Well, a new week begins, and the sun sets too soon on a sterling cinematic opportunity. This past Sunday marked the conclusion of the weeklong engagement of A New Old Play at the Anthology Film Archives in New York City, and with that there seems to be little else to do but wait to find out if U.S. distributor Icarus Films decides to handle an official home video/streaming release, or if subsequent showings this summer at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art in D.C. (June 5th), the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria (June 11th), the Austin Asian Film Festival (June 24th), or the Laemmle's Glendale in California (June 24th - 30th) will be all she wrote on the general public's opportunity to see one of the most endearing and technically fascinating films of the year. What's more, no sooner has this first fiction epic by Chinese contemporary artist and documentarian Qiu Jiongjiong been spirited away, so too has the pay-what-you-can streaming service Eventive ceased its own special curation of the filmmaker's entire body of work in its digital catalog. Truly one of those "blink and you miss it" moments.
That's kind of the way it goes in the marketplace of specialty cinema. Any illusion of the profundity of access to all kinds of films is undercut by apprehension of the enigmatic and cruel brevity of any number of them; not in terms of their running times, but in terms of their potential to be witnessed. For the vast majority of Americans, almost all our cinematic culture is presumptive, whether we're talking about the major studio tentpoles or whatever shows up on a marquee at an AMC or Regal after drumming up the perfunctory earned media out of Cannes. Even in our cultural metropoles on the east and west coasts, it's rather sad how many supposed cinephiles mainly try to keep at least one finger on the pulse of movies that are talked and written about, and thereby determine what is on their "watchlist" for the year. This, as opposed to consciously patronizing the theaters and repertories themselves, appreciating and taking advantage of them as the essential framework for defining a cinematic culture, not just as the superficial hosts for those films that we are supposed to see.
You never know what isn't getting "word-of-mouth," regardless of whether it hit up the festival circuit or not, because there are some films that aren't necessarily meant to be talked up or seen that way. There is a certain cinema that is apparitional, that can only be keyed into by chancing upon it. And once you see it, what follows is a melancholy that comes from the sense of its impermanence, not simply its rarity or exclusivity. With no assurance of even its most niche viability in the marketplace of specialty films, this becomes the cinema defined by its quality of fading memory, of lonely testament that might never get shared as part of the bundle of that year's great cinematic experiences. This is the frank reality and beauty of a cinema that lives and dies, which even the most passionate cinephiles are prone to ill-appreciate in the context of a popular culture where absolutely nothing comes to its natural end.
That ghostly impermanence to its rollout is probably appropriate for Qiu Jiongjiong's film, an international co-production of France and Hong Kong that stars Yi Sicheng as an opera clown, Qiu Fu, whose death and passage into a gray underworld is accompanied by reflections on his life. These elaborate and lyrically-structured flashbacks all take place in China's southwestern Sichuan province, beginning in the '30s with the foundation of a military-affiliated, modernist opera company into which the orphaned Qiu is adopted by a smallpox-scarred patriarch nicknamed General Pocky (Qiu Zhimin). Pocky schools the little miscreant in the traditions of the province's historically unique form of opera, and in time the theater troupe is quite successful, the growing Qiu becoming a locally-renowned star. Just as he plays the role of the clown on stage, however, so too does he become the fool and hero of a historical montage that Qiu Jiongjiong traces from world war to the scourge of opium, from civil strife to Communist liberation, from famine to a cultural revolution that sees the former celebrity of the People's Theater persecuted simply because of the nationalist affiliations of the men who took him in as a child. Now at the twilight of his years, the ridge of his nose still stained white with the impression of his clown make-up, Qiu is escorted by two demons to the outskirts of the Ghost City, where, in accordance with Chinese folklore, he must first drink a soup that will cause him to forget everything about his former life. Such a broth promises liberation from all doubt, regret, pain, and trauma. And yet, still, Qiu finds himself biding his time, trying to make excuses to stay behind just a little longer, to remember a little longer. And as we recognize in Qiu's journey an allegory for China's history and evolving national self-conception, we also recognize in our hero's indecision both the desire to forget all hardships and discontents, as well as the sorrow of traditions and stories that are on the threshold of being forever enveloped in time.
The characters and story of A New Old Play are intimately interwoven with the writer and director's own family and artistic legacy. The character of Qiu Fu is a thinly-veiled representation of Qiu Jiongjiong's own grandfather, the real-life Sichuan opera clown Qiu Fu-xin, who passed away in 1987. (The memory of and homage to Qiu Fu-xin was previously the partial subject of Qiu's 2008 short film, Ode to Joy.) Himself raised in the company of the Sichuan opera, Qiu Jiongjiong started out as a painter before he took up a super-DV camera in the mid-'00s and began producing long, black-and-white experimental documentaries chronicling the stories of his friends and family. The video-diary style of his early works were marked by a playful acknowledgment of his un-invited and nosey presence behind the camera, as well as by minimal and impulsive creative interventions while he otherwise edited together the storytelling of his subjects in long, unwaveringly fascinated takes. However, with successive film projects, especially Mr. Zhang Believes from 2015, Qiu has progressively adopted "a simple craft approach" (per the Icarus Films press kit) to compliment the stories and characters he captures. The caricatured production design of objects and settings, reaching its playhouse apotheosis in A New Old Play, invokes both the works of early silent film magicians like Georges Méliès and Segundo de Chomon, as well as the "traditional grammar" of the Sichuan opera itself.
