Babel is The World

Deep Dive into the Fifth Chapter: Babel is the World

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Heteroglossia, A Cinema of Dialect, and Jia Zhangke’s The World

It is precisely the diversity of speech, and not the unity of a normative shared language, that is the ground of style.

—Mikhail Bakhtin¹

The voice patterns brought into focus belong to the physical world about us no less than its visible components; and they are so elusive that they would hardly be noticed were it not for the sound camera which records them faithfully.

—Siegfried Kracauer²

Several years ago I had the chance to go through a Chinese film that I had known since childhood, a film that I would probably not choose to watch if it were not for a practice need. The film was recently donated by the Chinese embassy in Ottawa and it was on 16mm. I had to run the film through the projector so as to be able to identify its status of preservation. The film is Five Golden Flowers (1959). Set in the Yunnan Bai ethnographic minority region, the narrative unfolds as the protagonist searches for his lover, a girl named “Golden Flower”, whom he met and fell in love with in the March Street Festival. Unfortunately “Golden Flower” is a common name and in his search he encounters another four girls all bearing the same name but in different occupations, before he is able to locate the one he loves—hence the title. Seamlessly blending the format of ethnographic musical³ (understood as “revolutionary romanticism”) with aspects of socialism collective championed at the time (the revolutionary realism), the film was a huge success. Having seen it long time ago, I still remember vividly the imagery as well as the theme tune. What had evaded my memory, but immediately caught my attention this time, was the uncanny pairing of the clearly Southwest scenery and costume with the Northeast accent (many of the films from that period were made in Changchun film studio) spoken by virtually all cast members. How could I—and billions others—have missed such an outrageous mismatch, which seems so painfully obvious now?

Dialect is a strange object in Chinese cinema. Although a large portion of the Chinese population speaks a dialect in addition to the official tongue, and a considerable share speaks nothing but the dialect, this linguistic reality was for a long time systematically filtered out of the big screen.⁴ With the wide circulation of The Story of Qiuju (1992), however, things started to change. In the last two decades, an unprecedented number of films emerge with explicit use of dialects.⁵ Having experienced this body of films, my expectations of how one speaks in Chinese films are irreversibly changed. Not only do I now begin to expect dialect as an indication of authenticity, that is, to expect the linguistic reality to be represented in some ways, I am also more attuned to the aesthetic effects thus produced. The shock I experienced in Five Golden Flowers, therefore, is largely a consequence of my newly acquired awareness of how human voice can function in cinema.

This moment of shock also serves as a point of insemination for the current dissertation. Hearing the Five Golden Flowers for what it truly sounds like is an ear-opening experience for me. I discover the power of authenticity in its absence. It is the desire to understand this power that has led to the theoretical and historical investigation presented in the last chapter. This chapter seeks to further explore these issues by analyzing a specific film and its cultural context in detail. It is closely related to the previous chapter in multiple ways. Suppose the following question is being asked: how do we characterize the body of contemporary Mainland Chinese films that features prominent use of dialects? Do they form a genre (a cinema of dialect!), a movement (they certainly testify to a new ideological climate under which films are now made)? Inasmuch as these films share similar concerns of realism over the use of spoken language, can they be productively juxtaposed with other Chinese language films made in Taiwan or Hong Kong that exhibit similar use of languages (new approach to transnational cinema studies)? While all these are true, I have come to situate the phenomenon in a much larger context, namely, how voice evolves in the world history of cinema. I have come to believe that the proliferation of dialects in contemporary Mainland Chinese films is not simply an isolated idiosyncrasy of Chinese cinema. Instead it can be understood as a manifestation of a persistent current that runs through the talking history of cinema. A cinema of dialect needs to be properly historicized: more than issues pertaining to a particular national cinema of a particular period, they are symptomatic of forces that exist in a much broader geographical and historical scale.

The study proceeds in the following order. First I offer a close analysis of a film that is not only highly representative of the body of works that I am concerned with, but also serendipitously appropriate for the dissertation’s overarching theme: Jia Zhangke’s The World (2004). I shall focus exclusively on the film’s use of dialects, demonstrating their interpretive potentialities. What I want to offer primarily is a dialectical reading of dialects that operate on different levels: as reflecting the cultural and social context in which they are produced and received, as embodying a rejuvenated form of cinematic realism (Chinese Neorealism) and finally, as necessitating a reconceptualization of how languages relate to cinema. Through a heteroglossic representation of languages, accents, dialects and other idiosyncratic vocal articulations, I argue, the voice becomes a worlding device; it gives us a world of voices.

A Dialectal Description of The World

Should it be surprising that Jia Zhangke, widely recognized as a cardinal figure in the sixth generation, is also a foremost proponent of using dialects in films? From his first short film, Xiaoshan Goes Home (1995), to the internationally acclaimed Still Life (2006), dialects have a consistent presence in ten years of Jia’s filmmaking. In this study I will focus my attention on The World (2004), due to its special place in his filmography. If films made before this constitute a hometown (Fenyang) trilogy, The World represents a radical shift in terms of locale: from a geographically remote and provincial town to the metropolitan of Beijing. While the many repercussions of this shift can be observed in the visual style of the film, what concerns me here is primarily the issue of speech. If the hometown trilogy reflects Jia’s earlier experience living in a linguistically homogeneous world where everyone speaks the same dialect, life in Beijing (he had been studying and working in Beijing for more than ten years and at this point became an international celebrity, a real “citizen of the world”) represents a world that is linguistically heterogeneous, where one’s mother tongue is suddenly marginalized.

The world recounts the slices of life of its protagonists in an eponymous theme park at the southwest outskirt of Beijing, where scaled down replicas of the world’s most well known landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, Taj Mahal, the Pyramids and others scattered across a 115 acre land connected through monorail. Taisheng and Tao are two migrant workers who have secured jobs (security guard and contract dancer) of a marginal degree of respectability (one level above that of construction worker and prostitute) and act as the hub of a network of minor characters, whose struggling lives the film sketches.

