Book Proposal [EXCERPTS]:

by David Chute

“Making a martial arts film is like opening a door and finding an endless series of doors behind it. There is room for an eternal search.” —Tsui Hark, director, The Blade (1998)

Violent tales of righteous rebel warriors have deep roots in China’s history and folk culture. The first works of fiction about Chinese martial heroes date back to the 3rd century, and the oldest surviving Chinese feature film, made in Shanghai in 1925, is a silent swordplay tale. Like the Western in the US and the samurai drama in Japan, martial arts movies embody a great civilization’s most cherished dreams of heroism. At their best they are fables of idealism and poetic justice whose stylized physical encounters resemble acrobatics and dance.

If that description doesn’t correspond to what you normally think of as a ”kung fu movie,” you are not alone. Most Americans have seen only the dregs of the genre, cropped and dubbed on late-night TV and video, garish B movies in which muscular young Asian men take off their shirts and make high-pitched animal noises before kicking each other in the head. Oldies radio stations still occasionally play Carl Douglas’ 1975 novelty hit “(Everybody Was) Kung Fu Fighting,” and listeners smile knowingly. The challenge facing a critic who hopes to write about these movies in a new way is persuading movie lovers to take a second look, and a fairly long and deep look, at that, at a form of cinema that already seems familiar, that has become a running gag in American pop culture.

The timing for such a project is close to perfect. In the 1990s the cinema of Hong Kong became first a fan cult and then a mainstream phenomenon: John Woo, Jackie Chan, and Jet Li have joined the Hollywood A-list, and the high-velocity Hong Kong visual style has seeped into the Hollywood action film vocabulary, shaping global hits such as M:I-2 and The Matrix. The garish stereotypes left over from the “kung fu craze” of the 1970s have finally been supplanted in many minds by a much more glorious and seductive image: Chow Yun-fat and Zhang Ziyi, focused and solemn, airborne in a forest of bamboo in Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Given the low esteem in which it has been held, outside of a coterie of die-hard fans, it is not surprising that little solid information is available in English about this 2000-year-old form of swashbuckling entertainment. As digitally restored subtitled prints of some of the genre’s legendary classics roll into US movie theaters this year, for the first time in three decades, reinforced by a new wave of art house releases such as Zhang Yimou’s Hero and Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, a window of opportunity has opened up for a book that aims to set the record straight about the world’s oldest action genre. A book like Tigers and Dragons.

MAKING THE JOURNEY

“Journey as a metaphor is almost always an expedition to the borders of the self, a dialogue of civilizations in which the stranger mirror[s] the self and the self the stranger. By trying to understand the stranger in the stranger’s terms, he not merely confront[s] his own self but extend[s] its borders.” —Ashis Nandy, An Ambiguous Journey to the City (2001).

I came to Hong Kong cinema in the mid-1980s as a passionate fan of chanbara samurai pictures, so it makes sense that the first distinctively Chinese heroes that caught my eye were the swashbuckling super-swordsmen of the Chinese master-genre known as wuxia pian, or “martial chivalry film.” Many of these films were made when the approach to staging fight scenes was still strongly influenced by Peking Opera, before the so-called “new style” martial arts films of the 1970s introduced reforms in fight choreography that emphasized authentic depictions of Shaolin and/or Wudang combat techniques. So from the beginning of my acquaintance with these pictures I have always been more interested in the people who use the weapons than in the weapons themselves, the drives that prompt a fighter to unleash his hard-earned skills. This happy accident in the way I was introduced to these movies has proved to be fortuitous: never a practitioner or even a close student of the martial arts, I strayed closer than many writers to what the Chinese themselves regard as the heart and soul of the genre.

