UCLA Film and Television Archive "A Touch of Zen" is one
of the films that inspired Ang Lee and his film
"Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."
By Ryan Joe
Daily Bruin Contributor
Whirling fighters weave through bamboo groves and black inns.
Cold metal clashes as a fatal sliver of sword slices through the
ether. A blood-streaked warrior falters and falls as the swift
assassin sheaths her silver blade.
These images of adventure fed director Ang Lee throughout his
childhood; it was a diet of wu xia movies, or swordplay films, that
ultimately inspired him to serve up his own cinematic feast in
“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” the top-grossing
foreign-language film in the United States.
 And now, thanks to the combined efforts of the UCLA Film
and Television Archive and the Los Angeles Film Festival, those
starving for more of what “Crouching Tiger” had to
offer will find their famine sated in the featured series
“Ang Lee’s Chinese Sword and Sorcery: The Films that
Inspired Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” Friday and Saturday
at the Director’s Guild of America. The four films being
screened were personally selected by Lee and his long-time
collaborator James Schamus.
The films epitomize the essence of the wu xia genre by capturing
mysticism, beauty, spirituality and excitement. The world of the wu
xia film is not necessarily filled with kung fu boxers, but is
instead comprised of swordsmen and swordswomen ““ heroes and
villains who wield mystic weapons and who dance deadly,
sword-swinging ballets through the landscapes of mythical
China.
“There are two main strains of the martial arts,”
said Cheng-Sim Lim, series programmer at the UCLA Film and
Television Archive. “You have the sword-fighting subgenre and
later on you have the kung fu subgenre.”
Lim said that it was during the late ’60s and early
’70s that the wu xia films fell out of popularity in favor of
the newer, more visceral, more masculine kung fu films in which
bare-chested men careened, their muscles unabashedly flexed, onto
the Chinese screen. Masculinity was brought to the foreground, and
the central attraction of the films became that of men beating each
other up in a stylized fashion.
More precisely, “Crouching Tiger” stems from wu xia
novels ““ Chinese pulp fiction.
“The turn of the century was the time when martial arts
pulp literature was very popular among the masses,” Lim
said.
In times of political turmoil and Western aggression, Lim
explained that the wu xia novels endowed Chinese warriors with the
superhuman abilities and spirituality to successfully combat the
Western militaries. The literature was wish fulfillment for the
masses, and the religiosity and supernatural elements of the novels
found their way into cinematic counterparts.
These literature-rooted elements of the wu xia were ready to be
spread across the celluloid. But story is one thing.
Cinematography, choreography and direction are something else. How
does one visually convey a sense of time, atmosphere, tempo and
action?
For the earlier generations of wu xia filmmakers, Lim said the
answer was along the lines of, point the camera, shoot the camera,
and let the action speak for itself.
But cinema is a dynamic medium and the static camera
couldn’t contain the potential energy of the wu xia genre
forever.
Perhaps one of the most profound influences on “Crouching
Tiger” in particular, and the wu xia genre in general, was
King Hu, who directed two of the four films in the series, the epic
“A Touch of Zen” and the short “Anger.”
Hu, educated in Chinese classicism, amalgamated his cinema with
Chinese opera; there is emphasis on the theatrical over the
realistic as music combines with action, characters are introduced
with a flourish, and actors leap out of the narrative into a
third-person point of view.
“He set the tone both for the genre and the
culture,” Lee said in an interview with Lim.
Hu’s films are superheroic in scope as he paints large,
valiant characters over a scenic canvas of detailed, Ming-era
China, spliced with exhilarating action sequences. “A Touch
of Zen” has characters partaking in aerial combat throughout
a vast bamboo forest as the daughter of a disgraced nobleman and
her ally fight for their lives against the enemies who killed her
father.
Here, Hu blends his camera with the action. As characters
dive-bomb out of the tips of trees, the camera shoots swiftly and
cuts back and forth. As a result, the action is elevated and
brought to a level of operatic grandiosity.
The elements and mechanics of the mise-en-scene are not the only
influences from which Lee gleans. Characters in “Crouching
Tiger” suffer about their futures and past. Those who are
heroic are haunted by feelings of self-doubt. Others struggle
against the seeming immobility in life’s hierarchy.
As in the featured film “The Sword,” the characters
in “Crouching Tiger” are not always as sure-footed
socially as they are physically. The idea of heroism deconstructs
itself as the noble swordfighters plague themselves with
self-doubt, while empathetic villains walk the razors edge, angered
over some past injustice.
Elements of social stratification, gender barriers, and
vengeance pervade “Crouching Tiger.”
By virtue of the film’s nature, its diverse cast and
influences, “Crouching Tiger” doesn’t embody the
cinema of a single region or place in China.
“It’s an idea like America is more of an idea than
land ““ an idealistic idea,” Lee said. “(Being)
Chinese to me is a historical ideal, like a dream.”
FILM: “Ang Lee’s Chinese Sword and
Sorcery: The Films that Inspired Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon” screens Friday and Saturday at the Director’s
Guild of America. For more information, or to purchase tickets,
visit www.lafilmfest.com.