Metrograph Theater’s 10th Old School Kung Fu Fest
By focusing on wuxia films this year, the NYC theater has helped to celebrate one of the greatest filmmakers in the world, legendary director King Hu.
Subway Cinema, founders of the New York Asian Film Festival and the Old School Kung Fu Fest, present their 10th consecutive lineup of retrospective programming this year. This time around we’re treated to a reasonable chunk of wuxia action films — stories centered around martial arts warriors of ancient times who possess superhuman abilities righting wrongs and cleaning up communities rife with corruption.
Subway Cinema’s programming is proudly housed at New York City’s Metrograph Theater, and the theme of wuxia is paid in specific homage to the filmmaker that made a name for himself with Come Drink With Me (his first directorial success with the Shaw Brothers Studio in 1966), an influence we’re still seeing to this day. The indisputable king of wuxia films is Hu Jinquan, otherwise known as King Hu. Two of the biggest highlights of the fest are the new documentary on Hu, The King of Wuxia and the crowning achievement of wuxia martial arts cinema, A Touch of Zen, which won the Technical Grand Prize and nominated for the Palme d’Or in 1975 at Cannes. Zen is set to close out the festival in a one-two punch on Sunday, April 30th, with a screening of Peng-Yi Chang’s The Night Orchid following right after.
The King of Wuxia (dir. Lin Jing-Jie, 2022)
King of Wuxia is split down the middle in exploring King Hu’s work in wuxia cinema and beyond in the first half, and focuses much more on his personal and professional life outside of filmmaking in the second. It begins by looking into his start with the Shaw Brothers studio and his first major hit, Come Drink With Me, focusing on the technical side and craft of his films. There is an absolute wealth of information here just in the first 90 minutes as we follow Shih Chun (who confesses to seeing Hu as that of a mentor guiding him through performing and filmmaking), wandering through locations where he filmed with Hu and visiting film archives that still house his production notes, storyboards, and film cells.
It’s an incredible portrait of an artist in the truest sense and just like his films, every moment is essential to its identity. It’s the perfect introduction for those who may never have seen a film by Hu, and the perfect point of reflection for those who are familiar with his work from the most passive to the most critically engaged with King Hu’s oeuvre. Subway Cinema’s placement of the documentary at the very start of the festival sets a beautiful precedent with The King of Wuxia, through which each following film can be appreciated with a sense of heightened awareness of how Hu’s influence echoes still throughout the decades in wuxia, kung fu, and art house cinema.
But what’s the most fascinating about Subway Cinema’s programming of this year’s Kung Fu Fest is how characters King Hu introduces is portrayed in other titles, and the clear influence of his in other directors’ works. After Chang Cheh’s Golden Swallow in 1968 (another Shaw Brothers picture), the titular character returns in two other features for the festival, played by Polly Shang-Kuan Ling-Feng in Joseph Kuo’s Swordsman of All Swordsmen and Ghost Hill. This gives the audience a clear focus of a heroic warrior to champion, and although both films cover mostly the same ground they do it in wildly different ways.
Swordsman of All Swordsmen (dir. Joseph Kuo, 1968)
Swordsman is presented in the US for the first time since its digital restoration, offering stunning cinematography and wonderfully dynamic colors and sound. The opening credits are enough to sell a complete classic martial arts cinema neophyte and the meat of the film gives way to a compelling form of political intrigue, as is a tendency for period kung fu films. In many ways there are parallels between Taiwanese, Chinese, and Hong Kong period martial arts films and the westerns of the era (Italian, American, Spanish, and so on) where local politics and individual philosophies clash, for better or worse. Where Swordsman of All Swordsmen leaves us is the understanding of how not using power is perhaps the best use of it, but Ghost Hill is a semi-retelling of a portion of Swordsman with a much greater focus on legend & mysticism, especially visually what with its gorgeous gel-lit sets reminiscent of Bava’s Hercules in the Haunted World or some character elements of Blood and Black Lace. These two films are paired perfectly back to back, with Polly Shang-Kuan Ling-Feng present as Golden Swallow and Flying Swallow (or in some versions Fei Yen-Chi) respectively. But even Ghost Hill’s mythological send-up and Swordsman’s spiritual succession to Come Drink With Me is just one avenue for the filmmakers’ clear reverence towards Hu.
