THE SHADOWLESS TOWER: DUBLIN SCREENING, INTRODUCTON BY DR. QI ZHANG

My research area is Chinese-English translation. So please allow me to introduce the film to you today from a translation perspective, looking at the title of the film.

A film title usually attempts to capture the attention of its potential audience through showing the essence of a film, addressing its theme and plot and so on. For a foreign-language arthouse film like this one, the title tends to be an important marketing tool for the international audience.

The title of today’s film is 白塔之光 (Bái tǎ zhī guāng) in Chinese and The Shadowless Tower in English. At first glance, the original title and its translation do not seem to be equivalent. 白塔 (Bái tǎ) means ‘white pagoda’; translating this as ‘white tower’ is perfectly fine. 之光 (zhī guāng) means ‘the light of’. So 白塔之光 actually means ‘the light of the white pagoda’ or ‘the light of the white tower’. There is no mention of ‘shadow’ or ‘shadowless’.

The Chinese name of the film seems to have been taken from a well-known youth hostel in Beijing. The hostel is located near the White Pagoda, a 13th-century Buddhist temple, so the hostel is named 白塔之光 (Bái tǎ zhī guāng). Its English name is The Pagoda Light, the semantic equivalent. Part of the film was shot in this hostel. Therefore, it is likely that the film is simply named after the youth hostel.

So in the English-language title, where does ‘shadowless’ come from? What does this metaphor refer to?

With this question in mind, I watched the film and tried to find an answer. I would like to just draw your attention to part of the plot synopsis: “Gu learns that his father, estranged following an incident forty years ago, is living alone in Beidaihe.” At least one of the reasons for the inclusion of ‘shadowless’ in the film title lies in this aspect of the plot. So perhaps you could also keep this question in mind, and you may come up with your own interpretation for ‘shadowless’ after watching the film.

In my opinion, another important way to understand the metaphor of ‘shadowless’ is the mention in the film of a poem: 《一代人》(Yīdài rén), ‘A Generation’, written by 顾城 (Gù Chéng). This poem, and the poet 顾城, are representative of 朦胧诗 (Ménglóng shī), translated as ‘misty poetry’. Misty poetry is defined as a poetic style of opacity and incomprehensibility, and usually refers to the work of a new generation of poets published from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s – the period directly after the Cultural Revolution ended in China.

In fact, three poems are mentioned in the film, all three in the misty poetry genre. The one I’ll briefly discuss is this poem 《一代人》 (Yīdài rén), ‘A Generation’, since it is the shortest one, consisting of only two sentences:

黑夜给了我黑色的眼睛，

(Hēiyè gěile wǒ hēisè de yǎnjīng)

我却用它寻找光明。

(wǒ què yòng tā xúnzhǎo guāngmíng)

The English translation is:

Black night gave me black eyes,

But I use them to look for light.

We can see the optimism and hope that many people felt with the Cultural Revolution over and the ‘Reform and Opening-up’ policy underway in China. As Michelle Yeh says in her research, “Acknowledging the darkness his generation has endured, the poet nevertheless refuses to portray himself as a victim” by highlighting that he will “use [black eyes] to look for light.”

The last word in the poem is 光明 (guāngmíng), meaning light. However, in the film this is changed to光芒 (Guāngmáng), meaning rays of light. Is this change deliberate or not? I can’t find an answer, based on my research. But one Chinese film critic relates this change to the metaphor of ‘shadowless’. The light of the white pagoda is so strong that it completely eliminates any darkness, including the shadow. If the shadow can be symbolised as a person’s memory, the light of the white tower seems to impose an over-purifying process on us – an extreme erasure, including of our memories.

Back to Gù Chéng’s poem, ‘A Generation’. In a scenario where it is so bright that there is no shadow, we don’t actually need to look for light. So from 光明 (guāngmíng), light, to 光芒 (Guāngmáng), rays of light, from a generation in the wake of the Cultural Revolution to the following generation, do we – or are we still able to – look for light? I don’t know what kind of answer the film is trying to give.

But yes, I have my own interpretation. It’s based on the image of the father in the film. As additional information for your reference, the actor who plays the father is 田壮壮 (Tián Zhuàngzhuàng) – as a director, one of the leading Fifth Generation filmmakers. His prominent work includes 蓝风筝 (Lán Fēng Zhēng), The Blue Kite, released in 1992. It portrays the impact of various political movements in the 1950s and 1960s in China, such as the Anti-Rightist Movement and the Cultural Revolution. It was thus banned in China, resulting in an eight-year exile from the film industry for 田壮壮. The father in today’s film also likes flying kites, and he lives alone in a coastal town 300 kilometres from his son and daughter. This seems like a form of exile.

Okay, I’d better stop here. Now let’s watch the film and follow the camera of 张律 (Zhāng lǜ) to see the stories in Beijing’s Xicheng district, narrated in a style similar to that of misty poetry. The film’s opacity and vagueness leave it open to different interpretations.

Qi Zhang

(May 2024)

Dr. Qi Zhang, Assistant Professor, Dublin City University School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies.