Wuxia: An Aesthetic of Legend

 

The Chinese wuxia film, though relatively unknown at least in name to many Western audiences, is comparable to various other cinematic genres such as the American and Italian Western, the Japanese Samurai film, or even the American gangster film through its representation of morally superior characters or anti heroes who battle violent baddies to defend their individual or universal code of honor or that of others. While these genres share shades of stylistic and narrative similarities, what makes wuxia films stand out is that they feel tonally and aesthetically ancient, an aura that wonderfully captures the time when these types of tales were born. The word ‘wuxia’ can be translated to mean martial chivalry, or martial heroes. Wuxia comes from oral storytelling dating back to ancient China. They were fantastical tales of chivalrous heroes whose expertise in sword fighting and martial arts allow them to defy the very laws of nature. And while plots of extraordinary men and women fighting off evil is something to be seen across nearly all genres in cinema, or any other medium for that matter, the feeling that this genre has existed for more than 2,000 years in other formats is somehow, seemingly magically, translated to cinema. What the greatest wuxia films do is capture an aesthetic of legend that gives them an effect that makes them feel as old and mysterious as time itself, not simply through scores, sets, and costumes, but through the language of cinema they are shot and edited in. Needless to say it is one of the most visually captivating and awe inspiring genres ever brought to the silver screen.

Wuxia films have existed since the 1920s, but it was not until the 1960s when King Hu reimagined the genre that it really took flight. Chinese film history has suffered the same blows as the Chinese people themselves in the 21st and 22nd Centuries. The Second World War followed by the Chinese Civil War and the subsequent Chinese Communist Party that continue to govern today have had drastic impacts on who can make films and what they can be about. During the Cultural Revolution it was impossible to make films that did not coincide with the communist ideology, and the singular, individualistic, lone swordsman hero certainly did not. Subsequently, the revolution of the martial arts genre that took place in the 1960s was realized in neighboring Hong Kong and Taiwan. The two most emblematic directors of the period were Chang Cheh and King Hu who both began their careers in the Shaw Brothers studio in Hong Kong. While both are credited for reviving the genre, their filmmaking styles could not be more different. Chang’s films are ultraviolet tales of revenge and bloodshed, while King’s are more aesthetically experimental, often feature female protagonists, and offer remarkable landscapes and fight scenes choreographed like dance sequences.

Chang Cheh’s breakout film was the box office smash One-Armed Swordsman about an honorable young man, Fang, who is taken in by a martial arts master, Qi, when his father saves the old swordsman’s life. Orphaned and from a different class, Fang is ostracized by his classmates despite the fact, or perhaps because his skills greatly surpass their own. In a duel between his master’s own daughter and two other students Fang’s arm is cut off, turning him into our titular hero. Badly injured, he runs away and happens to fall off a bridge only to land on a boat that will take him to a beautiful young girl in the countryside. At first deeply ashamed of his condition, Fang eventually learns to overcome it and even uses it to his advantage. While Fang is training himself to fight and live without one of his limbs, a rival master, Long Armed Devil (whose name cleverly sets up the ultimate underdog story of the one-armed beating the long armed), is planning to kill Fang’s own beloved master and eliminate all his disciples, thanks to a new weapon specially designed to lock on the the special swords used by master Qi and his followers. Fang becomes the last hope for his master and his school and must choose between rescuing them, or staying to live a quiet life with his lover in the countryside.

The film is an entertaining martial arts romp that creates a character that would go on to become one of the most classic and well known in Asian cinema history. The characters are original one dimensional creations and the dialogue has a fun B-movie quality to it. Jimmy Wang as Fang became one of the biggest stars of the time due to his muscular, stone faced representation of the disabled hero and went on to feature in innumerable sequels. The hateful villains and the bloody action keeps the audience involved and rooting for the unfairly murdered heroes, even if scenes of their swords being locked before they are stabbed become incredibly repetitive. The over the top acting and melodramatic love interest also wear a bit on one's patience, but they are all elements that make it the wronged hero story arced, blood spilling, hammy dialogued cult action film it is. It is a film that Tarantino obviously admired and emulated, especially in his Kill Bill films which certainly take inspiration more from the Chang brand of wuxia than that of King’s.