As a well-read student of past writing on popular culture I subscribe to Robert Warshow’s famous dictum in The Immediate Experience: “A man watches a movie, and the critic must acknowledge that he is that man…that in some way he takes all that nonsense seriously.” The questions that Warshow’s “man” is inclined to ask as he watches a popular meat-and-potatoes swordplay film like Cheng Kang’s The Twelve Gold Medallions (1970) are not whether the hero’s jian is a phallic emblem of patriarchal hegemony, or even whether the tricks that actor Yueh Hua performs with his blade are authentic or merely convincingly faked. We ask the same questions that we would ask of an action movie of any type: Do the issues being contested really seem to be worth fighting over, or is the whole business blatantly trivial and therefore insulting to our intelligence? Are the conflicts and intrigues between the warring factions worked out cleverly enough that the movie is able to keep on setting traps for us all the way to the end, or do we get ahead of it at some point and lapse into resentful boredom? And on the simplest level are the characters cool and/or interesting enough to be worth hanging out with for 101 minutes?

As moviegoers we subject ourselves willingly to the pleasurable manipulation that, after all, is the product offered for sale in popular entertainment. Normally all we ask is that the filmmakers do their work with a decent amount of respect for our powers of discrimination. But a genre becomes a genre for a reason, because the narrative patterns it falls into, the types of people it elevates to the status of hero (or anti-hero, or heroine), and above all the issues it wrestles with, resonate with an audience. Tigers and Dragons will consider the Chinese martial arts movie as a genre on a par with the Western and the samurai film—or rather as a close-knit family of genres, descended from a common ancestor. We want to sweep away some of the stereotypes that accumulated around these movies during the kung fu craze, to take advantage of an unprecedented opportunity offered by recent re-releases to see the genre whole and on its own terms. But before it is anything else it is a Chinese film genre, and while the very existence of this book is premised on the belief that the films can be enjoyed by people who are not Chinese, we also take it for granted that the movies can only be fully understood in the context of the society and the culture they were created to entertain.

We should never allow ourselves to forget that these films were created and received primarily as dramatic works of fiction, written, directed, and performed by highly skilled artisan/entrepreneurs for a largely working-class audience they always kept firmly in mind. Quite a few of these artisans, until well into the 1970s, came out of the so-called “red trousers” tradition, trained in what amounted to trade schools specializing in the martial arts or Peking Opera, and who for all their prodigious physical skill remained illiterate into adulthood. In their own context the films were no more exotic than the people who made them. In fact I think the ordinariness in their native context of movies that look exotic to us is pretty close to the heart of the matter. These were pictures that ordinary people flocked to see after knocking off work from the tailor shops and shirt factories of Kowloon, with a belly full of street-stall noodles, in theaters clouded with the mingled fumes of shrimp crisps and cigarettes. Thinking of them as quaint foreign artifacts that can be cut loose from their moorings and carted proudly home, like faux-jade tchotchkes scooped up in Chinatown, would be an unforgivable failure of imagination.

For reasons that remain obscure, all but a handful of the classic martial arts films produced in the 1960s and '70s by the legendary Shaw Brothers and Cathay studios of Hong Kong have been held off the market for almost three decades. The Shaw Brothers holdback ended late last year, when reclusive studio boss Sir Run Run Shaw finally loosened his grip upon the dragon hoard. Seven hundred feature films from the Shaws library have been purchased by the Hong Kong's distributor Celestial Pictures, which is rolling out digitally restored, freshly subtitled, wide-screen prints of some the best martial arts movies ever made. The Celestial re-issues have already produced ripples of response among other Asian distributors. The Cathay Organization, a major Shaw’s rival in the 1950s and '60s, recently announced a re-release program of its own.

A new kung fu craze of sorts may already be gathering steam. Turn-away crowds assembled in March for the UCLA Film and Television Archive series Heroic Grace: The Chinese Martial Arts Film, when several of the Celestial re-issues screened for the first time in the US. And in April the independent distributor Miramax snapped up domestic rights to fifty choice Celestial titles. This rich alternate universe of fantasy, valor, and swordplay is about to be reopened to exploration. Our makeshift maps will have to be redrawn.

“THE SOUL OF THE XIA”

“The ideal of morality has no more serious rival than the ideal of supreme strength.” —Novalis, Hymns to the Night.

