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A Great Master Recaptured

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by Ellie Bramley
“You are better known than me. Our country needs you.” Mao Tse Tung to Mei LanFang

The magic of the Beijing opera, so this film tells us, is its ability to invoke a boat floating on an autumnal lake through the prop of a single oar.  This film gives us an informative look into the culture of Beijing opera and Mei LanFang whose emotive and exquisite hand movements that Brecht called his “finger-acting” earned him a place as one of the most famous Beijing opera artists in modern history.

We are given a valuable insight into an art form that in many ways, despite Mei LanFang’s efforts to introduce it to the west earlier in the twentieth century, remains a little inaccessible and enigmatic to western eyes and ears to this day.  But then perhaps this illusiveness of meaning is meant to be something of the charm.  Many people often compared Mei to the smoke from the cigarettes he smoked so delicately; he was hardly there: “looking at my other self I look like and unlike myself.”

The film captures the essence of the Beijing opera and all its visual richness.  Historical archive footage both of Beijing in the early twentieth century and of the opera itself, with some snippets of Mei LanFang at his craft provide the most interesting and arresting sections of the film.  The most captivating of these is where we see black and white archive footage deftly merges into modern technicolour as 3rd generation Mei style artists take over scenes from their predecessors with recordings of Mei’s voice ringing through.  Arguably the charm of the singing remains a mystery to westerners, but it is the elaborate makeup and costumes of the artists that enchant.  Like birds of paradise they flutter around the stage.

Where the film irrevocably falters is with the heavy-handed and overtly hyperbolic narrative.  The verbose language is not helped by the sentimental, lingering, scanning shots of Mei’s former residences through the seasons or of empty, dusty opera and tea houses.  The narrative makes grandiose claims of Mei’s talents which are probably not untrue, but which are certainly unnecessary. When he, without precedent, takes a show to Broadway, the narrator boasts of the Americans’ shock that something so far removed from the likes of Ibsen or Shakespeare could be just as exquisite.  There are unreserved boasts of the Mei’s success on his visit to Russia where he received a minimum of ten curtain calls a night and met with the likes of Tolstoy.

Mei truly led an extraordinary life, concerned with preserving the ancient traditions of opera whilst simultaneously innovating. For example, where previously female characters had held a single pose throughout a whole aria, Mei added delicate movement thus opening the eyes of the Beijing opera audiences to new artistic possibilities.  His clear talent and impressive life would have been better served had they been left to speak for themselves.
China Central Newsreel and Documentary Film Studio, 2006, 84 mins

This film, which will be screening at the ICA on the 23rd and 30th March 2008 is part of China in London: Spotlight Beijing, a season of films celebrating the diversity and breadth of cinema from China.

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