— King Hu (1931-1997) did not invent the wuxia; he ‘simply’ — that feels dismissive; I don’t mean it to be — made it purr. But that wasn’t everything; because Hu pulled apart the mechanism — clattering swords, opulent Ming costumery, secret identities — of an already quite staid and predictable format; throwing away all the junk instrumentation. What remained, by the time he’d left Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers studio (in 1966) and set up shop in Taiwan — aided by the acting talents of Hsu Feng and Shi Chun (et al) — was a much stranger/more expansive-pulsating entity. He made the wuxia dance. But he also made it smile — and then (kind of) disappear. Farewell.
— Xia nu (A Touch of Zen, 1971) had its 4k restoration in 2016; slivers of shimmering glass that elbow through pre-restored muck. This film lurches, shaking its hands; each denouement — a fight in a bamboo grove (branches collapsing mere inches from the lens); a nightly showdown at a ‘haunted’ fort (shadow swallowing light — flickering); a desperate combat in a ravine of pale, chalk-white stone (pursuant soldiers appearing in deep focus as Hu’s protagonists press themselves into nearby rock) — being swallowed by one that is bigger and more impressionistic, more excessive. Hu cuts — bringing the dexterous finesse of wuxia to the editing table; slicing Dutch angles (Hsu Feng’s face framed against blue sky) to hands-gripping-weapons to sunlight sparkling on water to folds of cloth billowing in slow motion. He’s said this already, the first few minutes of the film; smoke-billowing spiderwebs and jutting legs and pincers. Ouyang Nian (played by the severe Tian Peng) languishes, wound-stricken, in a heavy wooden chair; earlier, Gu (Shih Chun) smiles awkwardly over his canvas; he — without realizing it — is painting Nian’s death-portrait. In Dragon Inn (1967), Shih Chun — playing a master swordsman this time – will coyly grin. Everything is wrapped in silk; a knife passes through it.
— The subjectivity of Hu’s camera is suddenly surprising; the kind of thing you expect from Ida Lupino; just as the scenography gives you a slip of Parajanov — golden blood flowing from the wound of the stabbed abbot, Hui-yuan (played by the imperious Roy Chiao) — a yawning expanse of golden desert, the sun vibrating as if it will explode. Explains why Ming-liang chose Hu — and Dragon Inn — for his Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2000), a departure-returning from the unwatched ghost-party cinema of the grandfathers (all that simmering falling rain, leadenly erotic glances, empty chairs). Hu signified something more optimistic and more briskly confident of cinema, but he was far from a rabbit-in-headlights. Hu knew that film is magic-happening; that through light and its shadowing-opposite-darkness the ‘real’ world is made and unmade. In Xia nu, Gu — an artist (easy alter-avatar for Hu himself) — becomes the most adept of military tacticians; using trickery (bells on strings, stuffed-body mannequins, shadow, fire) to terrify an army into screaming pacification (and their deaths). Hu knew what cinema was capable of; Tsai Ming-liang merely understood — swinging incense above its grave — what it once was, of what it could no longer be. I’ve always felt that Goodbye, Dragon Inn was a kind of sorrowful acknowledgement, by Ming-liang, that Xia nu had failed at the box office, that Hu had never quite slotted in.
— Really, there’s not a landscape or a temple courtyard that Hu doesn’t know precisely how to frame. His actors fight like ballerinas (actually, Cheng Pei-pei was a ballerina — it’s why he cast her), and blood judiciously spurts like hot poster paint (what better reminder of our mortality; that the vessel we inhabit is merely flesh). For Stephen Teo, who wrote the first treatise on Xia nu – in 2006 —, Hu was engaged in making film maudit, “ambivalent and idiosyncratic works” that balletically leap through the macho-fighty context of the wuxia ‘proper’: giving us sexual ambiguity, subversive political commentary, digressive narratology, psychic disjunction — things that felt both spontaneous and exactingly planned. This isn’t just flights and fights of fancy; Hu encroaches on the “transcendental” — but he remains silly with it. Hu wants you to have a good time. Throughout, Hu teases out the contradictions between gravity-defying belletrism and the confining-limitations of the physical world; his fighters must fight somewhere, even if they — mostly — play the forest, the ravine, the mountain’s path like an instrument. Branches still snap; footing can be lost; walls must be scaled. I think of Manny Farber’s explication of the “moments of peripheral distraction, bemusement, fretfulness, mere flickering of sceptical interest” that go beyond a merely ‘competent’ performance. With Hu, there’s almost always a slyly subtle moment of: the fuck? It’s the trampolines he isn’t bouncing.
