Legendary On The Sea Analysis

Jia’s major contribution in this two films is gathering and treating groups of different voices, varied in terms of generations, genders, and experiences equally to create a heteroglossic or polyphonic narrative, and superimpose more various meanings on one single space, i.e. Chengdu and Shanghai, which are no longer reducible or generalisable. Heteroglossia is illustrated by Bakhtin through the metaphor of carnival which belongs to the whole people, and mocks the authoritative discourses, e.g. crowning and sequent de-crowning of the carnival king (252-255). Apart from blurring the boundary between the fictional and the real and parodying the genres in aforementioned way, the heteroglossia is achieved by symbolically “crowning” samples of different

The signification here shall not be misunderstood as his allegiances switched to another political regime, but rather as a suspension from conventional order, and to propose a more opening spatial definition, incorporating and highlighting those at the margin of the discourse. As the Chinese title of the film, the Legendary on the Sea, is a mimicry of Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Flowers on the Sea [Flowers of Shanghai], Jia pays tribute to Hou who in the interview introduces the interesting anecdote that Flowers of Shanghai was actually shot in Taiwan, implying identity and historical memory are not constrained in a certain geographical area, but inherited and adapted by people in different localities. That is to say, Shanghai can be everywhere, and everywhere can be Shanghai. Transforming from “Shanghai” to “Hai Shang” [literally meaning “on the sea”] by reversing morphemes, they treat Shanghai, more as a starting point of storytelling than a concrete centre, and destruct the binary opposition between the centre and the margin. Their filmmaking then, becomes “the second of leaping up” when the carnival begins and the “beggar” is

Apart from the diversity of interviews, the relations between the interviews, and the temporalities and perspectives they imply are also worthy examining: Instead of putting interviews strictly into different categories, both films organise them in a random order by complicating the chronology. For instance, I Wish I Knew begins by the recollection of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s to 70s, while after several interviews, it turns to story in in the thirties, although the inter-title before the narration implies much remoter historical event in 1843 when Shanghai was for the first time open to international business. Afterwards, the timeline shifts back to the Civil War in the late 1940s, and continues to address stories after the founding the the state in 1949. Without articulated explanation for the disrupted narrative time, both films create a “metaphoric and mosaic” quality in Weiseman’s sense that “each sequence [conveys] a recognisable aspect of [film’s] overall design” (Nichols 211 quoted by Robinson 13). In this way, the individual particularities are protected from periodisation