A Review of AS TIME GOES BY IN SHANGHAI by Bing Wang
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Czf0Oh0jJ3Y
In Uli Gaulke’s AS TIME GOES BY IN SHANGHAI, a feature-length documentary that follows the journey of the world’s oldest band from their everyday amateur jazz performances at the famed Peace Hotel in Shanghai to a high-profile jazz festival in Holland, nothing else seems to move on, at least not drastically. The music style the band has been practicing for over three decades belongs to a foregone rosy era. The deeply engrossed expressions of these octogenarians while they perform, appear endearingly warm and peaceful in the patient close-ups, and are honeyed in the color of amber, against the metropolis’s underrepresented ordinary looks in the backdrop. All of these are inviting to the viewer’s observant eyes on such themes as aging, the history, and the clashes between old and new, East and West. The invitation is so alluring that one expects a bit more intimacy to fine-tune the viewing experience.
As the film quickly establishes through a seemingly staged phone conversation between the band manager and the festival staff, we got to know that the six Chinese male musicians range from 75 to 88 years old and they are “all in good shape.” There exist two popular attitudes toward aging and senior citizens among non-elders: one derives from the deepest human fear of decadence, loneliness, otherness and death, and the other is privileged with a more humanitarian vantage point where people tend to patronize the elders by seeing them as adorable beings and romanticizing the aging process. When the Peace Old Jazz band tours in Holland, their local guide exuberantly claims jealousy of the band members’ age, but her overly passionate tone soon fades out while the camera reveals that these musicians are falling asleep (one member responds “we don’t think about those things.”) To some extent AS TIME GOES BY IN SHANGHAI violates the cinematic rules of depicting the elders——it refuses to infantilize them but documents the honesty and taken-for-grantedness of how the elderly view themselves during their intense in-group discussions. “Our USP (unique selling point) is a very distinct style. The technique we use is out-dated, but it’s got charm.” “We have to stay calm, otherwise we would mess up.” Mr. Gaulke allows a few moments of highly cinematic beauty to punctuate this vérité flow of keeping their lifelong passion alive. In these scenes, each musician solos on the roof of an unnamed residence building against the landscape of Shanghai which is haloed in the orange light of dawn. Their amateur music may still sound jarring to jazz connoisseurs, but the presentation, so fearless and engaging, provokes less condescendence of their age than pure admiration of their sincerity.
Less artfully presented are the hidden histories accumulated as the time goes by in Shanghai, both personal and political. These elderly musicians encountered American jazz influences in the glamorous 1930s of the city, and their pursuit never ceased even during the country’s most turbulent times. Most memories are conjured in a simple oral fashion, including the saxophonist recounting his “revolutionary” method of muffling the instrument to practice, and in the vain of “Fly Me to the Moon,” an old romanticist reminiscing about meeting the love of his life. No visual cues——either archival photo or videos——are included to reconstruct these interwoven trajectories. It is as if the stories, like the music the band plays, are so vulnerable that without human documentation, they would be foregone with the passing time. On the contrary, Shanghai, China’s jazziest city full of joy and sorrow, receives a visceral representation of its most mundane life flows. Beautifully crafted montage sequences of street scenes and ordinary people, day and night, reveal why this city is so vibrant, charming and mysterious, never short of untold stories. Without the cosmopolitan veneer featured in China’s recent blockbuster Tiny Times, a blatant celebration of youth culture and materialism, or clichéd exotic decors in many modern travellogues, Shanghai has not looked so local and accessible for a long time. The real glamour in AS TIME GOES BY IN SHANGHAI belongs to the interior scenes of the old dance hall where hundreds of elderly jazz enthusiasts effortlessly swing under colorful illumination, totally immersed in their unwaning musical nostalgia.
As the city harbors both Western ideas and Chinese philosophies, latest trends and ancient traditions, the film about Chinese elderly jazz musicians inevitably highlights any possible cultural conflicts. They caution each other that “people look down upon us in the jazz community.” The eloquent saxophonist describes the band’s music style as an inferior foreign species incomparable to its Western root——actually, the way they practice is not much different from the amateur Chinese opera musicians in Chinatown. Besides the West-East hierarchy, these old guys are also intimidated by the highly westernized, young Chinese jazz performers. While joking that “a young thing always makes trouble,” the band needs to find a female vocal for their international debut. A sultry young jazz singer who performs in an interracial band mainly for white audiences in Shanghai thus strides into this old clique. She surprises the band with the digital notes on her phone, and teases “if I used your style to perform, no one would come to see the show.” Yet what makes these old musicians’ struggle for survival and self-esteem so remarkable is how they resist imposed stereotypes. During the interview with a dutch journalist curious about the dangers of playing jazz music in the communistic China, one band member immediately points out that “you don’t know much about the country.” In another confrontation with the new jazz scenario in Shanghai, Mr. Gaulke’s camera mischievously lingers on Old Bao’s face. He is absorbing the avant-garde hairpiece of the singer, her world-traveling experience that outshines his offer for her to join the band’s trip to Rotterdam, and anything else in her modern rendition of one of China’s oldest jazz songs the band plays. Confused, amused and calm, the old musician responds to the new knowledge that enriches and challenges his and his bandmates’ passion.
This is also one of the moments you wish for deeper connections with the subjects. As the clarinetist poetically puts, “it’s better to look forward instead of looking back,” the film provides few archival materials to bring the viewer back to the past. One might accept this tactic of downplaying historical richness (though I don’t see why), but it remains difficult to understand for what reasons most band members are identified as “Old X” in the film (is Mr. Gaulke encouraging us to remember these elders as an ensemble composed of unrecognizable individuals?). With no depictions of colorful family narratives or other activities besides performing jazz and talking about jazz, the elderly musicians seem to pursue their passion simply for the passion’s sake, and AS TIME GOES BY IN SHANGHAI thus lacks the vitality and variations in last year’s PING PONG (Huge Hartford’s event-oriented documentary that features eight elderly players rising to the World Over 80s Table Tennis Championships in Inner Mongolia) or the contemplative and introspective weight in Lina Yang’s OLD MEN (an intimate ethnographic portrait of elderly retirees who gather every day at a curbside in Beijing). When the hospitalized Old Sun confesses his regret of not taking the plane with his lover to Taiwan over 60 years ago, the viewer sorrows for losing the opportunity of joining these Peace Old Jazz Boys on their voyage to the moon, back and forth.
(The film was screened on this Saturday during the 2013 Margaret Mead Film Festival at the American Museum of Natural History.)
Bing Wang recently graduated from New York University, where he was jointly awarded an M.A. in Cinema Studies at Tisch and a Certificate in Culture and Media from the Department of Anthropology. Passionate about video advocacy for underprivileged communities, Bing has created films about a troupe of elderly immigrant opera divas in Chinatown and videos about LGBTQ youth and students of color who are targeted by harsh school disciplines. To him, writing about film is a form of relaxation, a unique approach to ponder, decipher and learn from various visual tactics.