One of the most notable traits of The World is how the film establishes a vivid portrait of the linguistic reality in China. Since some of my readers might not be familiar with the linguistic reality in China, a brief account is in order. For over two thousand years, a formal standard written form of Chinese remained comparative stable, while the evolution of colloquial languages had never stopped. Since the logographic writing system does not indicate the exact pronunciation (there are only sometimes quasi-phonetic hints), the standardization of the written language does not in any way regulate its spoken variations. To establish a common spoken language, various efforts had been made in Chunqiu period (雅言Yayan), Han dynasty (通语Tongyu) and finally, Ming and Qing dynasties (官话Mandarin). In fact, it is based on this last spoken common language that in the 1920s, the New Culture Movement calls for a reformation of the classical written language. The result is a new vernacularized written Chinese that borrows heavily from modern Mandarin and the gap between the written and the spoken language is considerably narrowed. Both the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China carry this movement forward actively promoting either Guoyu (国语, national language) or putonghua (普通话, ordinary speech). Thanks to the use of modern media technologies such as radio and film, putonghua was promoted in an unprecedented way in Mainland China, bombarding daily hundreds millions of Chinese ears. As a result the Chinese spoken language has reached an unprecedented degree of homogeneity in the 20^th century.

Dialects, however, have been hardly abolished or even discouraged. The adoption of putonghua as a language spoken (instead of heard) varies from region to region, and its proficiency rate in urban areas is understandably higher than the rural areas. It comes through most effortlessly in Northern provinces, since putonghua is based on the Northern dialects. But in the west, south and especially southeast, a very high percentage of the population still relies on local dialects exclusively. Putonghua carries with it, one might say, a historical dominance of the North over the South, a symbol of political cohesion under communist regime, and a sign of the privileged class^⁠.

This linguistic context is important to the film, which portrays primarily immigrant workers that live in the capital as outsiders. All the characters in the film come from elsewhere, and they live in a segregated world, divided by the dialect they speak. The main protagonists use the dialect from Fenyang, Shanxi province, as in Jia’s previous films. It is the language used between Tao and Taisheng, between Tao and her ex-boyfriend, between Taisheng, his brother Erxiao, and the “little sister”. What identifies them as a group is not their gender, class, or economical status; it is the fact that they speak the same dialect, and they are thereby categorized as “laoxiang” (people come from the same region). By speaking the same dialect, the group demarcates an acoustic world of its own. The verbal communications between group members convey a sense of intimacy, whereas if the putonghua is used, there immediately emerges a distance, as if an invader has been spotted.

But in real world scenarios, where one switches between dialect and the putonghua, things get complicated. When Taisheng visits his buddy Sanlai at the construction site, the latter emerges from a group of faceless figures carrying their lunch-boxes. Sanlai speaks to his coworkers in putonghua, “that’s my laoxiang”. A few moments later he greets Tao with a hello, also in putonghua. This is perceived by Taisheng as a pretentious gesture, and he remarks, “only a few days and you start to speak putonghua.” Sanlai defends himself saying “what’s wrong with that; everyone speaks putonghua here.” “Here” can mean this construction site, or this city of Beijing, where his alien status is painfully obvious: one has to speak a foreign language in order to be understood. In the meantime, Sanlai is proud of the fact that he is now making a living in the metropolitan capital; and he speaks putonghua to show off his newly acquired association with the city. Taisheng, however, perceives mainly the negative effects of this gesture: it is an act of insincerity that does damage to their comradeship. What is also damaged is perhaps his superiority, that it does not please him to see his laoxiang making quick progress adapting to the metropolitan life.

It is interesting to compare this exchange to the first conversation between Taisheng and his boss, where the same pair of languages is used. Although the boss introduces to Liao Qun that Taisheng is his laoxiang, he speaks only putonghua to him. Taisheng speaks dialect in both scenes, but the hierarchy is now reversed. While with Sanlai Taisheng’s dialect can perhaps be interpreted as a refusal to share the prestigious metropolitan experience, with his boss it is more of a solicitation of intimacy. The boss’s exclusive use of putonghua, however, crushes this solicitation and can be taken as a refusal to acknowledge the special relation between them. Does the boss speak dialect at all? A later scene supplies the answer. When Taisheng tries desperately to locate Tao, his boss inadvertently remarks from the mahjong table “haven’t found your girl yet?”⁶ This particular sentence is tinted with a dialectal accent, and correspondingly, a sense of closeness and concern.

The linguistic hierarchy between dialect and putonghua is not the only one featured in the film. When Liao informs Taisheng that she is going to join her husband in France. Taisheng says, “why don’t you just come to our park, we’ve got all that French stuff.” “But you haven’t got the place where my husband lives.” “He lives in heaven?” “He lives in…” At this moment Liao flawlessly pronounces a French word “belleville”. This flawlessness is quite striking as it suggests that she may have spent extra effort to learn its correct pronunciation. This word, pronounced almost religiously, encapsulates, much in advance of her physical presence abroad, a new identity she will be acquiring. The world that Taisheng lives in collapses under these incredibly foreign sounding syllables; they render him speechless.

Putonghua is not only spoken by human agents, but also by disembodied voices, whose presence in this film is prominent, to say the least. They permeate the public space, mobile or immobile—at the train station, onboard the train, bus, airplane, and at all attractions sites. These voices repeat a soothing but pointless message (good day dear visitors, welcome to…) to which no one is paying any attention (eventually even the subtitle stops translating them). While most of time this vocal muzak remains in the background, at one place it stands out. At the Eiffel tower, a male voice (contrary to other instances of female voices) is heard repeating, “Hello, this is the Eiffel Tower, please tour clockwise, thank you for your cooperation.” Every time the film revisits this site, the same voice is heard. One is led to believe the voice comes from one of those invisible speakers, until Erxiao’s theft is exposed and he is taken away by the police. He leaves his handheld megaphone to the elevator girl (she seems to have taken a liking for the young man) who in frustration puts it on the table. The camera then lingers on the megaphone, which delivers one last time its mantra and then comes to an embarrassing silence. One cannot help but to take this shot as suggestive of a certain meaning: for instance, how a surrogate voice (that of Erxiao) that aspires to attain the status of those invisible speakers is eventually silenced and exiled. But this is not the end of the story. After Erxiao is expelled, the elevator girl is seen dining alone, accompanied by the megaphone and its ghostly voice. The scene ends by cutting to a long shot of the tower, with the voice from of the megaphone unrealistically lingers in the background.

