"Old Deng Rules by Day, Little Deng Rules by Night”: music and memory in platform

Abstract

This article is dedicated to the intermedial relationship between cinema and pop music in mandarin in the film Platform (Zhantai, 2000) by Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke. One of the main names in contemporary world cinema, Jia is the most prominent director of the Sixth Generation of Chinese cinema, also known as the “urban generation” for their focus on life and landscape in China’s ever-changing cities. The many pop songs that punctuate the film, which traces a panorama of the transformations affecting China during the 1980s through the story of an itinerant group of artists, are on one level fragments of Jia’s individual and authorial memory, transformed into important pieces in his effort to reconstruct a collective memory through film. On another level, the impact of such songs in the 1980s and 1990s China is related to a great extent to their novelty, given that they were something which came from abroad (specially Hong Kong and Taiwan) and which employed the first person singular pronoun “I”, until then practically absent from the ubiquitous revolutionary/propaganda songs in praise of communist ideals and Chairman Mao. Thus, the main hypothesis to be investigated refers to the use of pop songs in Platform as a complex authorial mark related to the emergence of the individual in the landscape of social and economic transformations in the People’s Republic of China from the 1980s onwards.