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 The Swordsman and His Jiang Hu: Thoughts on the World of Tsui Hark David Bordwell In a film industry where most directors come across as refreshingly down-to-earth, Tsui Hark stands out by his sheer flamboyance. Wild-eyed, outrageously energetic, full of visionary prophecies, Tsui would be a remarkable figure in any national cinema. The Swordsman and His Jiang Hu is among many things a portrait of a filmmaker on fire. 
Edited by Sam Ho and Ho Wai-leng. Priced at HK$100. The book consists of astute critical commentaries (by Li Cheuk-to, Sek Kei, Cindy S C Chan, and Po Fung) and, bulking much larger, in-depth interviews with Tsui's creative associates. The Oral History project of the Hong Kong Film Archive, by means of Sam Ho's careful editing and translation, proves its value in these fascinating memoirs, though not always flattering, of working with the director. One comes away comparing Tsui to Steve Jobs, the man who mesmerises his team members, inviting them into his reality-distortion field and demanding that they redo everything one more time. Most broadly, this densely informative and lavishly illustrated book helps us rethink Tsui Hark's place in local film history. When the Hong Kong New Wave emerged, young cinemas in all parts of the world had ceased to be truly innovative. By then a new cinema usually announced not a revolution in theme or technique but the arrival of a new generation. So it was, it seems to me, with the Hong Kong New Wave. The New Wavers, born between 1946 and 1960, were of the same generation as important emerging studio-trained directors (Jackie Chan, Yuen Woo-ping, Corey Yuen Kwei, Sammo Hung, Johnnie To). While the latter became the most popular mainstream entertainers of the 1980s and 1990s, the New Wave group brought prestige cinema to Hong Kong: mostly serious, thoughtful psychological dramas and socio-historical commentary. If we tentatively distinguish, say, the arthouse baby-boomers (eg, Allen Fong, Clara Law) from the mainstream baby-boomers (Jackie Chan, Corey Yuen Kwei, et al); and if we allow that some directors (notably Ann Hui) shift back and forth over the boundary line, where do we situate Tsui Hark? The Swordsman volume suggests that Tsui was by temperament always closer to mainstream entertainment than were more serious New Wavers. Like John Woo, he crossed over from the start. For local critics, All the Wrong Clues (1981) and Aces Go Places III - Our Man from Bond Street (1984), his entry in the Cinema City franchise, signalled his capitulation to the mass market. Yet already The Gold Dagger Romance (1978), his rapid-fire wuxia TV series set the tone and pace for his later action pieces. Significantly, he didn't produce a piece of local realism like Ann Hui's RTHK series Below the Lion Rock. Tsui's first feature, the supernatural wuxia pian Butterfly Murders (1979) parallels Johnnie To's debut The Enigmatic Case (1980): both are formally fresh treatments of a high-profile genre. Even Tsui's most obviously 'New Wave' effort, Dangerous Encounters - First Kind (1980), has a sensationalistic side rare in the purer art-house strain. In short, we may now see Tsui as a studio-based filmmaker from the start, exploring a variety of options until Our Man from Bond Street found him his niche. He has said on many occasions that the New Wave had no guiding philosophy and it could not satisfy average audiences (in this volume, p 178). It seems that Tsui always wanted to reach the masses, and sought to do it through unbridled imagination. That imagination wanted to break the mould, chiefly through a new fusion of East and West. Among all directors of his generation, he was most intent on retooling Chinese subjects and Hong Kong genres in ways which ran parallel to the efforts of the American movie brats. He seems to have had a taste for the low-budget splatterfests of Sam Raimi and Tobe Hooper (to which We're Going to Eat You, 1980, evidently owes a great deal), but he was most impressed with the special-effects extravaganzas of the late 1970s. Often compared with Steven Spielberg, Tsui emerges from this volume as even more like George Lucas. The most obvious connection is Tsui's effort to craft a personal mythology from Chinese legend and martial-arts fiction, recasting it along sword-and-sorcery lines. Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983) emerged as Hong Kong's answer to Star Wars, and one collaborator calls The Legend of Zu (2001) a response to Episode 1: The Phantom Menace (1999), with Tsui hoping to underscore story differences between East and West (p 209). Like Lucas, Tsui sets himself special-effects problems and demands his crew to solve them. Add to this the overriding importance of comic books in his personal aesthetic. Like Lucas, as a youth he drew comics. He has continued to collect them and occasionally designed some himself (eg, Red Snow). Comics fed not only Zu and The Wicked City (1992), but also the grotesque look of many of Film Workshop's action pictures. 
A self-portrait, Tsui Hark style. Tsui has always been alert for ways in which local concerns could be repackaged with a new gloss. He updated the Wong Fei-hung saga and the wuxia pian, created polished romantic fantasy from A Chinese Ghost Story (1987) to The Lovers (1994), and gave comedy and the historical action picture a new sparkle in Shanghai Blues (1984) and Peking Opera Blues (1986). What I had not noticed, until this book brought it to light, was all the ways in which his punchy visual design springs from his passion for special effects and cartoon art. His movies have a strikingly abstract look, favouring slashes of brilliant colours and overripe costumes. (A pity that Peking Opera Blues could not find room for a scene showing Brigitte Lin in the wild outfit she models on p 42.) Tsui's fondness for the wide-angle lens gives even ordinary dialogue scenes a comic-book distortion. Who else would embellish the final cooking duel in The Chinese Feast (1995) with steep crane shots? Who else would give The Blade (1995) - surely one of the great Hong Kong films of the decade - such a ragged, scorched look? Who else would include in Time and Tide (2000) a postcard which comes to life and a rappelling sequence that bounces the viewer, Spiderman-fashion, across the surface of an apartment block? Neither a realist nor an overt social critic, he has been primarily, even in the tabloid steaminess of Dangerous Encounters, a fantasist. In an age when Asian cinema seems to be celebrating stasis for its own sake and Hollywood (eg, Traffic, 2000) takes spasmodic nervousness for energy, Tsui has not forsaken his belief that cinema can create its own reality-distortion field, one which makes life splendidly vibrant. Truly, this swordsman has created his own dizzying and dazzling jiang hu.  David Bordwell is Jacques Ledoux Professor of Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (2000) is his most recent book on contemporary Hong Kong cinema. |