The loudspeaker in China has played an important role in mass communication before the advent of radio and television. As an affordable and efficient way of conveying an acute sense of indisputable authority to the mass, loudspeakers are widely deployed under the communist regime. In all venues of the communist society (military, school, factory, farm, etc.), they speak from high above, and at the top of their volume. Despite their lackluster appearance and teeny tweeter, they always speak with urgency and persuasiveness. Under their bombardment, private space is constantly being invaded and acoustically squeezed dry. The sound of these loudspeakers becomes an essential part of a collective memory of the generation who grow up in the 1960-70s.⁷ In The World, however, these disembodied voices speak with a much softer tone: now they seduce, instead of commanding. What these loudspeakers try to sell is no longer a rigid ideological fanaticism, but rather a voluptuous consumerism. They become a sort of hypnotizer who preaches to the unconsciousness of their subjects.

Fenyang dialect is not the only dialect spoken in the film. Liao Qun, the girl from Wenzhou, speaks a dialect that is linguistically opaque to Shanxi residents—Spanish and Italian are much more closer. If we were to place the two dialects on a spectrum of closeness to putonghua, then the Wenzhou dialect is much further away, since it does not belong to the Northern branch. The contrast between the two dialects, one from inland west, and the other coastal east, sonorizes a prevalent theme that was much felt at the time: poverty and wealth. Liao is introduced first when Taisheng and his boss are in the middle of a conversation, where Taisheng learns that he has been assigned an urgent task: to accompany a woman to Taiyuan (the capital of Shanxi province) for some family business. And when they get there we do not actually see the man she needs to visit. But from the language spoken we identify him as the man who had visited Taisheng’s boss last time and tried to get money from him. This voice, then, is first anchored to a body, and then disembodied—an emblem of his disappearance, his hiding, his lost of public identity.

Liao Qun naturally speaks with her people in dialect. When a factory worker consults her with a detail in duplicating a brand logo, she speaks rapidly in Wenzhou dialect. While I do not understand the dialect, I can easily detect a tone of authority and impatience—the very same tone she uses speaking to her younger brother. Her way of speaking putonghua, on the other hand, is considerably more leisurely paced (one might even say intentionally seductive). One comes to the shocking realization, after these acoustic manifestations, that she lives in two worlds, divided by the distinct tonal colors of two different languages.

Taisheng, too, dwells in two linguistic worlds and constantly traverses between them. When it comes to scold Erxiao for theft, it is just impossible for Taisheng to speak putonghua. The language becomes ineffective, not only because it does not possesses the vocabulary needed to vent one’s anger and too removed from spontaneity, but also because it is not sufficiently vitriolic. On the other hand, although Taisheng and Liao Qun are able to understand each other speaking putonghua, their conversation lacks spontaneity. Their words of flirtations sound like echoes without true conviction. The obviously strenuous exercise of pronouncing every word as correctly as possible gives a sense of deliberation to their vocal exchanges, adding to the conversation a somber yet curiously erotic charge—every line is echoed with a thousand understatements.

Does speaking different languages always entail a communication problem? In Jia’s films I have found a variety of scenarios that do not necessarily offer a coherent answer. Perhaps this is exactly why it is an intriguing question for the filmmaker, too. In the tea episode of Still Life, Shen Hong (played by the same actress Zhao Tao), looking for her husband, speaks Shanxi dialect with the woman factory worker who shows her the content of her husband’s locker. Now, how do we explain that a character that speaks putonghua throughout the film (except with her husband, of course) would suddenly burst into her home tongue in front of a woman whom she never meets and apparently does not speak the same tongue? Although they indeed speak different dialects (Chongqin & Shanxi), they seem to understand each other perfectly. Could it be that the connection between these two women is not at all tenuous—after all, this woman has the key to her husband’s locker? Yet in another moment of the same film, when Han Sanming talks to the hotel owner, exactly the same pair of dialects is involved, but this time the two parties have obvious difficulties understanding each other.

And what about different languages, for instance Russian and Chinese, instead of different dialects? Does that entail an even bigger communication problem? The World offers an interesting answer. The six scenes⁸ where Anna and Tao both appear exhibit a curious pattern: initially, both tend to use body language or concrete objects to suggest and indicate their intention.⁹ Later on, however, when the two get to know each other better, they abandon these gestural aids and resort to speaking in their respective languages. Their final two meetings testify to this strange way of communication: while they obviously don’t understand a word from each other, it appears that a whole world of empathy emerges through the sounds they make. It is imperative to speak in one’s native tongue (singing works too), for that is what truly needs to be communicated here, the non-semantic meaning of human articulation. Speech vanishes, but the voice remains.

From Dialect Films to A Cinema of Dialect

I have chosen The World as an exemplary case of what I shall term as a cinema of dialect, that is, a particular kind of cinema that puts dialects to a particular kind of work (I shall come back to this particularity). Although the term itself is thus generally defined, this chapter focuses on an instantiation of it in the context of the Chinese language cinema. What is significant about the issue of dialect is that, what can be said of The World rings true of Jia’s entire oeuvre, that is, the Jia cinematic world. It can also be observed mutatis mutandis, in many other Chinese films of the last two decades, the majority of which can be associated with the so-called “the sixth generation”^⁠ The notion of “the sixth generation” is potentially problematic, because filmmaking in China since the 1990s has become somewhat decentralized. Compared to the fifth generation, filmmakers no longer come exclusively from an easily identifiable lineage (the Beijing Film Academy)—although some of them still do. Their aesthetic as well as political agendas vary too widely to be characterized as one single movement.

