Abstract
Chinese independent cinema arose in the early 1990s against the dominance of Fifth Generation filmmaking and the encroachment of Hollywood blockbusters. Among other filmmakers, Jia Zhangke challenged prevailing national allegories with his accented hometown narratives and created an imaginary space remote from the political centers of Beijing and Shanghai. Inspired by Jia’s cinematic achievement, younger filmmakers employ amateur actors to make films about their hometown or regions they are familiar with, displaying ascending sensitivity to the specifics of the local space, including its linguistic features. With productions such as Han Jie’s
Different terms have been coined, including “cinema with an accent” (Teo, 2001, p. 18) and “Chinese dialect films” (Bai & Si, 2006), to account for the momentum of regional imagery on screen that has yet to be fully investigated. Nonetheless, as this article sets out to analyze, these designations are more or less restricted to the linguistic characteristic and therefore inadequate to map the discursive scope in the abovementioned films in which dialect is only the facade that transmits the undiminishing tension between the regional, the national, and the global. Represented by Jia Zhangke, many directors who make these dialect films identify strongly with the regions they come from and perceive their films as more than a glimpse of their hometown but a microcosm of contemporary China (M. Berry, 2009). I contend that “regional film” is a more appropriate designation for these films and “regional filmmaking” can better capture the phenomenon of regionalization across different sectors, be it mass media or independent art. The concept of regional film can help to break down not merely the barrier between commercial and art cinema but also the division between different generations of film directors as perceived by critics and filmmakers alike. While one remains cautious that regionalization or regionalism can have different meanings across fields, 2 it is also vital to see how the field of filmmaking in particular contributes to this cacophony of definitions.
When interpreting films by independent filmmakers onstage in the 2000s vis-à-vis the 1990s,
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regional filmmaking as a concept helps to encompass recurring themes and aesthetic styles in their works. Ying Liang, who made films about Zigong, a small city in the Sichuan province where the director once resided in, is one of the most prominent young directors whose production sheds light on the textures of the local psyche in provincial China. Ying studied photography and video production at Beijing Normal University and later graduated from the Department of Directing at the Chongqing Film Academy. As with other young filmmakers who lack resources, he started off by making shorts and then invested money he was awarded for these films in longer features. The first film Ying made was
As a young director, Ying Liang has not amassed an artistic and social influence comparable to established Sixth Generation directors. Nonetheless, his single-handed approach, being director, scriptwriter, photographer, and editor, has surely inspired more followers than is acknowledged within academia. On film viewership portals such as mtime.com, users pinpoint the lineage from Jia Zhangke to Ying Liang in Chinese independent cinema and the latter’s contribution to the independent mode of film production in present-day China. 4 The study of Ying’s films bears a threefold significance: First of all, his continued use of accent to depict local reality and the dire situation of underdevelopment is a relentless gesture against the dominance of official language about national prosperity. Second, his film canvas displays an innovationalism in film style, epitomizing how younger independent filmmakers consciously break away from tradition and push realistic aesthetics to a further front, at a time when most Sixth Generation directors venture into commercial films. Although techniques such as the nonintervening long shot that showcases the vastness of a cityscape stays prevalent, many of the young directors experiment with extreme close-ups that contract the cinematic space. 5 The third dimension of import relates to a transitional point in the course of independent filmmaking in contemporary China and the field of Chinese film studies at large. 6
Although Jia Zhangke’s success in making regional features continues to inspire younger directors to explore the side of China not as promising as propagated by the state, it seems to also threaten to channel their creativity in one singular direction. Customary practices, from the extended long take to diegetic sound of state broadcasts, once standing for the artistic pinnacle of Chinese independent film, have now become formulaic and bespeak nothing but their banality. 7 It is also against the yardstick of Jia Zhangke that younger filmmakers’ experiments with formal innovation can easily be read as opportunistic gimmicks aiming for personal gain in global film market. 8 Furthermore, the generational division between the dominant and the dominated in Chinese cinema leads to the precarious tendency among film critics to gauge less-prominent filmmakers by their comparable traits and preexisting standard for generational taxonomies. Thus, the merits of novice independent filmmakers’ output should be attributed to properties other than whether or not they surpass the aesthetics crafted by their predecessors.