Americans are often surprised to learn that until the mid-20th century the Chinese term gongfu had no specific association with the martial arts. It originally referred to any “skill acquired through long practice,” which means that the computer hackers on The X-Files were not even stretching a point when they used it to salute each other for feats of legerdemain on the keyboard. (“Your kung fu is the best.”) At the same time, the expression has not become inextricably linked with martial prowess by accident. It is a root premise of the world’s oldest action genre that the power the warrior unleashes in the pursuit of justice is not something he or she was born with.

One challenge facing the critic attempting to identify the central tradition of a genre as copious and as colorful as the Chinese martial arts film is that there always seem to be counter-examples ready to hand. Every possible variation on the form’s central themes has probably been tried on for size at one time or another. In fact, as I noted in the introduction to the catalog of the UCLA film series Heroic Grace, “the genre's almost limitless flexibility is what has kept it current and enduringly popular for over 50 years, adapting effortlessly to sweeping changes in its demographic.” But all the major sub-forms of the Chinese master-genre known as wuxia pian (“martial chivalry film”) do seem to agree on a few points, and most of these refer back, in turn, to this shared concept of gongfu, the bedrock belief that the warrior’s power is not a gift or an accident but can only be a product of arduous training and self-discipline.

In a Chinese martial arts movie, victory rarely goes to the physically stronger combatant. As a character observes in Zhang Zengze’s From the Highway, “In kung fu, a rat can beat an elephant.” The slender, agile Bruce Lee is able to lay out a towering muscle-bound adversary in an early scene in Enter the Dragon because his acquired skills have been honed to a peak of perfection. And even when raw force does manage to eke out a victory, the triumph of brawn (or political power or superior weaponry) is likely to be short-lived. In a common martial arts movie plot, a person oppressed and defeated in the first reel retreats to the wilderness in the second and acquires a new technique (preferably from an eccentric, white-bearded sifu) that he unleashes in the finale, turning the tables on his enemies. This so-called “training for revenge” format is the version of the Chinese martial arts film that has been most widely imitated in the West—in The Empire Strikes Back, The Karate Kid, The Matrix, and the recent Jennifer Lopez vehicle Enough, to name a few.

Sequences depicting the training process in excruciating detail are the center of interest in many martial arts films; especially in the unarmed combat pictures that came to define the genre for fans in the West during the “kung fu craze” of the 1970s. In Lau Kar-leong’s classic The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, a spindly novice survives five years of escalating tests and challenges in which he is called upon to transcend his physical limitations again and again. The training process is not always shown, but it is always assumed, and it confers at least generic plausibility on some otherwise fairly outlandish events. When the delicate-looking Shaw Brothers star David Chiang lays waste to entire roomfuls of hulking foes in Chang Cheh’s Vengeance! (1970), the whipcord economy of his movements is a graphic representation of his past training that in genre terms is the only explantion required.

One upshot of this is that the fighters in martial arts films often become not less but more powerful as they grow older. In film after film the supreme warriors, the protagonists’ ultimate adversary, are the elderly white-eyebrow masters who can kill with a touch or at a distance, as if they’ve risen above anything as crass as actual physical contact. Some fighters who rise above the physical seem to jettison their sexuality in the process, becoming androgynous eunuch figures like the porcelain-featured killer in Chu Yuan’s The Magic Blade (1976), played by a male performer with a dubbed female speaking voice. And because martial prowess stems primarily from training and not from brute strength, the Chinese wuxia form is the only major action genre in which women who fight are part of the central tradition.

In its heart of hearts, in its origins, wuxia pian is a populist genre of self-reliance and self-defense. The genre’s righteous warriors (the xia) see themselves not as exceptional beings but simply as people who by their own efforts have acquired certain useful skills. the implicit question that wuxia pian always asks and tries to answer is simply this: Once you’ve completed your training, and you’ve got the power, what exactly are you supposed to do with it? The standard answer is that the true xia use their skill not to enrich themselves or to dominate others but to defend the powerless, an impulse that can be over-interpreted in political terms but that is closer in practice to an instinctive response to bullying, “coming around a corner and seeing a big guy beating up a little guy.” The xia is a populist noble outlaw, not an aristocratic cog in a vast feudal bureaucracy, like the heroes of Japanese samurai films. In this sense the translation of the word xia suggested by scholar James J.Y. Liu, “the Chinese knight-errant,” is somewhat misleading: Even the Knights of the Round Table were loyal servants of a feudal monarch. More to the point, perhaps, would be a comparison with Robin Hood, whose restorationist allegiance to the deposed King Richard resonates nicely with the “Smash the Ching, restore the Ming” rallying cry of the xia’s real-world precursors, bandits and free-lance vigilantes who roamed ancient China in periods of social chaos.

In the 13th century the first true wuxia novel, The Water Margin, fictionalized the exploits of one of these bands of outlaws, portraying them as victims of corrupt officials who congregated in the wilderness to stage wrong-righting forays against the oppressive status quo. The Chinese term for their milieu, often rendered in English as “the martial world,” is jiang hu, literally “rivers and lakes,” an exceedingly Water Margin-like phrase that suggests a sort of Chinese Sherwood Forest. In the early stages of its development the genre always remained within shouting distance of its roots. The form’s great iconic standard-bearers, the martial monks of the Shaolin Temple, in the 17th century, and the Cantonese patriot Wong Fei-hong, in the early 20th, bookend four hundred years of grass-roots resistance to the Ching Dynasty, imposed by Mongol invaders upon the native Han population. Not even the fantastic powers ascribed to the xia in their later incarnations were invented out of whole cloth: they literalized the beliefs of Ching-era secret societies and religious cults, beliefs that have surfaced in the real world as recently as 1900, when the anti-Western insurgents of The Boxer Rebellion became convinced that they could safely face British rifles unarmed and bare-chested.

A fair number of martial arts stories have attempted to evoke the often-brutal frontier reality of the rebel underworld in which the legends that fed the wuxia genre originally arose. In fact a dialog between its fantastic and realist factions has been a feature of the genre, spurring innovation and evolution, since at least the late 1940s. Their creators saw both the Cantonese-language Wong Fei-hong films of the 1950s and the “new style” Mandarin swordplay pictures of the mid-1960s as conscious realist responses to the escalation of marvels in old school wuxia movies. Many filmmakers of the period, including King Hu and Chang Cheh, chipped away at encrustations of myth that they felt were obscuring the true glory of the culture of the martial arts. The most pointed critique of the lot was offered by Lau Kar-leong, whose Legendary Weapons of China (1981) dramatized a split in the martial world, in the Boxer era, between an old guard that clings to the folk belief in invulnerability and a breakaway faction of “modernists” who reject it is as a suicidal superstition.

Kung fu movies make relatively modest demands on our credulity as compared with typical works in the much older foundational genre of pureblooded wuxia pian. The uninitiated Westerner is likely to be flabbergasted by an initial exposure to a narrative form that has become surreally in grown a long process of successive elaborations and refinements. Nothing else could explain the bizarre feats that were depicted so matter-of-factly in these films: “weightless leaps” from courtyards onto rooftops, flurries of poisoned darts hurled with a flick of a sleeve, and action-at-a-distance “spirit kung fu” techniques that with an imperious gesture can fell trees and shatter boulders. At their most extreme the xia are martial sorcerers, firing bolts of lighting from their blades and riding to the rescue on the backs of giant birds.

The paragons of the so-called “gods and demons” school of wuxia pian are, in effect, super-heroes, although the comparison can’t be pushed too far. There is no martial arts novel or movie that I know of in which an evil Wudang master and his disciples set out to take over the more or less real world, or even to enslave a single village. In fact, by the time the wuxia novel became a mass-marketed genre of popular fiction in the modern sense, around the turn of the 20th century, the real world had simply ceased to exist in these stories. Their plots now revolved around intramural conflicts between patriarchal clans of adepts contending for dominance in a jiang hu that is for all effects and purposes an alternate universe of fantasy—like the ones depicted in excruciating detail in sword ‘n’ sorcery pulp novels and shared-world role-playing games. The warriors still pay lip service to the age-old Confucian notion of yi (“righteousness”), but it now refers almost entirely to issues of “brotherhood” and loyalty within the clan. In effect, the high-minded old morality of service has been replaced by a self-serving code of professional ethics.

