Wuxia Pian
By Mark Pollard
Continued from Part One.
New Wave
Around 1979, the Hong Kong film industry began experiencing an influx of talent, often trained and educated in the West and possessing a drive towards creating higher quality productions, more meaningful stories and more creative and artful presentations of their work. Two filmmakers who had an impact on wuxia pian were Tsui Hark and to a much lesser degree Patrick Tam.
After a brief stint in television, Tsui's first feature film was Butterfly Murders (1979), a very different take on the wuxia pian. Tsui mixed in elements of Hitchcockian suspense and the narrative of a mere observer of the jiang hu to tell the story of a clan's downfall and the conflict that erupts at its end. In 1980, Tam directed The Sword, a visually stunning and tragic story starring non-martial arts actor Adam Cheng as an ambitious swordsman struggling with the desire for recognition in the martial world and the painful consequences it brings. In contrast to the majority of wuxia pian at Shaw Brothers at the time, this film had a more Western aesthetic in its melancholic tone and artful visual presentation. In many ways, it was a continuation of the illustrative wuxia filmmaking begun by King Hu and revitalized by Ang Lee in 2000.
Tsui Hark's emphasis was ultimately on more commercial aspects of wuxia, specifically the advancement of its action choreography and special effects. With the help of Hollywood effects specialists and lead action director Corey Yuen, he directed Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1981), a rich fantasy epic based on Huanzhu Louzhu's 50-volume Swordsmen of the Sichuan Mountains. Shaw Brothers made attempts to incorporate some New Wave elements into their latter wuxia pian, like Secret Service of the Imperial Court (1984) and Journey of the Doomed (1985), but it was too little, too late.
The New Wave movement in wuxia filmmaking came near the end of a cycle where theaters had become oversaturated with kung fu masters and heroic swordsmen. Intense overseas demand for kung fu and swordplay created a thriving industry where studio and independent moviemakers in Hong Kong and Taiwan were pumping out hundreds of genre movies. Most of them were cheaply produced and engineered for quick and disposable consumption. Tired of this, audiences turned to other genres.
The New Wave had come too late for Shaw Brothers and many independent filmmakers, but Tsui Hark adapted to the industry's commercial interests and led the wuxia and kung fu genre to a brief, but remarkable comeback in 1990 when he released Swordsman. King Hu's influence on the look of the film was clear, but the outrageously kinetic wirework owed its existence to another talent.
Wirework Masters and the '90s Boom
Today, the image of a swordsman lightly hovering on the thin branch of a bamboo tree or skipping over the surface of a lake is part and parcel with the wuxia genre. These illusions are created by using wires and harnesses to hoist the actors about on pulleys operated by crewmen off screen. Computers are now used in postproduction to erase any traces of the wires. This wirework has been used in wuxia filmmaking since the silent era, but only to a limited degree until the 1980s.
Previously, its use was crude at best and had to be applied sparingly, not only to hide the wires from the audience as best as possible, but also to keep the actors from looking like they weren't in control of their own movements. Wirework was more often supplemented or replaced by trampolines, reverse playback and other simple tricks to make the swordsmen and women appear to effortlessly perform superhuman feats like leaping over walls.
In Shaw Brothers' Return of the One-Armed Swordsman (1969), an early example of wirework can be seen briefly as Jimmy Wang Yu spins unnaturally through a bamboo forest while he chops wildly at sharpened stalks to rain down a shower of death upon his enemies. Compare this with the extended fight scene in House of Flying Daggers (2004) where Zhang Ziyi elegantly balances between two bamboo stalks high up from the ground while wielding a third in her hands and the influence is obvious. The man responsible for this more recent example was Tony Ching Siu-tung, the leading force in swordplay action of post-New Wave wuxia.
Tony Ching Siu-tung grew up living on the studio lot, while also receiving an education in Peking opera. Both of these factors had a significant impact on his development as a filmmaker. Ching started out working at Shaw Brothers, occasionally with his father. He got his first break as a wuxia action director on The Sentimental Swordsman (1979). But he didn't begin showing his true potential until he left the studio to choreograph the action in a handful of independent wuxia pian, including Patrick Tam's The Sword. Ching had his directorial debut with Duel to the Death (1983), a highly kinetic work that made significant use of advanced wirework and editing.
