One of the distinctive characteristics of Jia Zhangke’s films is his consistent and pervasive use of dialect. Jia Zhangke’s success with the movie Pickpocket (xiao wu 1998), which was his first attempt to use Fenyang dialect as its main characters’ spoken language. This film was so popular that it became a series that eventually became a trilogy. And since then, dialects are used in almost all his films. Dialect has a great influencing power in cultural production in contemporary China. (Gunn Edward, 2005) Although national language likes mandarin is more widely used and known by audience, mandarin can never reflect the complexity, diversity, and liveliness of China’s distinct local cultures as embodied in their local languages (Jin Liu, 2006). On the other hand, the main characters in Jia Zhangke’s films are usually people in the margins of the society. Although they work and live in the city, due to historical, economic and institutional reasons, they can’t integrate into the city well. They dissociate between city and rural place and become peasant in city.
Hence,…show more content… But now the film shifts the focus on the people while country and its magnificent construction become the background of their stories. By using multiple narratives, we are brought closer to the folk “good people” or “hero”, who may exit among us but we just don’t realize. Although the protagonists and are independent and do not even interact in the film, by using multiple narratives, which makes unnoticeable intersections of them, naturally connects the films as a whole. Indeed, the setting of this intersection repeats in our everyday life as everyday we encounter strangers with their own stories and we may sometimes play a role in each other’s