You can see the problem. Knocking around in a jiang hu that no longer has any people in it, the xia have a tough time continuing to function as defenders of the downtrodden. “What does the Westerner fight for?” asked Robert Warshow. “We know he is on the side of justice and order, and of course it can be said that he fights for these things. But such broad aims never correspond exactly to his real motives; they only offer him his opportunity. … If justice and order did not continually demand his protection, he would be without a calling.” It’s no wonder that at a certain point the xia began to concentrate upon oppressing and/or defending each other.

There is some scope for cynicism, here, of course, and the only surprise is that it took several decades to set in. An hermetic understanding of the jiang hu as an arena of labyrinthine amoral intrigue had already been explored in wuxia fiction, but it was only in the mid-1960s that it began to surface on the screen, when early “new style” swordplay films such as Chang Xin-yien’s The Jade Bow (1966) portrayed implacable clan rivalries as implosive and self-defeating. This view became the genre’s new baseline in a series of films adapted by director Chu Yuan, in the late 1970s, from the “hard boiled” wuxia novels of Gu Long. It was adopted as a resonant metaphor for a corrupt dog-eat-dog society by the socially conscious “new wave” Hong Kong filmmakers of the 1980s, and in the ‘90s it achieved an apotheosis of sorts in the wuxia-inspired gangster movies of John Woo. The warriors in these stories may still occasionally pick up faint signals from their righteous past, but at best this is a form of nostalgia, a throb of self-pity for their lost innocence.

It could be argued that these “decadent,” modernist forms of wuxia pian are acknowledging an internal contradiction, or conflict, that had been lying dormant in genre’s premises all along. It is fitting, in this sense, that the form’s animating dream of self-mastery through training was summed up best by one of its greatest villains, Shek Kin's steel-clawed Han in the Bruce Lee blockbuster Enter the Dragon: "We are unique, in that we create ourselves. Through long years of training, sacrifice, denial, and pain, we forge our bodies in the fire of our will." The quest for power has it own logic, an inherent “fascist potential,” and there is a sense in which the plots of action movies are infernal machines for goading the hero to violence. In the Bruce Lee film released in the States as Fists of Fury (1971), an amazing amount of suspense is generated by the urge to fight that builds up in Lee’s character, like steam in a boiler, a simmering impacted energy that is daringly held in check for almost an hour as he struggles to keep a promise to his mother. The cynical view is that the release of narrative pressure in violence is the moment when an action movie (operating in this sense very much like a porno film) finally delivers what the audience has paid to see. But in classic martial arts films both sides of the equation are given equal weight: the power the hero has or seeks, and the moral code that holds it in check. It’s only when the balance of forces is upset, when the code no longer has the authority of tradition required to function as an effective counterweight, that power begins to expand to fill the vacuum and becomes and end in itself.

A surprising number of martial arts movies confront a misuse of lethal force, or pivot upon a desperate attempt to prevent one. That’s why it’s a mistake to dismiss as mere McGuffins the terrifying, de-stabilizing weapons, such as the explosive Butterfly Darts in Chu Yuan’s The Magic Blade, that in film after film must not be allowed to fall into the wrong hands. The device represents the temptation to cut loose that the warrior faces every day. In some especially interesting cases, martial heroes and heroines confront this inner adversary, the itch to use their laboriously acquired skills for unworthy purposes.

In Chan Cheh’s The Assassin (1967), Wang Yu plays a free-lance killer for hire whose life’s dream is to become the strongest swordfighter in the jiang hu. The character manages to eke out a measure of redemption by refusing to accept payment or even praise for his victories; because he seeks only self-recognition his actions achieve a kind of purity. The hero of Patrick Tam’s The Sword (1980), on the other hand, follows his dead end path to the bitter end. A single-minded glory seeker, he is denied closure when the supreme swordfighter he has been stalking for years turns out to be a broken-down old man, decades past his prime. With no one left standing worth testing himself against, the jaded warrior hurls his blade into the sea and retires from the fray. His life has always been empty. Now he’s staring into the void.