Like Kill Bill, One-Armed Swordsman is good popcorn chomping escapist entertainment, yet both Tarantino and Chang fail in comparison to the mastery of King Hu, whose filmography stands alongside the greatest of 1960s and 1970s international filmmakers. While on the surface King’s films may feel like nothing more than fist punching, sword swinging martial arts period pieces, his revolutionary editing and filmmaking technique paired with unparalleled set pieces and action choreography make him one of the greatest genre directors of all time. One of the most immediate differences one notices when watching One-Armed Swordsman and King’s first film, Come Drink with Me, is that while Chang filmed in a studio lot, King chose to shoot the majority of his scenes on location, and his use of natural landscapes only become more important as his career continues.

Come Drink with Me is a banging start to a wuxia filmography beyond compare. While Chang’s heroes would tend to be mascule, macho types, King preferred female heroines, as is the case here with Golden Swallow played by wuxia legend, Cheng Pei-pei. King also had a complex way of writing his stories. While Chang’s films were straight forwards plots of revenge, in Come Drink with Me, King places the story of Golden Swallow out to save her abducted brother from bandits at the center of what becomes an altogether bigger drama of two ‘brothers,’ one a secretive man who saves Golden Swallow’s life, the other the leader of the bandits who does not appear until the end of the film. Each men seeks the possession of the bamboo staff left by their murdered master. One would think the search for the bamboo staff would be the plot's primary focus, but King instead dedicates the majority of the film to his female lead and her battle with the bandits led by the deliciously evil, white faced and robed Jade Tiger. Other characters like the Smiling Tiger and Drunken Cat make colorful presences that add flavor to the often faceless heroes and henchmen.

In Come Drink with Me we also get our first look at King’s battle sequences, something he would go on to perfect in his following films. While the swordplay in One-Armed Swordsman was better choreographed than the average Western action film, here King presents us with intricate dances to the death, carefully planned and crafted scenes captured by King’s camera which is as much a bailarin as any of the actors, not only filming the heroes and villains’ punching arms, kicking legs and whooshing swords, but giving its own blows as well thanks to King’s quick, kung fu-like editing. Based on an opera, King’s technical expertise mixed with the ancient wuxia genre and its opera inspiration give the film a deeper emotional power that is not present in Chang’s films.

King’s second film, Dragon Gate Inn, is possibly his most purely entertaining feature. A film that feels like a western set in China, King brings the same elements he gave us in Come Drink with Me to the table and improves on them. In a quick prolog sequence the exploits of an evil eunuch leader who wants to execute the entire family of an already executed general to avoid any attempts at revenge is quickly explained. Yet the politics behind the plot are better understood by showing instead of telling, as the good guys and the bad guys are immediately apparent based on how King introduces us to each of them. The entirety of the film that follows then takes place in an inn on top of a mountain with a landscape that both has epic mountains in the background and a desert-like atmosphere in the foreground, sparsely populated by trees and shrubs. 

However, the majority of the first half of the film is set inside the inn itself, an enormous, expertly designed set where each set of characters arrives in turn: first the bandits, followed by a martial arts expert, followed by two cousins of the general himself. Each is set out to either kill or protect the exiled children while trying to hide their intentions from the other guests as long as they can. The inn, exchanged for a saloon seems set up for a Western remake, similar to Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. Tarantino certainly owes a lot to King's tense interior scenes here, characterized by the moment the martial arts master Hsiao enters the bandit-ridden inn. Yet, again, instead of overloading us with dialogue, King uses the camera to say more than anything a script could. Hsiao is played with an irresistible coolness by King’s muse Shih Chun, whose strong, unmoved presence silently overtakes every corner in the inn only for refusing to leave and ordering wine. Dressed in a white robe, his stark black hair tied back in a tight bun by a long white ribbon, Shih’s expressive dark eyes and sarcastic smile are shot in close up in reaction shots as the bandits try to bully and poison him. Close ups of the characters faces are suddenly abandoned for long shots in deep focus of elegant, quick moving kung fu, and quick extreme close ups of hands and feet colliding as Hsiao is eventually forced to fend off a couple of the goons when they fail to poison him. Like Leone, King is an expert in storyboarding his films before they are shot and building tension through editing by juxtapositioning close ups and long shots, and long takes and short takes to emit the ultimate effect possible. King is in no hurry, and he lets the steaming tension build within the inn to a boiling point before the big action set pieces take place. This tension continues when two siblings arrive at the inn as well, a hot headed brother and his wiser sister, the strong woman of the film that is never absent in King’s work.

