The Wuxia Revival

(This essay was first published in Polish translation in Silent Explosion, a volume commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Five Flavours Film Festival.)

Warsaw’s venerable Muranow theater, site of the Five Flavours Film Festival

One of the most striking trends in contemporary Asian cinema is the resurgence of wuxia movies, a traditional Chinese film genre about chivalric sword-fighting heroes and heroines in ancient and classical China. In 2015 Poland’s Five Flavours Film Festival took part in the trend through its series “Taiwanese Wuxia Films,” which featured The Assassin, a critically acclaimed new film that took the Best Director award at Cannes, as well as revival screenings of Dragon Inn (1967) and A Touch of Zen (1971)—both known as classic auteur takes on the genre—and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a 2000 blockbuster whose unexpected global success helped launch the current revival.

With its ancient temporal setting and specifically Chinese locales and history, the current wuxia revival may at first seem to have little in common with the varied geographies and frequently urban stories in Five Flavours’ usual focus on contemporary southeast Asian cinema. However, in the ten years since the Five Flavours festival was founded, China has erupted from a once closed and underdeveloped film market to the world’s largest, meaning that moviegoers in Asia and throughout the rest of the world are increasingly impacted by political and cultural tastes within this global superpower. Hollywood has already registered this effect, as has been evident in recent movies where previously omnipotent American studios have started to modify productions to appease Chinese censors or otherwise cater to mainland Chinese audiences, and the current move towards wuxia should be recognized as a parallel phenomenon. As twenty-first century wuxia movies like The Promise (2005), The Warlords (2007), and An Empress and the Warriors (2008) present glimpses of specifically Chinese cultural influence and power, this generic revival has important artistic and cultural implications, not only for Asian and southeast Asian cinema and filmgoers but indeed for all film lovers—like those who attend the Five Flavours Film Festival—who may be at some geographical distance from Asia but nevertheless will likely be affected by this major trend in contemporary cinematic culture.

Mythic imagery in early wuxia film, The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple

To best understand wuxia’s symbolic importance, it is helpful to know its origins, a history that goes almost as far back to the beginnings of cinema itself. Drawing inspiration from the centuries-old Chinese tradition of wuxia or “knightly” literature, early wuxia movies were among some of the best known narrative films to be made in China during the silent era. The 1928-1932 serial film, The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple, for example, was based on a popular serialized newspaper fiction, and its pioneering use of wires to enhance movement and suspend actors above ground proved so captivating that the films helped ensure growth in China’s then still emerging film industry and audience.

Mainland ingénue Zhang Ziyi debuts opposite Hong Kong icon Chow Yun-fat in Ang Lee’s homage to King Hu’s Touch of Zen in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Wuxia’s vitality in the Chinese mainland, however, did not last long, as Republican nationalists determined to modernize China according to western models banned the genre in 1931 on the grounds that its mythic imagery of “flying swordsmen” with quasi-supernatural powers perpetuated regressive feudalism and superstition. This ban remained in effect for decades, but rather than causing a total end of the genre wuxia simply relocated, as Shanghai filmmakers fleeing mainland tumult during the wars and rise of Communism emigrated to Hong Kong and Taiwan in the middle of the last century. Hong Kong in particular benefited from this development, and wuxia was one of the most distinct film genres produced by the prolific Hong Kong film industry in the 1950s and 1960s. King Hu, the celebrated director behind Dragon Inn and A Touch of Zen, is among the most famous of the Shanghai émigrés whose work in Hong Kong and Taiwan both energized the local film industries and brought international acclaim; this group also includes Chang Cheh, the famed Shaw Brothers director (and John Woo mentor) behind wuxia classics like The One-Armed Swordsman (1966) and Golden Swallow (1968). The legacy of these early wuxia maestros was long lasting: it was because he had loved such movies while growing up in Taiwan as child of mainland immigrants that Hollywood-trained Ang Lee was inspired to make Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the millennial film starring a variety of new and established Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland stars that helped establish the formula that most current wuxia movies follow.

There are many more things worth noting in wuxia’s history since their mid-twentieth century émigré production and their sudden global visibility with Crouching Tiger a half century later. Throughout its middle decades the genre was strongly associated with female protagonists, providing an interesting contrast with western film conventions in which action cinema is typically associated with masculinity, and despite its manufacture in Hong Kong and Taiwan wuxia also was influenced by regional parallels such as Japan’s chanbara sword flicks, whose name is said to come from the sound of clashing swords. By the late 1960s wuxia also had to compete with kung fu, then an emerging but stylistically distinct weaponless Chinese-language martial arts movie tradition whose greater realism was more directly associated with Hong Kong. Hong Kong icons Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, in fact, both got their start in kung fu movies, and their subsequent global fame helped spread the Hong Kong brand of virtuoso physical ingenuity sited in a charismatic single star that is very different from tradition-steeped, special effects enhanced wuxia. Indeed, for those familiar with Bruce Lee’s popularity among African Americans and populations throughout the developing world, for many years when people thought of “Chinese-language martial arts film” they probably thought not of wuxia but of kung fu, therefore suggesting how effective non-wuxia film genres were becoming in displacing their predecessor, even to the point of competing with Hollywood in capturing worldwide attention.

By contrast, today’s wuxia films, unlike those of 1950s and 1960s wuxia—and even Hollywood–infused Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—are now once again strongly associated with mainland China, renewing a direct connection between content and site of production that has not existed for nearly a century. This reversal from its previous history of migration and adaptation is fostered by a Chinese state policy that since the mid-2000s incentivizes the use of mainland locations, financing, crews and talent, and also mandates politically palatable content. These conditions favor wuxia because the genre both takes advantage of mainland locales and appeals to state-appointed censors with their sumptuous imagery of Chinese pageantry, but then also come loaded with political implications. Because wuxia’s return to the mainland has been contemporaneous with China’s rapid ascendance as a global superpower, the genre’s resurgence invites comparisons with similar political actions by the Chinese state to compel subjection among neighboring nations and populations.