The wide acceptance of the term, however, testifies to a need to demarcate new trends that do not comfortably fit into the fifth generation’s epic style. In contrast to the endless ahistorical mystification and amoral glorification of an imaginary cultural heritage, a new generation of filmmakers shifts their focus to the gloomy reality of contemporary lower classes, to the seemingly banal life in small provincial towns. In these works, it appears to me, the presence of dialects constitutes a stylistic common ground; it solicits a perception of the filmic world that is essential for the films’ stylistic ambitions. This worldview finds perfect expressions, one might even suggest, in a consistent use of dialects. To give an example, in The World, the last words of “little sister” are presented on a green wall of the hospital. This green wall also appears in Platform and Still Life. Such a detail has no apparent narrative value. Yet in answering a question by Dudley Andrew of the green light that appears in his 24 City (2008), Jia explains,

. In its first shot a few hundred peasants stand in front of a green wall waiting for a performance to begin one evening in 1979. The green color occupies the entire screen. In fact, this color comes from my memory of life in the late 1970s and 80s, when many families in northern China painted the lower parts of their interior walls in green as high as one meter. To a child who was short, as I was, that green was the color I met everyday. Moreover, the color not only appeared on the walls of homes but also in all kinds of workplaces. Everywhere, in hospitals, offices, classrooms, all sorts of public places had their walls painted this color. When you went into state-run factories, you would see the green color on those machines and walls. To me, this green color comes from real life. It represents my memory about that old system, the China that dates from more than a decade ago certainly. And the most important thing is that it still exists.¹⁰

Dialect in films, I believe, is a perfect example of how something inherently realistic (like the green wall) can be meaningfully deployed and thus becomes aesthetically significant in the cinematic world. Dialects and accents in its natural surroundings are often innocuous—they are just too natural to be intentional. But on the big screen, everything has the potential to become an object of contemplation. Dialectal differences may not act as meaningful signs in our daily conversation. They do, however, in cinema, which is always a selective, artificial and somewhat systematic exposition of the natural world.

If we consider the film’s visual and auditory offerings as a “field of signs,”¹¹ what is particular about dialects is that this category of signs does not have a dictionary. Their meanings can be opaque or contingent. My analysis does not want to establish a pattern where a cinematic phenomenon is automatically matched to an interpretive reading. What is at stake is rather the interplay of these signs in an idiosyncratic film—a Metzian singular system. Just like a high angle shot is not always connotative of superiority, speaking putonghua is not necessarily a sign of good education, or of higher social status. Speaking dialect, too, does not automatically equals marginality. An all-too-convenient argument such as this ignores the fact that in Chinese cinema speaking dialect used to be a privilege granted only to the highest social class, that only revolutionary leaders are presented as dialect speakers. To equal dialect with marginality not only equals social reality with cinematic reality, but also is a simplification of the social reality itself. Also unwarranted is to make general assumptions of how dialects should function in any given film.

There was a time when using dialect in a film constituted a novelty by itself. When Zhang Yimou's The Story of Qiuju (1992) came out, being able to hear dialect throughout in a feature film was a huge shock in itself. The effect of novelty is such that I can hardly distinguish in the film’s rendering¹² of Shaanxi dialect what is “new” from what is “authentic”. One seems to lead to another and the two blends perfectly together. One is reminded of the Russian formalists’ claim that realism is a formal trait because of its defamiliarizing power. A dialect therefore is perceived as authentic not because it mimics what it purports to represent, but because it defamiliarizes how previously languages were represented in cinema. In this sense, the presence of dialect is a formal innovation; it is a rhetoric device. Qiuju is revolutionary in the context of a long stretch of filmmaking where characters never speak the language that they are supposed to speak in the fabula. Likewise, its Cinéma vérité style is refreshing amidst abundant meticulous shot compositions and camera maneuvers that dominate the fifth generation’s previous productions. Zhang continued to use dialects, to a lesser extent, in his Keep Cool (1997).

While I want to acknowledge Qiuju’s preceding role to a body of work that may be called a cinema of dialect, it is also worth pointing out how this cinema of dialect stands out amidst the multitude of films since 1990s that mainly uses dialects as a comic element, which may be called dialect films. In this vein there exists a film called Conscription (1963), the only non-opera Chinese film in dialect before 1992 that I am currently aware of. These comedies share the exploitative use of dialects with a popular and contemporaneous stage genre called XiaoPin, where dialect-speaking people are invariably depicted as laughable/pitiable figures. Zhang Yimou’s use of dialects eventually collapses onto this category in films such as A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop (2009). In terms of epistemology the dialect films can be easily traced to traditional theater or regional cultural production.¹³ Just like the Commedia dell'arte tradition that includes various specifications for dialectal speech, Chinese traditional theater has long used regional dialects to signify the social status of characters.¹⁴ As an element of regional (or, marginal) cultural production and circulation dialects have indeed an uninterrupted stage existence.

In contrast, the cinema of dialect as I define it is a way of filmmaking that draws on a particular cinematic effect. Obviously, how someone would respond to dialects presented in films depends on the cinema auditor’s linguistic competence in the real world. Our perception of a certain way of speaking dialect varies according to our own grasp of the language, from complete opacity (subtitles can help but it basically shifts the auditory register to the visual one), reasonable familiarity to native fluency. But it also depends on the historical circumstance as well as stylistic conventions in which the films are presented. As my example of The Five Golden Flowers indicates, an awareness of the dialectal dimension of speech in films is not automatically acquired. A moviegoer seeking a good story is perhaps indifferent to the systematic use of mise-en-scène or camera movements, as long as he is able to extract the critical narrative information from these arrangements. Likewise, we often extract the semantic messages from speeches and discard the dialectal variations, unless it sounds too eccentric to our ears. Oftentimes the audience remains unaware of the formal roles human speech can play in cinema because the films they have heard so far have taught them nothing but the irrelevance of such a dimension. The majority of our movie watching experience, in fact, demands that we filter out those dialectal variations that do not seem to belong to the diegetic world. Like noises in the movie theater, we hear them but nevertheless do not want to hear them.

A study of dialect in cinema pays close attention to the representation of languages in films, but it does not take the film’s fidelity of linguistic representation for granted. Most often than not, the linguistic reality is transformed by the filmmaker’s choices and intentions in amplifying or suppressing what we actually hear. A film in dialects therefore differs from a film that documents people speaking dialects: obviously the former does not necessarily support or prove any claims of the society at large. To bring dialects to the big screen, a filmmaker is often preoccupied by other factors that entail different kinds of linguistic imperfections. To use the languages in films as truthful evidences for a study of languages in society is therefore a risky business even under the ideal circumstances (an actor/actress speaks the dialect/language in the diegesis in a perfect manner).

