ABSTRACT
The twenty-first century opens with China’s rise in the world, illustrated among other things by its global dream in filmmaking. The language China dreams in is monolingual Mandarin, a northern Chinese dialect represented by the capital, Beijing, its filmic grammar and syntax that of the wuxia (swordplay) genre favored by the fifth-generation Chinese directors. The Freudian “dream-work,” or the underlying psychological drive, revolves around power accrued from the mythical, timeless tradition of the sword practiced by heroes, phallocentric male bodies speaking or dubbed with the national language and ejaculated globally with English subtitles. As Emily Apter (2006) hypothesizes in The Translation Zone, “globally powerful languages such as English, Mandarin Chinese, … simultaneously reduce linguistic diversity and spawn new forms of multilingual aesthetic practice” (3). Milling around the dreaming body of the Mainland are viewers in this millennial wake, peripheral figures of multilingual New Taiwan Cinema, Hong Kong auteur, even sixth-generation Chinese filmmaking in various dialects. Not only wuxia’s monolingualism meets with the forked tongues from the margins but its core masculinity is undermined by wuxia’s own history.
