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123 CHAPTER 5 Dai Sijie Locating the Third Culture in Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress Unlike the writers and directors examined in the other chapters, Dai Sijie is a relatively unknown artist in the Sinophone world. Because China has banned both the film and novel versions of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (novel 2000; film 2002), his most popular work worldwide, curious readers cannot even find his name in the China Film and Television Bureau’s 2006 publication One HundredYears of Chinese Cinema (Zhong guo dian ying bai nian).This inclusive anthology has allowed more than seventy directors from China,Taiwan, and Hong Kong, many without Dai’s global presence, to introduce themselves in their own voice. Nor have Dai’s works inspired as many scholarly essays and monographs as have other Chinese directors and writers.This disjunction of being famous abroad but obscure at home is further complicated by the double role that Dai plays in contemporary Chinese cinema: he has adapted his own literary writings into film.And his “doubleness” extends even further, for he uses his second language ,French,to write about his homeland,China,and typically works with French producers and crew to make Chinese films. His interdisciplinary and cross-cultural experiences have made him an intermediary figure, uniquely qualified for an exploration of the idea of a hybridized, or “third,” culture derived from both national and international perspectives. Dai’s versatility and multiculturalism are compounded by the fact that his texts are richly intertextual: the French novelists Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert,Alexandre Dumas, and Romain Rolland are just a few of the sources he draws upon.This explains why, despite his Chinese upbringing , Dai’s European connection has been the focal point for scholars (Hsieh 2002; Bloom 2005; McCall 2006).Yet Chinese culture has also shaped his 124 CHAPTER 5 art: in his writing, we find Shen Congwen’s lyricism and Scar Literature’s testimonial realism; in his films, the work of the Fifth and Sixth Generation directors. Thus in Dai’s adaptations we can glimpse a third culture artist reworking the binaries into which he has been thrown by politics and history. Typically, his third perspective is indigenous and unofficial, existing outside the dichotomy of a liberating West and an oppressive China. Creating alternative cultural representations to mock dogmatism and moral binarisms,1 Dai develops perspectives on cultural resistance to Maoist approaches.2 In so doing he visualizes literature and poeticizes film in ways that are unique among contemporary Chinese authors and directors. Born in 1954 in Fujian province, Dai Sijie grew up in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in western China. Like many Fifth and Sixth Generation directors,3 Dai was labeled a “young intellectual” and sent to the countryside for “re-education” during the Cultural Revolution (1966– 1976).From 1971 to 1974 he was stationed in a remote mountainous region, Yaan, in Sichuan. After the Cultural Revolution, he entered Sichuan University in 1977 and graduated with a degree in history. In 1982 he earned a government-sponsored fellowship to study in France. This opportunity motivated Dai to study Western civilization and cultural history, art history, and French language for eighteen months before he left for France at the end of 1983.He entered the Université de Paris I and majored in art history. A year later he transferred to the most prestigious film school in France, L’école nationale supérieure des métiers de l’image et du son (or Fémis), where he studied for three years.4 After graduation Dai Sijie wrote and directed three Chinese films in France: China, My Sorrow (Niu peng in Chinese; Chine, ma douleur in French; 1989), The Moon Eater (Tun yue liang de ren in Chinese; Le Mangeur de lune in French; 1994), and The Eleventh Child (Di shi yi ge zi in Chinese; Tang le onzième in French;1998).Although China,My Sorrow won a special mention and was nominated for the Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival in Switzerland in 1989,Dai’s directing career fizzled.It was not until he wrote his first novel, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (Xiao cai feng in Chinese; Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise in French; 2000) and adapted it into film with the same title in 2002 that Dai secured both commercial and critical success around the globe. Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise won five prestigious literary prizes (Hsieh 2002: 93) and has now...

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