Vengeance of the Phoenix Sisters (dir. Chen Hung-Min, 1968)
Chen Hung-Min’s Vengeance of the Phoenix Sisters uses the influence of King Hu a little differently, trading the sweeping photography of beautiful natural settings for tight, panicked close ups of faces and moments of contact during fights. While it feels far more frantic than something even as wild as Ghost Hill, Hu’s presence can still be felt in the hero’s journey. Xiu Feng is orphaned as a child when a group of ex-convicts kill her father & mother, the sheriff who put them away and his wife, in front of her. Xiu Feng and her two sisters are saved but end up growing up apart from each other but each sister seeks revenge for the destruction of their family.
In Xiu Feng’s journey she disguises herself as a man and travels alone to find each one responsible for her parents’ death, even finding herself in an inn reminiscent to the premise of King Hu’s Dragon Inn, where nothing inside it is as it seems. In Phoenix Sisters the game of mental chess of Dragon Inn is condensed down to one sequence, yet still a fantastic one as Xiu Feng begins to catch onto the innkeepers’ treachery. The film does realistically challenge King Hu’s altruistic sense of heroes in the sisters’ pursuit of vengeance, but not without a warrior’s decorum befitting of the respect they wield towards others. If anything Hung-Min trades Hu’s optimism here for a far more believable cynicism of others, at least in this world where heroes can ultimately choose the fate of their detractors. While Phoenix Sisters plays more towards the cerebral in the fest, it shows a compelling criticism of the values King Hu’s more idealistic characters adopt without a second thought, which gives its audience something really substantial to chew on for its time in the sun.
The Assassin (dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2015)
The Assassin is the first recent wuxia film that actually feels like it continues in King Hu’s footsteps but with a delineation towards art house cinema. Hu’s output in the ’70s courted this with beautifully framed and constructed shots, with so much effort made to create an otherworldly space done with tricks as simple as filling the background of the frame with white smoke, placing his characters at various points in front of and in the midst of this veiled space.
Where fight choreography in A Touch of Zen has that graceful, purposeful weight behind every swing, kick, and slash The Assassin takes study in each fatal moment those kicks and slashes result in. The thud of an arrow feels final, a swing of the sword instrumental in ending everything one knows and understands about life. And yet Nie Yinniang, the titular assassin, feels displaced when she finds the target she’s been given as she develops feelings of love for him. It’s by far the most contemplative of the wuxia offerings this year, and viewed through a post-Hu lens gifts it with incredible power that you can feel even during sequences of long pauses, spent among the company of family in the Weibo court as a mother plays with her son or an official stares deliberately away from his governor after offending him during a meeting of state.
While King Hu’s films don’t explicitly offer the unbroken looks at societal structures in the way Hou Hsiao-hsien paints them, Hu has introduced the materials and a strong, raw influence to propel future films into a unique intersection of the art and action film. It feels like a natural progression for the tales of Chinese and Taiwanese warriors to adopt and embrace the framing of slow art cinema, especially after where King Hu has placed it. The Assassin’s explorations in themes of revenge, anger, discipline, and patience have uncovered something much more meaningful in the course of its characters making decisions contrary to the typical paths they would take in other films within a same or similar genre. That’s what makes Assassin so worthwhile and surprising, that in the mid-2010s King Hu’s ethics are echoed so faithfully yet so original and beautiful in its own inquisitive, interpretive nature.
It’s a perfect cap on a wonderful film series, and while the event itself may be over the programming’s influence doesn’t have to be. Among the films covered more in depth above, more titles from the series below are well worth discovering and experiencing in the same vein:
A City Called Dragon (dir. Tu-Chung-Hsun, 1970)
Night Orchid (dir. Peng-Yi Chang, 1983)
The Bravest Revenge (dir. Chien Lung, 1970)
The Fate of Lee Khan (dir. King Hu, 1973)
The Legend of the Sacred Stone (dir. Chris Huang, 2000)
Iron Mistress (dir. Sung Tsung Shou, 1969)
The Daring Gang of Nineteen From Verdun City (dir. Tu Kuang-chi, 1960)
[this article was originally published on may 2, 2023 on celluloid consomme.]
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