Studies on Chinese independent film, a burgeoning field proffering insightful research on a broad breadth of motifs—Artist subjectivity, amateurism, sexuality, and subculture, to name a few, have been duly committed to titular directors such as Zhang Yuan, Lou Ye, and Wang Xiaoshuai in the 1990s, and Jia Zhangke in the 2000s. Films characterized by distinctive regional features, and theoretical implications associated with the rise of these films as a somewhat collective phenomenon, are still understudied. Tonglin Lu’s (2010) analysis on the devastating metrics of globalization in the local and Michael Berry’s (2009) study on Jia Zhangke’s hometown trilogy are among the few examples that direct our attention away from city aesthetics and alternative cultures, but instead look at the transformation and destruction of provincial China. More recently, in
In dialogue with present studies on regional imagery, this article attends to the cinematic configuration of relational
From the National to the Regional
In the aftermath of Chinese government’s vigorous promotion of standard mandarin, a national campaign launched in the 1950s and strengthened in the 1980s (Zhou, 2004), dialect films disappeared from the screen for decades. Before Jia Zhangke made his accented films, Fifth Generation filmmakers were some of the pioneers who brought Chinese dialects and remote areas to public attention,
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with films such as Zhang Yimou’s
Most films made by independent filmmakers are not widely released, so the choice of using regional characteristics, including the language, is arguably not to catch the attention of the audience with a theatrical, exaggerative tone, or to please viewers from specific regions, as critics point out (Bai & Si, 2006; Berra & Yang, 2012). Instead, dialect in independent film is a device that serves to explore the potential of cinematic realism (C. Berry, 2010; Pickowicz, 2006). First of all, the aesthetic pursuit of independent filmmakers, that is, to offer a faithful account of the reality of contemporary China, is set against the social backdrop of unequal economic development and particularly the increasing magnitude of spatial disparities. Regional issues in their films shed light on inequality of regional development that tends to be overlooked on the big screen. Over the past 50 years, inequality, as measured by production and income distribution, has peaked during three time periods in China—during the Great Famine, at the end of the Cultural Revolution, and in the current period of global integration (Fan, Kanbur, & Zhang, 2011). Disparities in the provincial, regional, urban, and rural dimensions have only grown since 1985 and worsened with the accelerating processes of globalization after 2001 (Fan et al., 2011).
However, the popularity of dialect films among the general public corresponds with the phenomenon of rising regionalization and localization of the Chinese media (Fitzgerald, 2003; Goodman, 1997, 2002; Hendrischke, 1999; Sun, 2012). De-territorializing technologies such as satellite TV and the Internet have enabled place-specific media forms made by local and provincial stations to be accessed from further regions or even nationwide. A well-known example is Hunan Satellite Television based in central China, which has become China’s most successful producer of variety shows and entertainment programs. These regional producers occasionally contest the center’s hegemony on various issues, “challenging the cultural authority, if not the discursive legitimacy, of the Centre’s leadership” (Sun, 2012, p. 12).
The urban–rural divide as a socioeconomic reality, well discussed within social science and humanities, is not merely the context of filmmakers’ production, but provides the text they reflect upon, probe into, and critique against. Through representation, filmmakers seek to establish their agency as artists and intellectuals, contesting mainstream narratives that tend to glorify center-down urbanization and spaceless globalization. It is worth noting that many of the so-called city films are not about the glittering urban experience (Z. Zhang, 2007), but deal with the transitional area between the rural and the urban. While the rural–urban gap accounts for a large share of overall inequality in China, inland–coastal disparity has grown rapidly since the onset of the economic reform (Fan et al., 2011). Aesthetically, regional films shot in inland small towns accurately capture the gray area between the lure of the urban and the reality of a falling-behind countryside, which, to these directors, more properly defines what is real China and hints at its future.
Indeed, regional films addressing uneven economic development do not simply criticize inequality as a social problem that needs to be solved. Neither do these films portray unevenness as a reality that might have universal application or a manifestation of the materialistic dialectics, as claimed by theorists.
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Rather, joining other cultural forms, these films illuminate historical and epistemological mechanisms that shape the urban–rural divide as a notion and geographical disparity in conception. In his canonical work,
As articulated by Doreen Massey, under modernity, space is conceived as divided into bounded places and spatial difference is convened into temporal sequence. “Different ‘places’ were interpreted as different stages in a single temporal development.” She goes on to underline that “in these conceptions of singular progress, temporality itself is not really open. The future is already foretold; inscribed into the story” (Massey, 2005, p. 68). Her critique resonates with the contention that uneven development is an intricate condition of capitalism and/or modernity (Harvey, 2006; Smith, 1984).
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In the case of China, the foretold story of national progression from its battered past to a promising future of wealth and power, pertinent to political discourse since the May Fourth era (S. Lu, 2007), legitimizes the ruling of the state and the subjugation of selfhood.
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Marshall Berman’s remark, quoted in Zhang Xudong’s
Even though the new generation of independent filmmakers unexceptionally proclaim their intention of withdrawing from the Fifth Generation’s national allegories and resorting to the private space of self, such private space is far from a secure place of abode. What these young directors present on screen are the suppression of the psyche and its eventual implosion in the confined space. Implosion is defined as inward movement when the subject loses his or her outward or upward mobility. The local is shown as an entrapped inland space that makes at most symbolic references to the outside world but lacks valid connections to it. Crisscrossing the multilayered spaces contained in the imagery of the local, therefore, accentuates the efforts of players on the lowest rung of the society who try to tell a story of their own, countering the discourse of national development. 15 Independent filmmakers’ unwavering preoccupation with regional imageries, to understand in this vein, reflects not so much a feeling of solace for marginalized regions, but a vision of confronting the mainstream narratives that tend to reiterate the “inscribed” and “foretold” story of the future.