— Looked at as a (glistening, snappy) whole, there’s not as much violence as you might think; the wuxia isn’t what the kung fu film would become; more drunkenly immersed in the balletics of violence — and in contemporaneity; after all, the kung fu film (of Bruce Lee) was often weaponless (with fists and feet), set in the modern era; reflecting a period of intellectual-spiritual dissolution and drift. In comparison, the wuxia is positively steeped in ideas of honour, meditation, spiritualism. Raining in the Mountain’s biggest coup of a convict-turned-abbot (very Dostoevskian, in its way) burning the ‘priceless’ scroll of Tripitaka, proving that ideas are more powerful than their material vessels. The kung fu movie doesn’t trade in such unsubtle subtleties; nor does it – like the wuxia, and specifically Hu’s wuxia — owe so much to classical painting and the Peking opera, both of which he adored.
— Ok, what about violence? When it happens — say, in Raining in the Mountain — it’s slow, sometimes spasmodic; but always gentle, touchless. Each movement is unwound like a billowing ribbon; allowed to unfold and unfurl like a fabric mechanism. This is something Hu had to learn: in 1966 he — under the aegis of the Shaw Brothers — was more frenetic, more beholden to the idea of the wuxia; and yet, there’s always a sense of defamiliarization – his actors seeming to pause, glance, and then wound-twist-slice-shove; opponents opening their bodies to the blow that will certainly come. Yet, he always loved to romp with xia tropes; the shock-reveal of a drunk (‘drunken cat’, played by the impish Yueh Hua), or an old, weary abbot (played by Wu Chia-Hsiang) as being shit-hot wuxia masters. Sometimes, Hu deploys this jagged little editing technique to draw attention to the explosiveness of the action; Hsu Feng — in A Touch of Zen — hurls a handful of blades toward her assailant; the frame lurches ahead to reveal the shining blades arrayed in a pillar or rotten wood. When Gu sleeps with Yang, the romance is soft and hypnagogic and rich; bringing to mind the soft focus shimmering of Mamoulian. Hu wasn’t all fight-fight-fight — his wuxia resides elsewhere.
— By an aside, Raining in the Mountain (1979) is not ‘properly’ considered a wuxia; though it draws deeply from the same cup; it’s still Hu. Unlike, alike. For Hu, there is much less death; more intrigue, double-crossing, red-herrings; it’s rare for a sword to penetrate flesh; instead, it slashes, teases, trails — his favoured device being the interlocking glance of two opponents who, having leapt across each other's path, rub a finger over their wounds, raise an eyebrow, and taste their own blood. They’re enjoying what they’re doing; death is an impossible figuration; blood is speculative — death leaks through. It’s suddenly there.
— For Hu, each Dutch angle brings with it a little smiling gasp; he’s so good at this, you think — and he makes Kurosawa seem, at times, a little screwball — even messy. David Pendleton for the Harvard Film Archive: how he “toned down the genre’s melodrama [and magic] in favour of a sober stoicism”. That doesn’t make it glacial — or emotionless. It became more expressive, subtler (and, in this way, more like Kurosawa — they were both ‘warrior monks’). The frame is all important, and the blocking — and movements — of his characters; using steep framing to accentuate perilous ascents while deploying engulfing-wide frames to heighten the sense of risk as his thieves or fighters steal their way through temple compounds. With Raining in the Mountain, he also lingers — a la Bresson — on aesthetically composed still lifes of votive and ritual objects to generate a contemplative relationship toward his mise-en-scene. Come Drink With Me was looser, more anarchic; by the late 1970s he’d boiled the wuxia down to its essence. We spend a lot of time looking at faces; gleaning their emotions. Regardless of how many actors are on screen, Hu never allows us to lose track of them as a tension-shifting structure — they never dissolve into an “inchoate mass of Goya-like extras whose swarmings and mouthings are composed with naive pictorialism” (he’s talking — interestingly — about Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961). No figure — no matter how much of a ‘nameless’ grunt — is allowed to jibber or liquefy. Everything is held in tension.
— Right, Hu bounced so Ang Lee could fly; he knew the value of a well-placed trampoline, a wire, a flutter of billowing fabric to sell the ‘lie’ of his fighters’ flight as they soar through the sky. But, unlike Lee, he never really seems to defy physics — the bounce-wire happens almost always in the middle ground, at the edge of the frame, implying that the impossible is happening always-already somewhere else; we’re running to keep up, we’re too slow, too inelegant – and we’re not witnessing magic; Hu says: this is a film — now watch this.
— Funny that Hu wasn’t himself a Buddhist; claiming that his interest in such meditative self-effacement was “the flavour of an idea” — a golden thread that sews his scenes together with something more powerful and mysterious than mere mastery (his greatest heroes are more than simply brave — they bear something else). In Xia nu, the final crescendo — when it comes – trembles and explodes; quick-cut flashes, expressionistic textures, the play of light, inverted stock, colour negatives, shimmering silhouettes. Like Teo says, “Hu sought to undercut our expectations of wuxia heroics even as he indulged mightily in the form of the genre”; escaping the question of heroics, good vs. evil; widening the aperture toward metaphysical expressions of transcendence. In 1997, he bounced right out of shot.
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