Hong Kong’s 1997 reunification with China, for example, was often described in official Chinese policy as huigui or “return,” thus revealing the ideological ambiguities that surround the current wuxia revival, depending on which side or from what perspective one views it. For filmmakers and policy makers in China—and indeed perhaps for most mainland citizens and filmgoers—this reclaiming by China of an emblematically “Chinese” cultural product is probably a great source of pride, as it shows the nation’s growing global prominence and particularly its ability to offer seductive, engrossing alternatives to the western cultural dominance of Hollywood.  Similarly, from the specialized perspective of filmmakers and film talent, regardless of their position within or outside of China, the sudden popularity of and resources for wuxia movies offers unprecedented artistic opportunities, in which actors are costumed in imperial finery and directors can shoot in exotic locales with armies of extras of which D.W. Griffith could only dream. These two groups may have little in common, but in either case whether they pause to think about or even recognize wuxia’s political or historical symbolism, for these viewers and practitioners the significance of the genre’s revival and mainland return is likely drowned out by the visual and narrative pleasures of wuxia’s trademark spectacle.

In John Woo’s epic Red Cliff (2008-2009), a general surveys an army of Chinese extras (played by actual Chinese People’s Liberation Army [PLA] soldiers.

Mainland-born film and martial arts icon Jet Li–who once performed for Nixon at the White House–embodies Chinese state power in Hero

For more suspicious or politically guarded filmgoers and China watchers, however, it is precisely wuxia’s capacity to engross or distract with sumptuous spectacle that some caution against the genre’s rising cultural and commercial prominence.  Alarums first began to be raised with Hero, a 2002 film about the Qin emperor who first unified China in 221 BC, and which at the time of its release was the most expensive and highest grossing movie in Chinese history. Directed by famed former Fifth Generation filmmaker, Zhang Yimou, Hero’s plot and many thrilling scenes of bloody sacrifice were seen as fairly unambiguous romanticizing of Chinese national unity and power. Prominent American film critics such as J. Hoberman, who writes for the influential New York weekly magazine, The Village Voice, compares Zhang to Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl and went so far as to accuse it of fascism. To be sure, such histrionic rhetoric may say as much about American  anticommunist Sinophobia as it does about the film itself, but it nevertheless calls attention to certain trends in the wuxia cycle that Hero helped consolidate. As these critics suggest, new wuxia movies exploit the symbiosis between their martial content and the actual circumstances of their production within mainland China to promote Chinese culture and power. The political and cultural implications of these new wuxia films thus go far beyond merely using those images of Chinese power to challenge competing cinemas such as Hong Kong and Hollywood. Rather, for vulnerable populations that are threatened by Chinese power—including particularly neighboring places such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, and the Philippines—these images might be tantamount to a twenty-first century Red Scare.

The Five Flavours Film Festival has so far prospered unburdened by this wuxia-specific debate, and as a contributor to this catalog it is not my desire to stake a position on either perspective. Rather, in reviewing wuxia’s history and bringing it to the attention of Five Flavours supporters I hope only to cast a spotlight on one of the many distinct traditions of Asian cinema that makes the region one of the world’s most diverse filmscapes. It is this quality of contemporary Asian cinema that the Five Flavors Film Festival deserves credit for celebrating, particularly as it brings Asian film to audiences who might not otherwise experience it in such variety and depth. Indeed, with specific regard to wuxia, Five Flavours’ recent engagement of The Assassin exemplifies the genre’s manifold pleasures, even suggesting an alternative to the politically divisive claims currently surrounding wuxia. Directed by internationally acclaimed Taiwan filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien and starring Taiwan-born beauty Shu Qi, the movie about a female assassin’s mounting ambivalence about the actions for which she has been trained both revives the genre’s rich tradition of female warriors and perhaps uses that progressive perspective to underscore a more striking political break with the state conformity advocated in most recent wuxia. (Like most wuxia films, the story follows the spiritual journey of a chivalric knight, but unlike all of the recent mainland wuxia films and more in the tradition of émigré filmmakers like King Hu and Ang Lee, The Assassin emphasizes a protagonist’s gradual disillusionment with institutional tradition.)

Taiwan-born star Shu Qi embodies ambivalence and reinvention as the eponymous protagonist in The Assassin

Whether or not the Cannes jury was aware of the complicated geopolitics and cultural history behind this emblematic Chinese genre, its high profile acclaim of The Assassin suggests alternate pleasures possible through continued generic engagement, innovation and change. The next ten years of Chinese and Asian cinema should be interesting for both wuxia and the Five Flavours Film Festival. Whether wuxia continues in the vein alleged of most recent examples of the genre or diversifies in interesting ways like The Assassin, the ongoing cycle promises much more spectacular imagery, and a trend that other Asian and southeast Asian cinema in the Five Flavours Film Festival will have to consider.

* J. Hoberman, “Man with No Name Tells a Story of Heroics, Color Coordination,”     Village Voice, August 17, 2004

Additional Reading:
Petrus Liu, Stateless Subjects: Chinese Martial Arts Literature and Postcolonial History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011)

Stephen Teo, Chinese Martial Arts Cinema: The Wuxia Tradition (Edinburgh: Edinburg
University Press, 2009)

Zhang Zhen, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896-1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006)

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