Ying Liang’s Regional Trilogy
The first film of Ying Liang’s trilogy about Zigong,
With more financial assistance, Ying Liang made
In a haunting tone, the third feature in the trilogy,
Luo Liang, a driver working for a real estate company, has drifted away from his disgruntled wife and has an affair with a prostitute, who turns out to be a gangster working to scam ransom money. In parallel with Luo’s familial difficulties is a story about his distressed mentor who eventually commits suicide. Meanwhile, Luo’s boss, Mr. Peng, is in the process of negotiating a deal with nearby villagers to purchase their land—the business, however, is taken over by Peng’s consultant. In the end, Peng goes insane, and believes that cats are meowing in his building. As an expressive device, a posthumous band appears on a stage and sings elegies when a main character’s life sinks to a low point, as if to indicate the advent of death, or to blur the line between death and life. Categorized as suspense, this film is permeated by an ever-increasing feel of despair that leads to the emotional and physical collapse of the protagonist.
Thereafter, the director was afflicted by his doubt about the relevance and usefulness of cinema and stopped making full-length features for a few years (with the exception of
From
While continuing to portray the local space as confinement to one’s self and psyche, characteristic of Jia Zhangke’s hometown narratives, Ying searches the abstract dimensions of space—the linguistic, topological, domestic, transnational, embodied, and imaginative, on-screen and offscreen, all of which are harbored in the local. He captures the space as an observer and, concomitantly, as an entity that undergoes transformation and intrusion in a way similar to what is experienced by its inhabitants. Equalized to its limitless use, as continuous construction projects span the country, space is not open any more, but locked to its official definition. Its existence as possibility, nonfulfillment, dynamics, and relation is hastily displaced and filled with one function after the other. In
Ying Liang’s regional films quietly present space as a pivot of relations, within which the position of self and the situation of the local are intertwined. In such a relational space, dialects convey a merry shrewdness enjoyed by local people and mandarin stands in as a disembodied authority. The cinematic space is where the imaginative outside world meets the represented reality of humble living in an underprivileged small city and where the topological dimension of the region recedes to the existential. In
Compared with other independent regional films, many of which fixate on either the victimization of the local or the moralistic endurance of the subject, Ying Liang’s features stand out with explosive endings where prophesying signs of imminent calamity eventually break out in forceful and violent ways.20 As part of the destructive social milieu, such an explosion/implosion both suffocates the characters and brings to surface the degree of agony they endure. The impending destruction of the local space, seen both in
The Other Half : A Relational Cinematic Space
This section of the article offers a detailed analysis on how formalistic experiments in Now that our . . . faith in the power of aesthetics has been tempered by an understanding of exclusion and social power, we should recognize that aesthetic and creative texts and films may unravel their own unique and imaginative logic, and may point us toward more deeply theoretical understanding. (p. 11)
The interior scenes of
The film presents the process in which each site undergoes ruthless transformations at the same time when Xiaofen’s life suffers different intrusions, accentuating how different forces penetrate an enduring space. These transformations are constant, often brutal and violent, erasing the communal ground the characters live on. The “fairy lady tailor shop,” a neighboring site Xiaofen passes by every day, is remodeled into a mahjong parlor after its owner is murdered. However, a mysterious fire soon destroys this new location of leisurely entertainment. The reverse shot at the closing of the film resembles the ending in Hou Hsiao-shien’s 1989 film,
As enduring as the violated local space is the silent heroine who is often placed in a secondary position in the scene or in a long shot receding from the view, as if allowing the camera to comment on her subjugated social position. The film further maneuvers the mismatch between image and sound to dwell on the impingement she suffers. Concluding the first day of her work, the image of her crossing an overpass is juxtaposed with sound from the local radio station. Shot from a high angle that miniaturizes her posture, the overpass signals not mobility but an entrapment overtaking her personal endeavors. Another example of innovative camerawork displays on-screen images matched with sound from the subsequent shot. The morning after her transient reunion with her boyfriend, Xiaofen is seen riding a bus to work, a view brimmed with the voice of a woman complaining about her gambling husband. It is then disclosed that these complaints are from a plaintiff sitting in Xiaofen’s law firm. That the heroine’s distress is not articulated by her but expressed cinematically by a stranger reaffirms her quiet demeanor. It also serves to emboss her acquiescence to multiple claims, including her mother’s instruction about marriage, the local government’s public announcements and, here, the plaintiff’ complaints about family disputes.