Needless to say, there are plenty of films where accents and dialects simply play no part in the film’s intention. They have nothing whatsoever to contribute to the film’s artistic integrity and cannot be justified by the diegesis the film purports to offer. These are irrelevant acoustic information that the audience has to ignore or, if the task proves to be difficult, to suffer. Examples within my context of discussion are the many recent pan-Asia blockbuster films, which for reasons of production value often gather actors whose accents are quite noticeable for a native Chinese speaker. Many of these films are set in ancient time, so the audience’s linguistic expectations are already low. Yet in a film such as Crunching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) the Cantonese-tinged Mandarin of Chow Yun-fat^⁠,¹⁵ the Taiwanese-tinged Mandarin of Zhang Zhen, and the standard Mandarin of Zhang Ziyi might disturb its audience for its cacophonic speech patterns. Chen Kaige’s The Promise (2005) is even more outrageous in this respect. In addition to the above three tones, it also includes Japanese and Korean actors who pretend to speak Mandarin. Understandably, for the international market that these films target, this dialectal implausibility is not really a problem. The audiences rely on subtitled translation, which completely masks the oral/aural differences.

The fact that the cinema audience is more than ready to discard what is irrelevant in terms of vocal irregularities doesn’t mean this information can’t be of some use. Professional stage/cinema actors are willing to and can indeed afford to learn the accents they are supposed to speak with the help of language tapes and private tutors. The result varies from passable to persuasive, depending on the person’s linguistic talent. A recent example in Chinese cinema can be found in The Peacock (2005), where the female lead (Zhang Jinchu) only has a short amount of time to learn to the Anyang dialect, spoken throughout the film. When foreign language is involved, a more unusual (but by no means uncommon) path is sometimes taken. An actor or actress will learn to pronounce phonetically the syllables of a language that he/she can’t actually speak. Okada Eiji’s French in Hiroshima mon amour and the Chinese spoken in The Human Condition (1959-61) are my favorite examples of this atrocity¹⁶.

A film can choose to employ dialects only occasionally, so that a balance can be struck between the imperative of narrative comprehension and a reasonable degree of language authenticity. If a certain percentage of the audience (sometimes a large percentage) will rely on subtitles to understand the dialogue, then the film risks alienating its audience by employing dialect in any serious manner.¹⁷ Zhang Ming, the director of Rainclouds over Wushan (1996), makes some interesting usage of the dialect of Wushan (a small town along the Yangtze River) in his second feature, Weekend Plot (2001). The film begins with a scene that shows our protagonist Yu Dong with a groups of friends visiting from Beijing, among which his ex-girlfriend Xiaobei, who left the town years ago. Yu speaks both the local dialect and putonghua. Rather unexpectedly, Yu’s wife arrives and scolds her husband “I thought you don’t drink” in putonghua. Yu urges her to sit down (in dialect) and then introduces her to everyone (in putonghua). Immediately she makes unpleasant remarks about Xiaobei’s relationship with her husband (in dialect). At this point Yu apologizes saying, “Sorry, actually she can speak putonghua.” And Xiaobei replies: “no need, I can understand pretty well” (in dialect). Yu answers “You are already a native of Beijing now” and urges his wife to speak putonghua. But when she complies and starts to speak in putonghua, she makes more remarks that nobody wants to hear. Yu urges her to stop, this time in dialect. While this kind of exchange is extremely interesting in that it speaks everything that is unspeakable, the majority of the film is carried in putonghua. Thus the audience would have no difficulty understanding the main plot. Later in the film, when Yu is at home (twice) with his wife, they speak (both times), to my surprise, still in putonghua. Similar to the Deserter example discussed in the previous chapter, this inconsistent use of dialect shows how, despite the fact that linguistic authenticity might be desirable, narrative comprehension sometimes has the upper hand. On a similar note, although the Basque films of Julio Medem draw profusely from the folklore, customs, history and politics of the region, they do not exploit the unique language of the region, i.e., euskera, but are instead shot and exhibited in Castilian. A Basque audience may be offended by the fact that a character that is unmistakably Basque does not speak euskera, but it is the film’s choice to sacrifice the language authenticity for a domestic market that does not want a Spanish film with subtitles.

It is perhaps not always possible to draw a hard line between a cinema of dialect and the dialect films—Jiang Wen’s Devils on the Doorstep (2000), for instance, can be seen as drawing from both—but their aesthetic agenda cannot be more different. For dialect films, speaking in a deviated way is supposed to be funny—it is just another slapstick device. And to achieve that intended effect, only certain dialects are the best candidates: in the Chinese context the Sichuan, Northeast and Henan dialects are often associated with comic behavior and the lower class. A cinema of dialect, on the other hand, doesn’t think dialect is funny at all—one does not mock one’s own native tongue. A cinema of dialect does not want to sacrifice the language authenticity for narrative comprehension—it is a price too dear to pay if a film is serious about the world it intends to bring to life through languages spoken. It cannot afford to employ the service of dialects half-heartedly and it certainly cannot allow the unconditioned voices, voices that simply do not belong, to collapse the filmic world. Instead of a boost for realism, the presence of dialects constitutes an essential component of the cinematic worldhood as proposed by the films.

Cinema and Languages: a World of Voices

Having made some preliminary distinctions between dialect films and a cinema of dialect, I want to further explore the raison d’être of dialects on a formal level, as the case of dialect offers a unique opportunity to reflect on the issue of cinematic realism. The many intricacies of perceiving dialects in movies point to the inadequacies of traditional approaches to the relation between language and cinema. A cinema of dialect ultimately calls for a reconceptualization of how languages can inhabit the filmic world.