Here many King’s action scene tropes become even more apparent and are masterfully executed, such as the tracking shots of fast running feet, the hidden trampolines used so the actors make super human jumps, and shots of the most powerful martial arts experts zipping through the trees. The fight sequences get bigger and bigger as the film goes on, and it ends with the epic battle between all our protagonists, the innkeeper, Hsiao, and the siblings, against the bleach blond, despicable eunuch himself. In this final scene, something extraordinary happens, the eunuch, moving faster than light itself it would seem, is shot moving through space using jump cuts and quick pans to demonstrate the speed of his ability. As the eunuch tries to escape he jumps, the camera pans up to a tree to find the villain magically there, then quickly to another, then another, until he finally stops in another place entirely in the matter of less than 3 seconds. The impressiveness and power of his ability is heightened by the revolutionary use of editing and camerawork. While we are often given long takes of several seconds to be able to take in the powerful beauty of the fight choreography, in sudden moments King inserts several rapid speed shots that are maybe less than one second to demonstrate a dramatic point in the action in a visually shocking way.

After Dragon Gate Inn, King went on to direct what would be his masterpiece, A Touch of Zen, the first Chinese-language film to win an award at the Cannes film festival. At first it was first imagined to be two films, each telling half of the story, but was later combined into one. After the successes of Come Drink with Me and Dragon Gate Inn, A Touch of Zen, clocking in at more than 3 hours, is more epic, demanding, and ambitious in every way, and perhaps for this reason, was actually a box office disappointment upon release. Like in Come Drink with Me, King begins the film with a protagonist who will not be the center of the action for the entirety of the story. The first half of the film is dominated by an unambitious artist, Gu, again played by Shih, this time portraying the polar opposite of his previous character. Gu lives with his mother in a rundown area of an isolated village in the mountains and is constantly berated by her in comedic scenes for his laziness and for not having a wife. It is through him that we learn that government officials are looking on behalf of another evil eunuch for a fugitive they are ordered to execute. This time the fugitive is Yang, a beautiful woman who specializes in martial arts and the character who will eventually take over as our main protagonist.

Yang is played by another of Kings’ muses, Han Ying-jie, whose first role as an actor was a minor one in Dragon Gate Inn, and who would go on to be the main protagonist in many of his films to come. Yang is an incredible protagonist for several reasons. The first, now a recurring characteristic in King’s work, are her masterful martial arts abilities, here being the real protagonist whereas the other men are certainly supporting characters to her story. The only character that can compete with her for screen time is Gu, a man completely physically inept at protecting himself. The second reason is for Yang’s sexual freedom. She decides to have a relationship with Gu, perhaps out of pity to give him an heir so his mother’s name will not die, or because she really does sexually want or love him, or for any combination of all three possibilities. But her decision to overcome or directly ignore, through necessity or choice, the social and sexual written and unwritten laws for women in such a period make her truly fascinating and unique.

The film is filled with incredible scenes and set pieces, but one of the most unforgettable takes place after Gu plans to booby trap the supposedly haunted house where Yang is staying to protect her from the soldiers that have come to kill her. The plan is a great success and results in the death of dozens if not hundreds of soldiers. The scene begins after the massacre with Gu atop a tower looking down upon his destructive creations, laughing joyfully yet maniacally. As he descends the staircase victoriously cackling the camera follows him cutting, panning, and tracking in one gorgeously mysterious take after another as the bright sun, gray stone, yellow reeds, and wispy fog accompany him. As he moves down the stairs we witness the artificial, theatrical human size forms, the catapults, and bells that were manipulated to scare and kill the soldiers. It is not until Gu enters the decrepit building, a beaming smile still on his face, the camera looking up at him from a low angle, that he accidentally steps on a dead man and the brutal reality of his actions becomes clear to him. The soundtrack kicks in with disturbing percussion and the editing speeds up to quick cuts of dead, bloody bodies piled on each other. Gu stumbles out of the house and comes across a group of sober faced monks who have come to bury the dead. It is in this moment, when Gu was feeling more successful and useful than he probably had in his entire life, that he realizes the destruction he has caused, and that the only relief to his horrified depression, Yang, has abandoned the village, and him, to live in a monastery. 

