#dai sijie

[toiich]

The Chinese Botanist's Daughters (2006), dir. Dai Sijie

[exhaled-spirals]

— Dai Sijie, Once on a Moonless Night

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

Have you read Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie (orig. Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise, 2000)?

yes

no

I didn't finish it

I've never heard of it

Voting ended onMar 29, 2024

[301-302]

Mùi đu đủ xanh (The Scent of Green Papaya | Tran Anh Hung | 1993)

Les filles du botaniste (The Chinese Botanist’s Daughters | Dai Sijie | 2006)

[litandlifequotes]

I hadn’t expected that a tiny glimmer of hope for the future could transform someone so utterly.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie

[knuckle]

so much scholarship on "self-orientalism" is garbage. i don't think there's a way to fully separate what, when, why, or how directors and authors do this but I watched Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress last night and here is a white Italian author's take on it

Once translated into Chinese, the description loses its attractive power, inverting a mechanism that does not seem to work properly in the author’s mother tongue. The author employs a similar strategy when describing the protagonist’s signature, yet without explicitly saying his name: Ma Jianling (Dai 2000, 138). Once again, when translated into Chinese, the mysterious aura the author tried to create around the signatures disappears, forcing the translator to reveal the concealed identity of the characters that composed them (Dai 2002, 126; Dai 2003, 119). Consequently, the author’s extensive self-orientalism (Chevaillier 2010, 71) succumbs to the rules of the target language, neutralizing the foreignizing effect and substituting it with a redundant and pedantic description of the names.

which like is so um... wrong because the Mandarin-language movie has an introductory scene where Ma Jianling introduces his name by explaining to the villagers why there is a drawing of a horse, sword, and bell in his possession representing his name. the idea that the phrase is supposed to be an element of mystery rather than, perhaps, an element of familiarity to Chinese speaking readers is so ??? if it didn't work and was only for orientalizing the Chinese language, why was the scene reworked visually and put into the movie (which Dai adapted and directed)?

[sinetheta]

The Chinese Botanist's Daughters (植物园). dir Dai Sijie (戴思杰). 2006. 

The Chinese Botanist’s Daughters, French name Les filles du botaniste, is a French and Canadian produced film by director Dai Sijie. The film is about a famous botanist, whose daughter falls in love with a female botany student who is studying at his home. The relationship is risky and taboo, and when the botanist finds out, he dies of a heart attack in shock. The two women and their homosexuality are blamed for his death. The film was deemed “improper” by China and thus although it was set in China, it was not filmed nor shown there. 

Dai Sijie is a director and author, born in Chengdu in 1954. In his late teen years during the Cultural Revolution, he was sent to a re-education camp, an experience that later shaped his works. In 1984, he went to France on a scholarship to study at the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques. 

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[nondualreality]

I was carried away, swept along by the mighty stream of words pouring from the hundreds of pages. To me it was the ultimate book: once you had read it, neither your own life nor the world you lived in would ever look the same.

Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress