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a fictionalized “Fenyang” as a microcosm of China. In Unknown Pleasures,
the female protagonist speaks the local dialect and shows no interest
in upward social mobility. The two male high school graduates speak
Putonghua, which carries with it a certain cultural and symbolic capital,
but they still have no prospects for escaping small-town life. The difference
in the male and female protagonists’ language reveals a stratification
among the disaffected and disillusioned youth in China. Finally, I explore
the feature of silent protagonists and sparse dialogue common to Jia’s
work and other underground and independent films in local languages.
Drawing on subaltern theory, I trace the voice of the intellectuals or elites
in their re-presentation of the subalterns. This study of films from the
perspective of local languages suggests that when China is represented
by local dialects, it is revealed as a fragmented and unassimilated country
where a unified, mainstream discourse is impossible.
Jia’s Documentary Filmmaking Style
6
Rayns (2003) generalizes Jia’s
filmmaking style as “minimalist
realism,” featuring “wide-angle
compositions, extended takes and lowkey,
undemonstrative performances.”
For a more thorough discussion of
the realism in Jia’s films, see McGrath
forthcoming.
Jia Zhangke’s use of local language is an integral part of his documentary
style and realist aesthetic 6 that favor the representation of bare events as
the most efficacious way to capture reality. His Hometown Trilogy films
are all set in Shanxi province, with the first two in Fenyang xian (county),
Jia’s hometown, and the third in Datong, a run-down middle-sized city in
north Shanxi. The xian or xiancheng (county seat) functions as an important
geographical-cultural crossroad marker in China because it links villages
with big cities and thus becomes a site for the intersection of urban lifestyle
with the rudimentary life of the peasant migrants. It has often been said
that Jia Zhangke discovered China’s xiancheng, just as Shen Congwen
discovered West Hunan. The choice of xian or xian-like city settings breaks
with both the early Fifth-Generation cinema (e.g., northwest villages in
Zhang Yimou’s films) and earlier independent movies (generally set in big
cities [Cui 2001]). To evoke an authentic spatially and temporally defined
environment, Jia uses the local languages supposedly spoken by real people
166 • The Rhetoric of Local Languages
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