The other scene that one cannot fail to mention when writing about A Touch of Zen is the bamboo forest fight, a sequence shot over the course of 25 days. It is one of the most famous action scenes of all time, and an influence for the subsequent bamboo fights in modern wuxia classics Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The House of Flying Daggers. Here Yang and another general fight against the first half of the film’s villain, Men Da, and two of his men, all three dressed in blood red coats. While in the modern wuxia films, thanks to digital technology and wires the actors do not simply jump and cut through space, but fly, in the 1960s and 70s King had to use choreography, acrobatics, and editing to give this supernatural fighting effect. The camera tracks and pans through the beautiful green, crowded bamboo forest in long shots so the audience can absorb the pleasure of the bamboo ballet, and then close ups and quick cuts are used to demonstrate the fighters agility as they jump from place to place, flip through the air, and kick themselves against bamboo sticks to climb the trees. The beauty of the battle, from the location, to the perfect composition of shots concludes its last 40 seconds with more than 25 cuts as Yang, jumps from one of the guards, does two flips, jumps across a couple trees and then dives downward before landing, doing another flip, and slaying the guard as she lands again all while the general also defeats his own man. It is amazing the awesome control over montage that King possesses, perfectly communicating these superhero actions with film and a pair of scissors in such an elegant and stunning way unequaled by action films of his time or our own. And what is most incredible, is that while it is the most famous action scene, it may not even be the film’s best, as it concludes with another face off between Yang and buddhist monks against another of the eunuch’s cronies, this time played by Han Ying-jie, the film’s choreographer himself.

The operatic action comes to an end with the defeat of our aforementioned cinematographer by the monks who possess a holy spiritual power that elevates their martial arts beyond even the superhuman capabilities of the other characters. Being pretty ignorant of Chinese buddhism and Asian religions in general, the ending, and King’s filmography as a whole certainly have a spiritual element to them that goes over my head. All I know is that the spiritual message can be felt thanks to King’s trippy ending where the villain, unable to grasp the power he faces, falls into a sort of trance as the screen’s color goes crazy, and a silhouette of the monk Abbot  shot from a low angle becomes a symbol dominating symbol of an overpowering figure directly behind whom the sun shines, giving him a heavenly essence. This image is repeated several times in King’s filmography, and the figure of the reclusive monk who only hesitatingly uses his power when forced to is one that is common throughout the genre. 

Two of King’s later works also worth checking out are 1979’s Raining in the Mountain and Legend of the Mountain. Both are tied to an impossibly beautiful, dream-like monastery set in the mountains. Raining in the Mountain mixes the wuxia genre with a heist film as a wealthy man and a general seek to steal a priceless scole when invited to the monastery to help the abbot choose his predecessor. Here White Fox, Feng, is our strong female character as the treacherous thief who attempts to outwit her competitors and the monks guarding the scroll. Legend of the Mountain is a film where Shih once again plays a dorky academic type who goes to the same monastery where he is given the task of translating a text of spells in another village. There he is enchanted by a witch, Feng, yet again, who tricks him into marrying her so she can steal the translation once it is completed. While there are kung fu battles, magic is the main weapon used in this film through the brilliant use of drums and other percussion instead of wands or staffs, and colored smoke that comes out of the magicians’ hands like lighting from a Sith Lord in Star Wars. King, of course, is up to the task both at making a heist film as exciting as Oceans 11, and a magical film with fight scenes more interesting that those captured with all the digital technology of a Harry Potter film.

After the success of directors like King and Chang, the wuxia genre would go into a hiatus at least as far as quality and quantity were concerned. That is, until 2000 when it was resurrected in spectacular fashion by the genre jumping Taiwanese auteur Ang Lee. Lee’s film would go on to be an enormous success, especially in the West, where it was nominated for 10 Academy Awards and won 4. The film stars Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh, actors already familiar to Western audiences, and newcomer Zhang Ziyi, who would go on to be almost as famous in the West as in her native China. The film features incredible action set pieces that were impossible to imagine in the time of Chang and King, and combines the carefully choreographed kung fu with Matrix-like special effects like slow motion and flying. The film also adds two heartbreaking love stories into the mix, something unseen in King’s films, and secondary in Chang’s. The unrequited love or impossible love experienced by the two couples in the film is as beautiful as the fight sequences, spectacular cinematography, and on location settings. Though criticized in China for pandering to a Western audience, and for some of the actors' poor Mandarin accents, the film is a beautiful homage to the genre and reinvigorated, or, in many cases, introduced it to international audiences.