Duel to the Death
Thereafter, Ching hooked up with Tsui Hark and began a successful collaboration that contributed greatly to Hong Kong's explosive action movie output of the early 1990s. Almost all of the top wuxia pian released from 1990 to 1995 were choreographed and/or directed by Ching. Highlights include Swordsman II, Dragon Inn (a remake of King Hu's Dragon Gate Inn) and Butterfly Sword.
Other leading action directors were quick to follow Ching's lead. Yuen Wo-ping became the dominant force in a new wire-enhanced kung fu sub-genre with films like Twin Warriors (The Tai Chi Master; 1993) and Iron Monkey (1993). Although not wuxia pian by definition, these movies borrowed heavily from the genre's traditions. Now, even historical-based kung fu heroic characters like Wong Fei-hung and Fong Sai-yuk were performing superhuman feats in a pseudo-jiang hu where Shaolin-trained masters fought against Qing tyranny.
Death in Hong Kong, Rebirth in China
Towards the end of the '90s boom, adventurous filmmakers like Ringo Lam and Wong Kar-wai were just beginning to take the genre into more challenging and technically accomplished directions that harkened back to the ill-fated New Wave movement of the early'80s. Wong applied his art house sensibility to the wuxia pian by directing the non-linear and character-driven Ashes of Time (1994). Blending kung fu and wuxia conventions with a darker motif and high production standards was Ringo Lam's Burning Paradise (1994). With The Blade (1995), Tsui Hark himself entered into this movement by helming a bleak revision of Chang Cheh's One-Armed Swordsman. Yet these films didn't even register long enough to be considered a movement. Fears over the territory's handover to Beijing, interference from triads, and rampant movie piracy further wreaked havoc.
The wuxia pian made a brief comeback in Hong Kong with the introduction of CGI and fresh interest in the genre from manhua (Chinese manga). The Storm Riders (1999), its sequel A Man Called Hero (1999) and The Duel (2000) all featured cutting-edge digital effects to help sell the swordplay action for a new generation. Topping them all off for sheer fantasy effects was Tsui Hark's The Legend of Zu (2001), a remake of his 1981 film that ended up being both a critical and commercial failure.
Crouching Tiger, Flying Daggers
The uncertain fate of the wuxia pian has since rested with the mergence of mainland Chinese and Hong Kong filmmaking, although this trend began in America with a Taiwanese director. Taking his love for the genre and cues from King Hu, Ang Lee and writer James Schamus adapted the forth novel in a wuxia pentalogy by author Wang Dulu into Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Lee had already established himself as an award-winning and critically acclaimed director in Taiwan and Hollywood. Armed with a budget of $15 million (a huge amount by Hong Kong standards), big studio backing on both sides of the Pacific, some of China's most picturesque locales, a stunning score by Tan Dun, and two of Asia's most bankable stars internationally (Michelle Yeoh and Chow Yun-fat), this film couldn't have arrived at a better time. While proving to be a modest hit in China, Crouching Tiger experienced unprecedented, for a foreign-language film, acclaim and commercial success in America. It made an international superstar out of mainland Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi and confirmed what many already knew, that Yuen Wo-ping was a world class action director.
Since then, China has encouraged its top mainland filmmakers Zhang Yimou, He Ping and Chen Kaige to build on this success by creating big budget wuxia pian geared towards international release and award campaigning. Zhang Yimou has so far directed two, Hero (2002) and House of Flying Daggers. Both star a mix of mainland Chinese and Hong Kong actors, and both are choreographed by Ching Siu-tung, whom Zhang worked with previously as an actor in the pseudo-wuxia pian Terracotta Warriors (1989). Like Ang Lee, Zhang follows King Hu's methods in both films by emphasizing visuals, particularly dominate colors and focused internal struggles reinforced and manifested outwardly through the film's dazzling martial arts displays. The quality of these films' stories, which Chinese audiences generally find shallow, is debatable, but it's certain that the quality of wuxia action shown has improved dramatically, even by Ching's early '90s standards.
As with Japan's samurai movies and America's Westerns, China's wuxia genre will likely never be as prolific as it once was. Most production has moved to television where long-running serials provide an ideal venue for adapting novels filled with complex plots and characters not easily fit into the narrow confines of a feature-length film. But as the release of Tsui Hark's Seven Swords (2005) indicates, wuxia pian isn't dead yet. As for the classics, the continuing restoration and re-release of the majority Shaw Brothers' film library, which includes the bulk of Hong Kong's major wuxia pian, insures that they won't be far out of reach or forgotten by fans worldwide.
Seven Swords
Mark Pollard is a film critic and founder of Kung Fu Cinema.
| 
Your cart
