The sound of the city: Chinese films of the 1990s and urban noise

The process of Chinese socio-economic transformation launched by the policy of reforms in 1978 has strongly affected the film industry. Changes evident since the early-1990s, when new regulations in filmmaking were issued, together with the privatisation of the state studio system, have enabled a variety of totally new production modes, genres and visual representations to emerge. Hi-tech buildings in Beijing and Shanghai, fashionable Ikea-style interiors are now often juxtaposed to rundown suburbs and neglected traditional residential quarters. Not since the 1920s and 1930s, when Shanghai city life was the focus of the Chinese film industry, had such varied representations of the Chinese been available. Contemporary Chinese filmmaking cannot be explained simply in terms of the revitalization of the entertainment industry, frozen since 1950 when the film industry was nationalized and made to promulgate the ideals of a socialist China. The specificity of contemporary cinema lies in the combination of memories of the early Shanghai days, a long recent socialist tradition and the new perception of space, in particular, city space within which the forces of the market economy collide. More interestingly, the ongoing transformation is not just highlighted by the variety of visual representation, but rather by the combination of the visual and sound elements. This article focuses on the evolution and the importance of sound in relation to the representation of the Chinese city. The eruption of urban noise in Chinese film production of the Nineties strongly affects all representations of the Chinese city space, from fiction to documentaries, from independent video productions to high-budget films. Thus, it contrasts with the use of music and polished soundtracks, which characterized the decades when national studios encouraged audience emotional engagement. Furthermore, the use of natural sound, in particular in documentaries, acknowledges not only the modernizing efforts and the striking urban development of the Chinese metropolis (as most commonly in fiction films, i.e. Zhang Yimou’s Keep Cool) but also some of the less glorious aspects of the process. For instance Wang Bing’s Tiexi qu (West of Tracks), a documentary on the closing down of an industrial area, in which the combination of images and natural sound portrays the collapse of the socialist relationship between man and factory. Now, Chinese cities impose themselves on screen through images and sound, specifically urban noise, often in dialectic relation but in striking contrast to the previous tradition of state studio productions which left out any natural sound in order to emphasize the ideological message.