The amazing costumes, sets, score, and cinematography make it one of the most impressive period pieces of the millennium, and the fighter’s new found ability not only to jump impossible lengths, but to hover through space is truly breathtaking. Lee’s bamboo forest fight takes place not in the forest, but on top of it as Show and Zhang drift between the tops of the flush green trees to clash swords. The other action sequences are equally impressive and Lee keeps the tradition of strong female protagonists going with great roles for both Zhang and Yeoh. The film’s feminism goes even further to directly criticize the role of women in Chinese society, and like Yang in A Touch of Zen, Zhang has an affair outside of marriage, though hers is much more romantic and sensual with the dreamy desert bandit Chang Chen. To top it all off, the film even features a female villain, the Jade Fox played by the Golden Swallow herself, Cheng Pei-pei.

Lee only started off the new wave of wuxia, and Zhang Yimou would take the romanticism of the genre to even more towering levels. In 2002 he went on to make what may be the most magnificently beautiful wuxia film, or film of any genre for that matter, of all time, Hero. Zhang recruited internationally renowned kung fu star Jet Li, and new international darling Zhang Ziyi along with Wong Kar Wai regulars Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung to create a Rashomon style film that is almost wall to wall fight scenes. Enlisting Wong’s regular Australian cinematography Christopher Doyle to complete the team, Zhang made one of the most exquisitely designed films of all time, the editing, choreography, sets, performances, score, costumes, and locations are all picture perfect. The fight sequences are utterly mind meltingly sublime as we start off with a bang in a one on one battle in the rain, then change to a blood red decored and costumed school that gets showered in a storm of black arrows, later two women have a passionate duel over a dead lover, dressed in ravishing red robes, battling in a shower of golden fall leaves, after two men skip over an impossibly still blue lake, their feet and the tips of their swords making the only ripples visible over the tranquil space, then a couple make an assault on the emperor’s palace through willowy, swaying green banners that hang from a sky high ceiling, and finally, an army of extras in black drab take on Jet Li who must decide whether or not he will complete his assassination attack on the emperor or not. What a masterpiece of visual delight Zhang concocted for us. 

Unfortunately, the films ‘One China’ political message overshadows its beauty. It is an incredibly unfortunate decision, if there was even an option to make a decision in the first place, especially in a country where the foundations for wuxia were only made possible by Taiwan and Hong Kong’s ability to make films outside the control of mainland China. It is proof once again, of China’s overreaching obsession with only making films that serve its own interests. 

But Zhang would follow up Hero with what is probably the best film of the modern wuxia era, House of Flying Daggers, thankfully devoid of the same looming political issues. It features the impeccable color design of Hero with the universal emotional power of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, with the superb kung fu sequences of both of them. It also features a bamboo forest scene, here set inside the forest again, but the green color of the bamboo is accentuated to make it a fantastical bright vibrant green. Again, the digital effects, and new technology make the fight sequence even more epic that anything King could have imagined in his day as the bamboo trees are not simply cut down as they are in his film, but flung like lances and used as bars to make a bamboo cage. Like in Hero, Zhang’s panache for set design and location is unmatchable as the film starts with a richly detailed, pastel colored brothel in one of the most impressively detailed sets of all time, and ends in a battle between the three protagonists, trapped in a love triangle, the female played again by the ever present Zhang Ziyi, and the men by Hong Kong crime superstar Andy Lau and another Wong Kar Wai regular, pretty boy Takeshi Kaneshiro. In the final battle, set in a clearing, the entire landscape suddenly turns to snow, as if the lovers quarrel didn’t simply take place over the short sequence we see in the film, but as if they were in an eternal struggle, their emotions indomitable even after death.

Zhang and Lee’s tributes to the genre rank among the most beautiful films ever made, and are fine nods to the genius of King Hu, the man who reinvented wuxia as Leone did with the Western. The cinematic language invented by King transcends even the power and money behind the digital production of today, and I can only hope that one day a local cinema decides to do a film series of them on the biggest screen possible. Unfortunately, since House of Flying Daggers release in 2004 no film has been able to equal the international successes of these three modern classics. As almost 20 years have passed, let's hope the next movement is close at hand to once again transmit us the aesthetic of ancient legend. Because if there is anything the films by these 4 directing greats have shown us, it is that no matter how old the stories of the wuxia genre may be, and no matter how supposedly similar they may seem to other cinematic genres, there truly is nothing like them.