Let us consider first briefly the social dimension of dialects. The representation of dialects on the big screen is naturally not a private affair of the filmmakers. It poses potential threat to the state ideology that promotes unequivocally a homogenized speech. The sudden burst of dialects onto the scene of Chinese cinema in the 1990s, therefore, can be understood as a political event and on the symbolic level, as a rebel against the linguistic censorship policy exercised by the State Administration of Radio Film and Television (SARFT). It is under this censorship that some of the predecessors of this cinema of dialect are brutally castrated. Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Horse Thief (1986) and On the Hunting Ground (1984), for instance, apart from their extremely daring visual and narrative strategies, also attempt to use the authentic language spoken by the non-professional actors (Tibetan and Mongolian). As a result, the film either is dubbed¹⁸ or is extremely restricted in terms of circulation. Twenty years later, Ning Hao’s Mongolian Ping Pong (2005), because of its independent funding, is able to use Mongolian throughout. SARFT’s regulations are not limited to the big screen. In recent years, concurrent with the emergence of a cinema of dialect, there is also a proliferation of dialect programming in both television and radio broadcast. In response to this trend, since 2000, SARFT has repeatedly issued regulations restricting the use of dialect in mass media. Some of these stipulations have incurred considerable turmoil.

The complex dynamics between mass media and state ideology in contemporary Chinese society is a fascinating topic that I cannot explore in detail here. Suffice to say that the cinema of dialect as a movement, emerged in the 1990s, has tinted the contemporary Chinese cinema with a special poignancy. The proposal to rejuvenate the spoken language on the big screen carries in itself the many throes and disillusions of the social reform. Not unlike the case of Italian Neorealism, these films speak for the society in turmoil through their linguistic aberrations as a means to revolt against the hegemony of official language. Rossellini once claims that “Neorealism is given birth, unconsciously, by the film in dialect. Then it becomes conscious of itself in the heat of the human and social problems of the war and its aftermath.”¹⁹ For Chinese cinema one might suggest a similar trajectory: the movement was given birth unconsciously by a film in dialect (QiuJu); then it becomes increasingly conscious of this use of dialect in the heat of the human and social problems of the economical revolution.

The social dimension of dialect has played an important role in some key national cinemas—it can, if it wishes to, play such a role in many other national cinemas, as linguistic variations are irresistibly intertwined with social stratifications. Yet it is all too convenient to confound a study of dialect in movies with a study of the society that purports to produce these movies. Consider the Pagnol-Clair debate, a debate centered on the role of spoken language in cinema. What does it mean to have films that talk? What does it mean to have films that talk in dialects (Pagnol is famous for his Marseille trilogy, which is among the first attempts to make films in dialects)? What are the virtues and limitations of such films? Christopher Faulkner situates the debate in its historical moment and suggests that “what appears to be a dispute about aesthetic matters can readily be understood as a displacement of social concerns about interests, audiences, values and, above all, the relations of power that structured class and other differences in French society in the early thirties.”²⁰ While I would agree with Faulkner that films do need to make sense in their cultural and social context, I hardly believe that all the issues raised by a film (notably the issue raised by the representation of spoken language) are merely symptomatic of its socio-political dimension, or that film aesthetics can be reduced to a footnote to sociology. A study of the representation of spoken languages in cinema should be sensitive to the circumstances in which individual films are produced, to the nuanced artistic forms a particular film may take or aspire to. But it should also address the internal logic of cinema: technological basis and psychological effect, stylistic heritage, genre convention, not to mention the idiosyncrasies of individual filmmaker.

A brief example shall suffice to give a hint of what is at stake here. In The World, as well as in Jia’s Hometown trilogy, the dialect spoken by Wang Hongwei is Anyang (Henan Province) dialect, but in the films’ diegetic world he is depicted as a native resident of Fenyang (Shanxi Province), Jia’s hometown. These two dialects are in no way identical to each other—although both belong to JinYu, a branch of the Northern dialect—and for those who speak either dialect, the difference can be easily told. Does the fact that Wang speaks a “false” dialect violate the films’ linguistic authenticity? Does it make the character somehow unconvincing, for those in the know? Another important dialect film, The Orphan of Anyang (2001), purports to take place in Anyang. Yet the film is shot in Kaifeng, another city in the same province, and all the characters in the film speak Kaifeng dialect. Should the film be called instead “The Orphan of Kaifeng”? Instead of a social index, it seems to me, the choice of language here functions mainly as an aspect of filmic performance and perception. For a decade, in films such as Xiaoshan (1996), Xiaowu (1997), Platform (2000) and Unknown Pleasures (2002) and The World, Wang has been highly recognizable because of his Anyang dialect. But in Still Life (2006), a most radical change comes: throughout the film he speaks putonghua with practically no detectable accent. Without ever changing anything in his appearance—still the same dark-rim glasses, the same hairstyle^⁠—this person acquires a brand new identity, which testifies to the fact that our perception of a character is intimately intertwined with his/her voice. A simple change of voice, his connection with Shanxi, just like Jia’s own, becomes a distance memory of his, and of ours. In Jia’s case, speaking dialect was, and still is a choice made by the film to its overall aesthetic effect.

Films and other artworks, on the contrary, plunge us into a non­ practical, playful type of interaction.”²²

This account of the relation between art (e.g., film) and the world has many virtues. Setting the films apart from the world allows the Neoformalists (and the Russian Formalists) to characterize how films transform the mundane reality into a work of art. It might be said that the presence of dialects acquires its aesthetic appeal by defamiliarizing the linguistic distance between the film and its audience. It either shortens this distance (if the auditor happens to speak that particular dialect) or enlarges it (if she doesn’t); but in any case the speech is no longer on the neutral ground. Here lies the film’s opportunity to work on its form. In another essay on the Soviet use of sound in films as counterpoint Thompson uses the term “perceptual roughening,” which describes the same idea with an even more cognitive bent. Although I do believe that the concept of defamiliarization is a powerful mechanism to account for the aesthetic effect produced by a film’s linguistic multiplicity, ultimately it seems insufficient to provide an explanation on why this multiplicity can produce a lasting effect when the process of perceptual roughening should have long worn out. If hearing dialects in Qiuju had been a roughening process, why do dialects still work beautifully in a Jia Zhangke film made a decade later? Instead of becoming habitual, automatic, my senses of the spoken language in films have become even more attuned to all the acoustic nuances. What is the basis on which I make aesthetic judgments in a form of art that I no longer consider novel? What is the art in the familiarity of things?

Another deficiency of the Neoformalist perspective is that it tends to regard the audience as an undifferentiated pool with largely identical minds since the mechanism is said to function at a cognitive rather than cultural level. In my view there certainly are things in a film to which an Italian audience in the 1950s, a French critic like Bazin and an American academic in the 1970s all react in the same ways, but dialect is probably not one of them. A native speaker of the Anyang dialect, a Chinese speaker who has no access to that dialect and a non-Chinese speaker who reads subtitles for everything cannot possibly react to the use of the said dialect in the same way. The auditor’s linguistic competence plays an important role in determining the perceived authenticity of the film’s vocal performance, and consequently its meaning. The said linguistic competence is not a passive part of cinema auditorship, an afterthought. Instead, it is specifically targeted before, in and after production, which may well have an impact on the film’s casting, location choice and other aspects of style.

Instead of treating dialects or any speech deviation as a mere index for the external, social reality, I suggest that we consider the presence of language differences in films as a world apart. But instead of regarding the juxtaposition of languages as pure formalist play whose value hinges on novelty, I believe it functions as a worlding device. What I mean by worlding is to understand the issue of languages in a formal way without severing the film from the world. The intentional orchestration of languages solicits a worldly response from the audience, and it gives them what I call “a world of voices.” A world of voices is a phenomenological effect that can be can be induced by the juxtaposition of different languages, different dialects or different accents. In fact, the distinctions between these terms are not as clear as we might have thought. Saussure admits already, “precisely how a language differs from a dialect is hard to specify” and “everyone would agree that people who do not understand each other speak different languages.”²³ If there is a way to quantify the differences between languages and dialects that takes into account of pronunciation, syntax, vocabulary and other aspects of the concrete use of language—all of which cinema is totally capable of representing—we shall see that some dialects are further apart than languages spoken by different nations. It is therefore more fruitful to consider the languages—dialects—accents continuity as a spectrum of voices. After all, the continuous formation and transformation of languages by live speakers disregard those artificial and arcane distinctions made up by the linguists.

A world of voices is a world that the audience can inhabit, in the sense that this audience can interact with these voices in similar ways as she would in the real world. These voices, exemplified by the heterogeneity of languages, dialects and accents, therefore function as a worlding device, much like the audiovisual diegesis and the sound space are. To understand what this world of voices entails, I present in this section some preliminary thoughts on a reconceptualization of how languages are represented in the filmic world, drawing on the anti-linguistics²⁴ of Mikhail Bakhtin. We shall first review the different ways in which cinema has been related to language. Then I shall examine a key Bakhtinian concept, heteroglossia, which I believe not only offers a descriptive account of how a film might make use of this worlding device as a formal possibility, but also is highly suggestive of what a worlding theory of the cinematic voices might sound like.

For cinema, language is not exactly a new issue. As Robert Stam puts it provocatively, “Films are saturated by language from the beginning to the end of their existence; they come from language and ultimately return to it.”²⁵ Yet what exactly is the “language” referred to here? Roughly speaking it might be said that there exist three different senses of how language is related to cinema: as a metaphor, as a semiotic subject, or as an aesthetic device. Using language as a metaphor arises mainly to vindicate (because of its mass entertainment origin) cinema as a purposefully organized artistic expression. The ideas of “cinematographic language,” “cine-language,” “film grammar,” “cine-stylistics,” and “film rhetoric” permeate early theorizations of cinema, notably in the writings of Ricciotto Canudo, Louis Delluc, Vachel Lindsay and the Russian Formalists. References of this kind are too numerous to list here. Boris Eichenbaum for example states matter-of-factly that cinema is a “particular system of figurative language.”²⁶ Perhaps there is no better phrase that captures the immense appeal of such an affinity between cinema and language than “inner speech,” a key term among 1920s’ Russian intellectuals. Eisenstein is obviously indebted to this theory when he tries to explain why montage is able to create certain effects:

The secret of the structure of montage was gradually revealed as a secret of the structure of emotional speech. For the very principle of montage, as is the entire individuality of its formation, is the substance of an exact copy of the language of excited emotional speech.²⁷

This momentum to bind language and cinema together reaches its zenith in the 1950s, resulting works that take the metaphor for granted and perhaps too literally.²⁸ Largely reacting to this line of thinking, Christian Metz in the following decade endeavors to initiate a much more rigorous way of relating cinema to language.²⁹ Metz’s investigation is empowered by the methodological exactness embedded in Saussurean semiology. But Metzian semiology may have overemphasized certain aspects of Saussure’s thinking, which is already distorted by the fact that the “Course in General Linguistics” is compiled posthumously, on the basis of some course notes.³⁰ I hold a generally speaking sympathetic view of Saussurean linguistics, taken into account of its context, purpose, and the objectives it has successfully achieved. From the perspective of theorizing voice, however, Saussurean linguistics offers little help, for it is foremost “une langue sans voix.” Saussure makes the point clear saying that the linguistic signifier “is not phonic but incorporeal—constituted not by its material substance but by the differences that separate its sound-image from all others.”³¹

Langage, according to Saussure, cannot be an object of study for linguistics because it includes parole, which is unstable, fortuitous and contingent. The exclusion of parole may be justifiable in the context of a linguistics that aspires to be a science, for it “can dispense with the other elements of speech; indeed, the science of language is possible only if the other elements are excluded.”³² But this is decidedly not the case with cinema, where the “other elements of speech” may play an important role. Needless to say cinema scholarship has little aspiration to become science.

The foundation to Saussurean linguistics is the idea that the system of language (langue) is completely independent of individual creative acts, intentions, or motives—language stands before the individual as an inviolable, incontestable norm. It is precisely on this point that Bakhtin and his collaborators launch their objections. The Saussurean linguistics may be adept for the isolated, finished, monoglossiac utterance, in other words, the language of the dead, but not for living speeches, where “meaning belongs to a word in its position between speakers.”³³ Language may look neutral on the paper, but in its living transmission and appropriation, it is inexorably colored by the unique individuals involved in the performance.

Despite its apparent rigor, the Saussure-Metz conception of cinema and language is powerless on theorizing the voice. The “anti-linguistics” of Mikhail Bakhtin constitutes in this respect a much-needed alternative. Bahktin’s view on language runs in many ways diametrical to the Saussurean notion of language. While the latter divides and conquers by virtue of its quasi-scientific rigor—in this respect the semiology of cinema carries on what the filmologue movement has failed to accomplish—the former excels with evocative descriptions:

As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing, as heteroglot opinion, language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes ‘one’s own’ only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own.³⁴

If linguistics as a science has to eliminate parole to take its present shape, then language as an artistic representation of reality, a worlding device, has to do the exact opposite—to embrace parole, to pay close attention to the particular and concrete context where an utterance is made. This notion of the human language is especially appropriate for sound cinema’s unique capacity to portray the live act of human communication, an act not reducible to written transcriptions. Simply recognizing the linguistic norm used by the speakers may extract useful semantic information, but in the meantime the operation discards other aspects of a particular utterance, all that is deviant from the norm but crucial to its meaning.

Although Bakhtin does not deal with the phenomenon of cinema directly, his theoretical insights regarding the novel are highly applicable and, I am tempted to say, anticipatory to sound cinema’s unique strength. Take for instance his notion of polyglossia and heteroglossia. The idea of polyglossia is most forcefully discussed in Mikhail Bakhtin’s studies on Dostoevsky. The notion of polyglossia is firstly a historical one: it refers to the simultaneity of two or more national languages within the same society, a phenomenon that had always existed, well before the canonical monoglossia. But it had not entered the “cultural and creative consciousness”³⁵ until the invention of the novel. Clearly, the same can be said of the voice in cinema. By adapting the concept to describe the literary device of having multiple voices within one text, Bakhtin is able to make claims of not only the style of a particular novelist (Dostoevsky), but also of what he believes as the stylistic essence of novel in general. My move from polyglot film to polyglossia cinema is motivated in a similar way: while “polyglot” refers to a linguistic reality, “polyglossia” describes an artistic intention, or purpose. Instead of taking note of the existence of multiple languages in a text or a film, we shift our attention to the ways in which multiple languages are represented, arranged, or orchestrated therein. A polyglossic film is not a mere replicate of the real world where multiple languages exist. Neither is it content with a statement that languages exist. What it proposes is a cinematic world where language differences matter.

For Bakhtin, the notion of polyglossia finds its best examples in the contrast between languages. Heteroglossia, on the other hand, refers to differentiations within a single seemingly unified language.

Closely connected with the problem of polyglossia and inseparable from it is the problem of heteroglossia within a language, that is, the problem of internal differentiation, the stratification characteristic of any national language. This problem is of primary importance for understanding the style and historical destinies of the modern European novel, that is, the novel since the seventeenth century. This latecomer reflects, in its stylistic structure, the struggle between two tendencies in the languages of European peoples: one a centralizing (unifying) tendency, the other a decentralizing tendency (that is, one that stratifies languages). The novel senses itself on the border between the completed, dominant literary language and the extraliterary languages that know heteroglossia.³⁶

Heteroglossia represents therefore a decentralizing force that works against, or rather in dialectic opposition with the unifying or hegemonic one. In Bakhtin’s original example, the novel becomes a ground of conflict between these centripetal and centrifugal, official and unofficial discourses. Little needs to be changed in order to adapt this term to cinema: heteroglossia, in cinema, may refer to the aesthetic effect created by the meaningful juxtapositions of languages/dialects/accents that coexist in a single film. In contrast to polyglossia, heteroglossia foregrounds the clash of multiple voices. While a polyglossic world is the necessary condition of heteroglossia, it is not its sufficient condition. To make an analogy to music, a polyphonic world with no apparent authorial intention in its sonic composition would be a cacophonic world. A heteroglossic orchestration pairs voices into thematically contrasting groups³⁷and stresses on their dialogic transformation.

In the Bakhtian model of language, the meaning of word is essentially dialogic; it is the interaction between speaker and listener produced via the material of a particular sound complex. This dialogic relation is of critical importance to a conception of cinema auditorship that highlights the intricate negotiation between the character’s linguistic performance and the audience’s linguistic competence. The issue of languages in cinema is a joint venture of the film and the audience. Heteroglossia only presents itself to the extent that the audience can grasp the difference. What characterizes a cinema of heteroglossia, after all? Perhaps the following eloquent passage can inspire us.

The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized. The internal stratification of any single national language into social dialects, characteristic group behavior, professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age groups, tendentious languages, languages of the authorities, of various circles and of passing fashions, languages that serve the specific sociopolitical purposes of the day, even of the hour (each day has its own slogan, its own vocabulary, its own emphases)-- this internal stratification present in every language at any given moment of its historical existence is the indispensable prerequisite for the novel as a genre. The novel orchestrates all its themes, the totality of the world of objects and ideas depicted and expressed in it, by means of the social diversity of speech types and by the differing individual voices that flourish under such conditions. Authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters are merely those fundamental compositional unities with whose help heteroglossia can enter the novel; each of them permits a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships (always more or less dialogized). These distinctive links and interrelationships between utterances and languages, this movement of the theme through different languages and speech types, its dispersion into the rivulets and droplets of social heteroglossia, its dialogization—this is the basic distinguishing feature of the stylistics of the novel.³⁸

If for Bakhtin heteroglossia is the “basic distinguishing feature of the stylistics of the novel,” I contend that in cinema, where languages are more spoken than written, the idea is even more applicable. The said heteroglossic effect aims at a world of voices, an aesthetic dimension that is unique to sound cinema. What makes sound cinema special is precisely “only the current of verbal intercourse endows a word with the light of meaning” or “There is no such thing as word without evaluative accent, with an expressive intonation.”³⁹ The notion of heteroglossia not only locates where cinema differs from other arts, but also demonstrates how it may excel. It offers a new path that leads cinema to the world, but it does not reduce this world to its elements, to a structural abstraction. It approaches the world while leaving its integrity intact. A world of voices, ultimately, is “a new engagement with worldhood.”⁴⁰