A New Old Play (Qiu Jiongjiong, 2021) (Patreon)

Before trying to say anything halfway cogent about A New Old Play, I wanted to read Shelly Kraicer's interview with Qiu in Cinema Scope 91. There are a couple of reasons for this (aside from the fact that anything Shelly writes is well worth reading). First, there's a fact that in its three hour run time, A New Old Play spans three decades of Chinese history, for the 1950s, when the Nationalists hold sway in Sichuan, through the rise of Communism, Mao's Cultural Revolution, and the post-Mao reform period. This kind of sweeping historical panorama is not unprecedented. After all, Platform is a like-minded epic surveying a similar period, although Jia's brand of ironically detached realism could hardly be more different from the tonal disjunctures and overt artifice favored by Qiu.

But more than this, I was a bit thrown by that tone I just described. Reading the interview helped explain some of Qiu's background -- the main character in A New Old Play is based on the director's grandfather -- but also gave a sense of how Qiu made the transition from documentaries to his first narrative feature. It was a bizarre experience watching A New Old Play, since it is a film so thoroughly engulfed in its maker's unique perspective, as if Qiu emerged as a fully-formed cinematic stylist right out of the gate. This resulted for me in a rare experience, watching a filmmaker firmly establish his signature, have very few meaningful points of comparison, and still not having a clear sense of where he was coming from.

Qiu talks with Shelly about his lifelong interest in Chinese theater, as well as his work as a painter of highly exaggerated "clownish" portraits. This is an artist who cops to a Brechtian agenda, trying to provoke audiences with anti-realist distanciation, but there's more to it than that. A New Old Play is not just a chronicle of a Chinese clown and his "New New Theater" troupe. It sees the cultural work of the clown (xiaochou) as intrinsic to his creative outlook, which makes A New Old Play simultaneously a portrait of a family member, an historical panoply, and an aesthetic statement of purpose. "[The Sichuan clown] is a figure of contradiction: his humble, modest demeanor hides a brave soul; there is sadness and melancholy under a playful, clownish exterior."

This may not be a wholly original take on the cultural function of clowns. Anything from Cirque du Soleil to Jerry Lewis partakes of this crying-on-the-inside approach, and the aggressively carnivalesque films of Emir Kusturica (the only real point of filmic comparison that occurred to me while watching A New Old Play) similarly adopt the distorted fun-house perspective when unfurling broad swaths of social and political history. But unlike Kusturica or, to cite a Chinese point of comparison, Jiang Wen, A New Old Play is often slow and quiet, a forlorn and ever-grinding pantomime that halfheartedly parrots the ideology de jure.

So in an odd way, A New Old Play articulates Chinese history with the baleful melancholy one finds in, say, Angeloupolos's The Travelling Players, but radically ramps up the theatrical mannerisms, very often making it difficult to tell which scenes depict actual performances and which are "real life" as refracted through Qiu's Brechtian prism. It would be rather reductive to suggest that A New Old Play regards 20th century Chinese existence as a kind of theater of life and death. But as the film shows, the ever-shifting political orthodoxy, to which all must kowtow, means that citizens are "performing" the gestures and shibboleths of the new regime before they may even understand what they're pretending to believe.

Qiu, of course, begins at the end, when his nimble but benighted clown Qiu Fu (played by four different actors at various stages of life) is dead. Two gods of the underworld, Ox-Head (Liu Boyu) and Horse-Face (Huang Lingchao), attempt to cajole Qiu Fun into accepting his fate and following them down to Hades, where he seems to have a standing theatrical engagement. But as a bit of a diversion tactic (shades of Scheherazade), the clown recounts his entire career, beginning as the abandoned son of a well-known performer, snaking through decades of success and failure, comfort and penury, Nationalist pride and Maoist reeducation.

Yi Sicheng, the actor who plays the adult Qiu Fu, is a special effect all his own, with his protruding ears, bulbous nose, and rounded cranium. He never stops looking like a clown, with the makeup on or off. It's frequently suggested that Qiu Fu was "born" for the role, but A New Old Play depicts a top-down world, where lowly individuals far from the centers of power are instructed what to do by local toadies and mid-rank martinets. Individual subjects are expected to allow themselves to be borne along by the rush of history. Memory -- of what the previous doctrine was, of where you came from, and of one's own life story, which may or may not be convincingly proletarian -- is the thing that sustains one's fleeting sense of self, and it's that persistence of identity that proves, again and again, to be dangerous. A New Old Play is a defiant statement about the indelible marks of history in a culture dedicated to their continual erasure.