The most direct comparisons I can think of in terms of overall style of Qiu's later works are the films of Wes Anderson. But Qiu demonstrates a far more disciplined ability to at first appeal to the spectator's bemusement with the sentimental artificiality of his film's design, only for the sense of its "staginess" to recede as his camera eye more intimately and (in cinematic terms) conventionally explores a theatrical space. Just as formalistic as any Anderson film, A New Old Play lacks the same degree of deadpan alienation, or, as Qiu himself puts it in his director's statement, "supercilious detachment," wherein forms seem to comment largely on forms themselves, rather than inviting the viewer in and conditioning them in new ways of seeing and perceiving an artistic subject.
Furthermore, the superficial naivety of this presentation is counterbalanced by the weight of history. Though largely presented as a somewhat wistful comedy, Qiu's film does not shy away from some rather gruesome historical details, as when Qiu Fu and his wife Huafeng (Guan Nan), at the height of the Great Famine, steal excrement from a sanitation ditch for maggots to be used in baby's milk, providing a foundling they've briefly adopted with that essential protein and nutrition that is so hard to come by. Still, even these episodes, including Qiu's own persecution during the Cultural Revolution, or his and Huafeng's own son (himself adopted by the Sichuan troupe) being indoctrinated against them, are never framed in maudlin terms. Qiu Jiongjiong assumes an ethereal patience when regarding the horrors and humiliations of history. It is not merely the specter of death, but the transience of time itself, that asserts a certain sense of existential futility, suggesting exactly the "supercilious detachment" the director seeks to avoid. At the same time, Qiu's simple craft approach redeems the parables and allegories of private histories from obsessive regression into cloying pity for the sufferer, or perverse morbid interest in the abjection of violence, poverty, and want. There are few film scenes this year more impactful, for instance, then when Qiu Fu, forced to stand in the street outside the old People's Theater and wear a dunce cap and placard advertising his reactionary crimes, still manages, through his facial expressions alone, to willingly embody the clown once more, much to the delight of passersby old and young. Though engaged in frank historical critique - especially of the supposed "liberation" of China under Maoism - the existentialism of A New Old Play is consistently redemptive, presenting the private melodramatic history of the fictionalized Qiu family in stark contrast to the thrust of political forces, which are framed as being as natural and irrevocable as a famine itself.
If there is melancholy to the film, it is not a melancholy of some collective historical shame, but rather the melancholy of individual stories as they are progressively winnowed away by time, each generation's layering of memories becoming increasingly caricatured and abstracted from a mythic original. The loss of history and tradition are one thing, but even that tragedy loses any sense of its vitality if totally deracinated from the living allegory of its actors and the little melodramas in which they participate, at once indisputably political and totally apolitical. One of the funnier gags of the early third of A New Old Play is when one of the demons escorting Qiu Fu to the underworld keeps correcting him with regards to the specific details of when certain events in his life took place. In satirical terms, the demons themselves are presented as more or less technocratic functionaries, the foibles and inscrutable bureaucracy of the living world apparently stretching all the way into the Ghost World, despite our best hopes. Still, what's even more important is that the demons who escort Qiu Fu are themselves presented as young men, the sons of older demons now retired, carrying on their own tradition just as Qiu Fu took up the mantle of the clown from General Pocky. Qiu Jiongjiong, in turn, articulates his own theater in order to preserve the impression of memory, and thus life, if not necessarily an exact history. As encapsulated by the title of the film, the tension between the old and new subtly persists throughout the decades-spanning drama of the story. But A New Old Play is not a story about generational schism. It is, rather, and again, a redemptive tale about mantles being handed down and taken up, in defiance of the utter futility of preserving spiritual, as opposed to merely technical and fact-based, truths. And if there is a frankness to the film's historical satire of Communism, this is playfully balanced by an anti-reactionary conviction. Qiu Jiongjiong's impression of his family legacy is rendered as a series of adoptions, which is to say that nothing that comes to each generation comes about as some sort of divine birthright. The story that is being told, as its beginnings fray and its ends perpetually unfold, is bonded by a transcendent love, which Qui's cast captures with beguiling understatement.
That passion for remembering is, of course, locked in a constant dalliance with the temptation, the desire to forget. The craft aesthetic of A New Old Play, as well as its existential melodramatic focus, does nothing to detract, ultimately, from its seriousness as a historical film. And where Qiu succeeds in leaps and bounds above both his contemporaries and even many antecedents in the historical picture is that he manages to perfectly distill the feeling of history as a burden, as a cross to be carried in body and mind of our thankless private legacies. I don't want to give away the ending, exactly, but the final image of A New Old Play presents the director at perhaps the most naked he's ever been, even more so than when he plays his own deprecating self in his family documentaries. It communicates the eagerness of a young inheritor of memory to join his forefathers at the supper of forgetfulness, punctuating the lucid dream of Qiu's play with an acknowledgment of the daunting fate that awaits new generations in their charge of history, a task from which it is all too easy to abdicate. As an experience, A New Old Play is at once consistently humorous, but haunted both by the implications of the past it presents, as well as by forebodings of a future in which threads of memory may not so much be forgotten as intentionally abandoned. Just as the Maoists proclaim the destruction of the old world and the erecting of a new one in its place (never, in the vision of the film, managing to accomplish much that is really "new"), Qiu's film alludes to the perfidy of convenient ignorance and wanton destruction masquerading as informed creation. As time and the inevitability of death collapses all dialectical distinctions, A New Old Play becomes inflected with a subliminal invective for its rare audience, especially its young, not so much to "never forget," but to not forget too soon; to take up the task of recreating memories, patient in anticipation of when it is really our turn to rest and forget.
With a sizable, lively, and exceedingly talented company, beautiful sets and production design, and cinematographer Yuchao Feng's camera pushing the limits of its potential for both magic and naturalism, A New Old Play proves a deftly executed play of contradictory feelings. With any luck, Qiu Jiongjiong's cinematic apparition will hold out a little longer, so that as many people as possible can see it in the fusion of theatrical and cinematic context it deserves.
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