History, Silence and Homelessness in Contemporary Chinese Cinema: Wang Xiaoshuai's Shanghai Dreams

Abstract

Set a few years after China's opening to the various forces of globalisation, the film Shanghai Dreams (2005) tells the story of the conflict between Qinghong, a 17 year-old schoolgirl who wishes to remain in her hometown of Guiyang, and her father, Lao Wu, whose dream of returning to his hometown of Shanghai is stirred by reports of the better life others have obtained as a result of Deng Xiaoping's policy of economic modernisation. Analysing their familial conflict in terms of a “political melodrama”, the paper contextualises both the dramatic ideological shift from patriarchal state Communism to free market capitalism and the massive internal migration from China's interior to its eastern coast to argue that Qinghong's eventual psychological breakdown represents not merely a personal, sentimental feeling of homelessness but the more philosophical form of estrangement characteristic of modernity examined by Martin Heidegger. The paper then explores how one of the film's most important scenes, Qinghong's rape, links Heidegger's notion of homelessness to Sigmund Freud's understanding of the uncanny. The paper concludes with a brief examination of how Qinghong's catatonic silence represents the less-discussed consequence of the schizophrenic freedoms engendered by late capitalism as defined by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.

Keywords:

• Chinese cinema
• homelessness
• economic modernisation
• melodrama
• silence
• the uncanny
• Heidegger
• Freud

Notes

1. The categorisation of Chinese filmmakers in terms of generations helps to draw a chronology of filmmaking cultures in China. The First Generation filmmakers produced films in the 1920s and are considered “pioneers” of Chinese film (Kuoshu, 2002, p. 1). Although their adaptation of Chinese Opera lent itself to the Western melodramatic form and thus an early Hollywood filmic style, both they and the Second Generation of the 1930s integrated melodrama with a social or critical realist style to create socially progressive films. Both generations were greatly influenced by the emergence of the Chinese Republic and the anti-feudal, anti-imperialist and nationalist May 4, 1919 Cultural Movement which, in part, gave birth to the Chinese Communist Party. Once in political control, the Communist party-state employed the Third Generation of filmmakers to create Communist propaganda films that celebrated the glories of the Communist revolution, its leader Mao Zedong and its heroically drawn soldiers and peasantry. The Fourth Generation filmmakers, who were trained in filmmaking in the 1960s under the Communist state, did not begin the process of reassessing the Communist Revolution and addressing the social concerns of the Chinese people until the post-Mao era (1979–90). Graduating from the Beijing Film Academy in 1982, it was the Fifth Generation filmmakers such as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige who brought international fame to Chinese cinema with their rural allegories that subtly hid critiques of the Chinese patriarchal state and society in settings, characters, narratives and filmic images that garnered these directors the distinguished label of auteurs. Finally, after graduating from the Beijing Film Academy in 1992, three years after the student uprising and government crackdown in Tiananmen Square, the Sixth Generation of filmmakers, including Wang Xiaoshuai, began to experiment with a new realist style that focused on the economic and social conditions of everyday life in (mostly) urban China that were created by economic modernisation and globalisation more generally. For a further discussion of the various generations of Chinese filmmakers and criticisms of this categorisation scheme, see Kuoshu (2002, pp. 1–19).

2. Because of conflict with the United States over Vietnam and mistrust of the Soviet Union, Mao and other Communist leaders sought to protect China's military and industrial base by moving both to China's inland regions. Thus, in the 1960s, Mao began to dismantle industry in Shanghai and other first-line cities on the east coast and in the northeast, while creating a group of second-front cities such as Suzhou to which the citizens of Shanghai and the Chinese Army could “withdraw” and begin their “war of resistance” (Naughton, 1988, p. 352). A new industrial base was then built in a group of third-line cities such as Guiyang in interior provinces in southwest China such as Guizhou and Sichuan, which both the Soviets and the Americans would have a difficult time reaching if war was ever declared. For further discussion of these third-line cities, see Naughton (1988, pp. 351–75).

3. Although Deng Xiaoping is often credited with initiating the set of policies generally associated with economic modernisation, Joe Studwell provides convincing evidence that Chen Yun and certain historical events, such as the farmers of Sichuan and Guangdong province turning their families into work groups, provided much of the domestic incentive for the policy. Deng should, however, be credited with opening China's economy to international trade and investment. For further discussion of this issue, see Studwell (2003, pp. 26–61).

4. For an analysis of Chinese films that depict filial devotion to paternal figures separate from and, in many cases, sacrificed on behalf of the Chinese nation, see Berry and Farquhar (2006, pp. 134–68).

5. For a discussion of the relationship between Heidegger's notion of silence and Zen Buddhism, see Kotoh (1987, pp. 201–12).

6. For one of Lacan's original explanations of point de capiton see Lacan (2002, pp. 281–312). For a further discussion of this concept see Lee (1990, pp. 61–71).

7. McGrath adopts this concept from Svetlana Boym (2001).