Such a relational cinematic space congeals into narratives about the ironic relation between the local space (which is provincial, subordinate, and doomed) and the outside world (envisioned as cosmopolitan, empowering, and propitious): The local inhabitants’ search for an exit, an endeavor at transcending geographical disparities, unexceptionally ends in failure and meets with the unresponsiveness of the external world, as if the latter only exists as a mirage. After Deng Gang goes missing, Xiaofen searches through different sites, including a labyrinth-like karaoke bar, in which she asks the guard to direct her to the exit. “Where is the exit,” one of the few sentences the quiet heroine ever utters throughout the film, is a desperate but suppressed calling for help. The resounding question about “the exit,” shown as the characters’ admiring references to foreign regions and countries, marks the isolated status of the local and its inhabitants. In an earlier scene, when Deng Gang, for his delinquency and mistreatment of his girlfriend, was chastised by his policeman buddy, Deng impassionedly rebuked him, asking “will you ever be able to get out of this place?”
The film shows that whatever connection built to reach out to the outside world is at most feeble and whimsical, if not a complete illusion. In Xiaofen’s workplace, a woman asks for divorce from her Taiwanese husband, citing a preceding case in which the local court ruled that if a husband did not respond to a divorce announcement in 10 days, the divorce would be legalized. Here the film does not stop at alluding to the phenomenon that Chinese women living in provincial areas marry internationally to emigrate, or to the fragility of this type of marriage. Instead, it satirizes how the outside world, the opposite side of spatial development that is portrayed as urban, modern, and frequently transnational, is unresponsive and even ensnaring, as the story in the film unfolds that Xiaofen’s friend dies as a stowaway to America. Xiaofen’s father, who disappeared for 20 years, suddenly returned in the middle of the film and promised his wife and daughter reunion and prosperity. However, he disappears again in the end of the film when the city faces evacuation—The befalling external savior turns out to be completely useless.
The lighthearted tone permeating the complainants’ narration changes abruptly toward the end of the film, with the deterioration of Xiaofen’s health and the advent of the chemical plant explosion. As in his first feature,
The ending of the film touts well-crafted image compositions: Xiaofen walks away from the camera toward a destroyed building compound, while radio announcements shift between news about the chemical plant explosion and announcements by those searching for missing families, as if weighing the relative importance of the official news and the requests from individual households. The disastrous accident in the chemical plant trivializes Xiaofen’s personal sufferings, insomuch as her wretched life is mixed in other women’s tragedies and becomes unnoticeable. She eventually disappears from the screen, amid the urgent radio calls for “missing people.” The contrast between the vast and empty landscape that Xiaofen is walking into and her persistence in walking away from a city decimated by the explosion becomes a paradoxical metaphor for “erasure and persistence” (Acquarello, 2009). Her personal suffering is exacerbated by its unprivileged place inside a social context overburdened with various malaise. As in the end none of the “missing persons” radio announcements are meant for her, the solution to her life problems, something she longs for, is declared not to be hers. When she passes out on the ground, the resounding theme of death seemingly becomes the only endorsement of her life, and it is here the film reaches the aesthetics of tragedy—Death becomes the eternal solution and ultimate salvation when justice elsewhere is unattainable. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s (2003) reflection on German tragical drama, in which, he observes, everything “about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face—or rather in a death’s head” (p. 166), the theme of demise in many regional films constitutes a collective resolution for historical justice.
In comparison with mainstream films that deal with national disasters in recent years, the “explosive ending” in Ying Liang’s films sidesteps the well-treaded motif—the binding effect of disasters (e.g., Feng Xiaogang’s
Conclusion
In 90 min (the filmmaker names his film studio “90 minutes film studio”), Ying Liang maintains the vibrancy of independent narrative features with a keen observation of relational space and its disposition in the local. In the search for a new film language, one different from that set up by Jia Zhangke and other established independent filmmakers, Ying captures the local in transfiguration, from the axis of lost memory to the entrapped space of signifiers. Whereas Jia Zhangke’s films depict a time of regional difference in the 1990s, when hope of modernization is shown as the train waiting for boarding, even for inlanders, films made by his followers show a more desperate picture of the locked-up inhabitants seeking a way out. While in Jia’s
The Chinese title of Ying Liang’s most recent film, “I still have words unsaid” (
As the director himself remarks,
The confined screen space hints at the other (not shown) half of Chinese reality, taking the form of a haunting anxiety and the totality of personal sufferings. Xiaofen’s chronic cough is as persistent and detrimental as the chemical pollution and environmental disasters that have contributed to her illness. Ying Liang’s experimental film language successfully builds the linkage between the subjugation of selfhood and the entrapment of the local, in which an abandoned subject and an evacuated city stand in as a quiet but disturbing challenge to the legitimacy of the discourse of national development.