King Hu, 1971
I had a few random thoughts watching this at Lincoln Center last night, so excuse me if this post is a little haphazard.
The first thing that came to mind was a comment made by the professor of a Chinese Cinema class I TA'd this past semester. The last few weeks of the course were devoted to Hong Kong (as opposed to mainland) cinema. The professor mentioned that the main audience for these films were Chinese emigres who were experiencing patriotic nostalgia, or their children who never knew the "real" China. As a result, many of the historical epics were riddled with historical and sartorial inaccuracies and projecting a kind of "Fantasy China." Since Taiwan also had a big Chinese emigre population and this film seems to take place in a fantastical past, I want to know if the phenomenon also took place in Taiwan, and if so how did adhere to or differ from the Hong Kong tradition? The past depicted here seems to be dominated by a spiritual and metaphysical badassness where might and right are elegantly fused together.
Even if you've seen (admittedly in my case, only a few) wuxia flicks (or the Quentin Tarantino films that were so inspired by them) it says something that this one can take your breath away and make you go, "How'd they do that?" While it is true that when our intrepid fighters bounce across terrain like they're on pogo sticks does sometimes feel a little Monty Python, but somehow this adds, not detracts, to the overall effect; the absurd elevated to the sublime.
Watching this one I kept thinking of that scene in Stranger than Paradise where they go see the martial arts movie and you never see the screen but you can tell what it is because of the repetitive fighting sounds. In a similar vein, this film has a particular mechanics and structure: the clanging swords, swooshing breaths, emphatic facial close-ups, sharp intakes of breath. I found the viewing experience (for a honky like me) akin to looking at Asian caligraphy: I can recognize strokes heading in different diections and admire the elegance with which it flows together, but I still haven't figure out what it all means.
Since I have spoken about the three hour movie before, I will just say that this packs in a lot of action, which keeps moving at a fairly nice clip. But even when there's not a lot of slicing and dicing, I was quite content with gorgeous, contemplative shots of grand landscapes. When it comes to epic scale, Hu could easily go toe to toe with David Lean.
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