Wu Xia: heaven or hell? part 2: Chung Chang-Hwa's Way

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Category: Essays

Born in 1928, the disciple of director Choi In-Kyu (author of the masterpiece Jayu Manse/Hurrah For Freedom!) was neither the first nor the only case of a Hong Kong-South Korean collaboration. In 1957, Love With an Alien, a joint project between Shaw Brothers and South Korea Entertainment, initiated a whole series of large-scale co-productions. As Korean cinema was enjoying a golden age, Shin Films, founded by legendary director Shin Sang-ok, joined hands with Shaw Brothers for a long-term partnership that started in 1964: The Last Woman of Shang (1964), The Goddess of Mercy (1965), The Man in Chang-an (1966), The King with My Face (1966), The Bandits (1971), Thousand Years Fox (1971), and The Ghost Lovers (1974). Following the model of Love With an Alien, whose direction was shared by three filmmakers, one from Hong Kong: Tu Guangqi, one from South Korea: Chun Chang-Geun, and one from Japan: Watasugi Mitsuo, these projects combined crews and casts from both worlds (mostly Korea and Hong Kong) and gave birth to a revolutionary genre of action-oriented productions.

In this context, Shaw Brothers studio head Run Run Shaw invited a large number of Korean directors and actors to Hong Kong to work on his own movies, including Chung Chang-Hwa of course, but also Kim Soo-Yong and Choi Kyung-Ok, and actors Shin Young-Kyun, Kim Seung-Ho, Park Lo-Jek and Namgung Won. Chung's impact on both the Hong Kong and the Korean film industries was by far the strongest of the group, commercially and artistically. A quick look into his eclectic career, long ignored by most Korean film historians and scholars, can provide the sketch of an explanation.

Before lending his services to Run Run Shaw and later, Raymond Shaw and Golden Harvest (1973), Chung directed a wide variety of melodramas, thrillers, noir and war movies... However, his debut feature, Final Temptation hardly rose above the conventions of the sentimental genre to which it belonged and failed to draw audiences. But the success of George Stevens' Shane in Korea in 1953 awakened him to an element that was to become an essential structural device of his films: tempo. For Chung, building a narrative became a matter of keeping up, literally, with a certain fictional pace and rhythm. This implied a systematic restriction/reduction of the plot to a stripped-to-the-barebones storyline, driven by an internal movement that jettisoned unnecessary formal and thematic elements. To put it in a nutshell, everything in this perspective revolved around speed and its variations. Film after film, Chung developed and refined this method of voluntary cinematic poverty.

 

With Sunny Field in 1960, the director began to meet with popular success. Always working within the limits of specific genres, he took the habit of mixing the rules that normally governed and kept different types of movies apart, with increasing subtlety and originality, following a strategy of maximum efficiency. At this point, it would be very exciting to get into a further discussion of Chung's oeuvre, still largely unknown despite the retrospective at the Pusan International Film Festival in 2003, but it would probably take me too far from the subject at hand.

A Wandering Swordsman and 108 Bars of Gold

At any rate, Chung seemed to find in the wu xia genre the ideal form in which he could shape his best films. In A Wandering Swordsman and 108 Bars of Gold (1968) for instance, he brought quite a sharp edge to the costume drama, by blending and bending some typical conventions of various genres. The hero of this movie, played by Park No-Sik is an amoral killer for hire, strongly reminiscent of the outlaw gunslinger in Spaghetti Westerns, the ronin (wandering samurai) in Japanese chambara, or the modern urban hitman in noir movies. He knows only one law: his own. Only concerned by his greed, the wandering swordsman serves no superior purpose or man. The whole film through, his sole motivation is centered on his own survival and the stubborn quest for gold (the transcendental signifier of the movie), as if the space where he evolves was some kind of Wild West that precluded any possibility of social order. Austerely anti-sentimental, A Wandering Swordsman is a much darker tale than your typical wu xia story, to which it adds the cruelty of a style marked by the particular speed of the montage.

A Swordsman in the Twilight

In stark contrast, Swordsman in the Twilight, a Shaw Brothers production that Chung made a year before (while he was still he Korea) deals with a classic hero essentially concerned with the restoration of Queen Min, overthrown by Jang Hee-Bin (on whom he made an entire film in 1961). The character faithfully and traditionally adheres to Confucian ideology. But it is this very loyalty to the exiled queen that banishes him to the margins of mainstream society, thus subverting Neo-Confucian morality, which normally subjects the totality of the people, without exception, to the rule and reality of the powers that be. In spite of its organic link to historical drama, Swordsman in the Twilight is discreetly divergent from the wu xia genre in which Chung will excel in Hong Kong, alongside King Hu, Chang Cheh, and Sammo Hung. While it does not seem significantly different from other Hong Kong productions, the ingenuity and the intensity invested in the mise en scène sets the film apart from its counterparts made in the (now ex-)British colony.

  

 

In Hong Kong, where he moved after the release of A Wandering Swordsman, Chung Chang-Hwa found the appropriate context and creative conditions to explore the martial arts genre, and the ideal film form with Five Fingers of Death. A classic, in the strongest sense of the word, this work deserves a few comments, even if it is not a wu xia pian, strictly speaking. Driven by compulsive effects of mise en série (chain-serialization), the film displays a constant tension that accelerates the pace of the narrative. Not a scene passes without immediately setting off the following sequence, thus perpetually raising the stakes of the plot.

The originality of the film obviously owes less to the script, a compilation of traditional figures from Chinese stories of ritual initiation and vengeance, than to pure and simple principles of mise en scène. Basically dry and cruel: his film reinvents genre fiction as a visually lean and mean, fat-free storytelling machine, almost solely relying on the speed of its effects. For example, the switch from wires to trempoline for fight sequences might seem like a minor innovation in Five Fingers of Death. But this formal revolution actually densifies and verticalizes the action, which assumes a new dimension, unbarred by narrative suspensions.

Another formal element that might appear as a quaint oddity at first is the occasional resort to the technique of the “iron palm”. The special effect is minimal and discreet: the hand becomes glowing red, in the fire of the full fight. Nevertheless, it is not so much the translation of a surreal whim as a symptom of the action. The film always cuts short to the core of the movement, to the point of exhaustion where the limits of hand-to-hand primary combat cease to exist.

Because of its organicity, and particular relation to pain, its distance from fascination, Five Fingers of Death is probably more Korean than Chinese, but also constitutes itself as the polar opposite of the more academic (but equally excellent) The New One-Armed Swordsman, by Chang Cheh. Unlike his fellow wu xia filmmaker, Chung Chang-Hwa does not embarrass himself with unnecessary psychology. On the contrary, he embraces a continuous nervous narrative show/break-down. In Five Fingers of Death, there is no such thing as a dramatic knot: everything finds a (swiftly-cut) resolution through action and gesture. The internal rage of the film abolishes the frontiers between form and content, the book (ideological and prescriptive, that is to say: the cinematic genre and tradition) and its actualization (the sword, in wu xia, or here, the hand, in other words: the action). This way, the work forms a whole closed upon itself, just like the glowing red fist of the hero. The genre becomes self-sufficient and a sort of sacred space, both closed upon itself and opening itself to its ideal definition: a territory to explore. More than a lesson of wu xia filmmaking, a statement of mise en scène in the form of a declaration of war.

 

 

End of part two. Return to part one