The Clown’s World: Opera, Cinema, and Everyday Life in Qiu Jiongjiong’s A New Old Play

The University of Chicago Center in Beijing

20th floor, Culture Plaza
No. 59A Zhong Guan Cun Street
Haidian District Beijing 100872

This talk explores Qiu Jiongjiong’s first fiction feature, A New Old Play (2021), a film about the rise and fall of a Sichuan opera troupe in twentieth-century China. Its protagonist, Qiu Fu, is largely based on the director’s own grandfather, a renowned chou (clown) performer. Rather than submitting traditional opera as source material for a cinematic story, Qiu translates the logic of its theatrical conventions into the visual, material, and narrative language of cinema. I examine how he uses his painterly imagination to mediate between opera’s formalism and cinematic realism, creating a film that is distinctively transmedial that evokes the vernacular lifeworld of Sichuan opera. The chou is the hero of this world. Drawing on the rich repertoire of chou roles in Sichuan opera, as well as the Western traditions of the jester and fool, Qiu presents a gallery of clown figures, among them ghosts and deities, to embody the absurdity, melancholy, and critical insight of the film.

18:00–18:30 Regristration 

18:30–19:30 Talk and Q&A 

19:30–20:30 Dinner 

Language: English

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Chun Chun Ting: Independent scholar. Ph.D. from the department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago. Previously Assistant Professor at School of Humanities, Nanyang Technological University (2016-23), Research Fellow at International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden University (2023-24). Her works appear in positions: asia critique, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, The Newsletter, IIAS Leiden, as well as Ming Pao,《方圓》,《字花》,《虛詞》, etc..