Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/22/17

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, October 22, 2017

A Touch of Zen (King Hu, 1971)

Han Ying-jie (center) in A Touch of Zen

Yang Hui-zhen: Hsu Feng
Gu Sheng-tsai: Shih Chun
General Shi Wen-qiao: Bai Ying
General Lu Ding-an: Xue Han
Abbot Hui-yuan: Roy Chiao
Ouyang Nian: Tien Peng
Sheng-tsai's mother: Zhang Bing-yu
Men Da: Wang Rui
Chief Commander Xu Xian-chun: Han Ying-jie

Director: King Hu
Screenplay: King Hu
Based on a story by Songling Pu
Cinematography: Hua Hui-ying

I'm not an expert on or even a devotee of Asian martial arts films (wuxia), so I come to A Touch of Zen with more than a touch of naïveté. It's a celebrated film for its elevation of the genre into the realm of art, and that part of it I can appreciate, even as it often baffled and sometimes irritated me: Why did the battle with the "ghosts" have to be shot in the dark? Its sometimes oblique narrative puzzled me: The first two characters we meet are the scholar-artist Gu and his mysterious customer, Ouyang Nian, and I felt a bit lost when Ouyang turned out to be a bad guy and Gu's reticent neighbor Yang Hui-zhen became the protagonist, as well as Gu's lover (after declining the marriage proposal Gu's mother insists on). But we're clearly working with a director-screenwriter who wants to keep us off-balance, and succeeds. Best, I realized, not to attempt to unravel the plot but to pay attention to the gorgeous and often exciting images that King Hu gives us -- the more than three-hour length of his epic flies by if you do that. The mixture of martial arts and religious philosophy is something the skeptic in me can only gaze at disinterestedly, so the ending, with the dying abbot bleeding gold, eludes any attempt I might make to find coherence with the political struggles that inform most of the film's action. But perhaps if I educate myself better in wuxia, I'll come to a fuller appreciation of why A Touch of Zen is so widely and enthusiastically admired.