These challenging revisionist wuxia pictures suggest what can happen when something that should to be a side effect of the xia’s pursuit of righteousness, such as fame or glory, becomes a value in its own right. It is one of the defining paradoxes of Zen philosophy, after all, and of some strains of Western thought, as well, that the most desirable aspects of human life can’t be pursued directly, that they can in fact only be glimpsed out of the corner of the eye as we are focusing on something else. Aristotle, for instance, held that “happiness is not a possible goal of our actions, but rather the natural accompaniment of actions rightly performed.”

In some “training for revenge films,” such as Yuan Wo-ping’s Drunken Master (1978), the draconian exercises enforced by a harsh sifu look more like forms of torture: Jackie Chan was reliving aspects of his own training at a Peking Opera school in that film when he allowed himself to be burned, beaten, half drowned, and strung up by his wrists. Am I the only critic who has ever flashed back during these sequences to the SOB drill instructor characters in American films about the Pride of the Marines? The xia are warriors, soldiers, trained killers, although this aspect of their make-up has not been acknowledged very often. Martial brothers (and sisters) salute each other (with a distinctive hand-on-fist gesture) as veterans on an equal footing of a soul-testing ordeal that mere civilians will never understand.

When director John Woo describes his favorite martial arts movies he doesn’t talk about their authentic depictions of Hung Gar elbow techniques, or even about the craft aspects of staging thrilling fights—although it is abundantly clear from his own films that he paid close attention to these things. Instead, he talks about the characters and about what he interprets as their nobility: their passionate loyalty to each other and their devotion to yi. It is nobility that in the value system of the films themselves is validated by the risk of being killed and the acceptance of the responsibility of killing.

There is no getting around this. It won’t do to pretend that these films are “really” about high-minded moral issues, and that their violence is just a side issue. There is no point in being squeamish about the fact that these are movies about killing and being killed. This is the power, after all, that the martial artist seeks to acquire, and to some extent we can gauge the seriousness of a wuxia film by its willingness to face up to this. If the scenes of violence are too discreet or evasive we dismiss the director as a dilettante, lacking a sufficiently tough-minded sense of what is at stake in a conflict between lethal adversaries. Visually a spurt of blood can be a form of punctuation, a pictorial power chord. On a narrative level it is the logical consequence of the hero’s decision to pick up a weapon in the first place. It the outcome he must be prepared to accept.

The soul of the wuxia movie as a genre is closely bound up with the culture of the martial arts schools and the Peking Opera companies that molded its creators and performers and, in a sense, even its characters. The role of restorationist resistance fighter that the veterans of the schools and opera companies were forced into, when the institutions were banned during the Ching Dynasty, is still an element of the wuxia warrior’s self-image. We can’t hope to see into the heart of this genre unless we acknowledge that in its formative years it acquired a value system and worldview along with the martial and acrobatic skills that continue to thrill moviegoers. According to film scholar Sam Ho, “The Chinese word wu [“force” or “power”] is written by combining two other characters, zhi and ge, which mean ‘stop’ and ‘fight’ respectively. In other words, the term is an oxymoron, suggesting that it takes fighting to stop fighting, a paradox that is central to the appeal of the wuxia form.”

This is the response of the culture of the Chinese martial arts to the nagging question at the center of the wuxia genre: the tension between power and morality. In an interview presented in The Art of Action, John Woo suggests that the theme of acquired power and the devotion to duty in the martial arts film are inextricably inter-twined, because it is the process of training itself that “disciplines the passions and forms you into a righteous person.” What is acquired, in other words, is not raw power but power civilized, lifted out of the realm of the passions, handed back to a conscious human agent. “The martial arts are about control,” says Jackie Chan, “not just strength. Anybody can become strong. Strength is only in your muscles. Control is in your brain.” The ultimate martial master is the warrior who is no longer driven to fight, who has freed himself to decide not to. The martial arts versions of the famous anti-pacifist challenge is that an untrained person will not be able to stop short of killing the person attacking his daughter.

[Several sections of the proposal had to be omitted due to the space limitations on this "free" web server.]