CHINESE AND KOREAN NOIR

This chapter focuses on film noir in the contexts of the Hong Kong and South Korean cinemas, two Asian film industries that have produced some of the most remarkable films noirs of the contemporary era. If Asian noir is seen as a later phenomenon in the development of film noir in world cinema, South Korean cinema has produced some of the most striking examples of neo-noir in the past ten years or so and it may be argued that South Korean filmmakers have inherited a wider tradition of noir cinema in the world and simply perpetuated it within their own industry. However, from an Asian cinema perspective, the South Korean films are part of a tradition that arguably stretched back to the Hong Kong cinema's New Wave which materialised in 1979 through the first feature films of Ann Hui (The Secret), Tsui Hark (The Butterfly Murders), Alex Cheung (Cops and Robbers) and Peter Yung (The System). All of these are films noirs in their conscious conveyance of a ‘new mood of cynicism, pessimism, and darkness’, as Paul Schrader has defined noir in his seminal article ‘Notes on film noir’. The Hong Kong New Wave simply infused this mood into the Asian cinema mainstream which at the time was mostly dominated by Hong Kong martial arts pictures, comedies and romantic melodramas. So pervasive was the noir sensibility in the Hong Kong New Wave films that it was not so much a New Wave as a Noir Wave. The New Wave generation of directors sought to suture the tone and sensibility of noir into the body fabric of Hong Kong cinema as a kind of collective mood-motif which had not really been present before. Noir's manifestation in Hong Kong cinema can be attributed to the fact that many of the New Wave directors were educated in the West and had brought back with them Western influences. The 1970s was a time of transition in which the dawn of the New Wave marked a modernist phase of development in Hong Kong cinema which had, after all, patterned itself after Hollywood. As noir took critical hold in the American critical discourse during the 1970s (Paul Schrader's ‘Notes on film noir’ was first published in 1972), Hong Kong was affected one way or another.

36th Chamber of Shaolin/Shaolin sanshiliu fang (1978)

The Adventures of Fong Sai-yuk/Fang Shiyu da leitai (1938)

All Men Are Brothers/Dangkou zhi (1975)

The Angry Guest/E ke (1972)

The Ardent Couple/Rexue yuanyang (1928)

Ashes of Time/Dongxie Xidu (1994)

The Assassin/Da cike (1967)

The Banquet/Yeyan (2006)

A Battle of Wits/Mo gong (2006)

Beach of the War Gods/Zhanshen tan (1972)

A Better Tomorrow/Yingxiong bense (1986)

The Big Boss/Tangshan daxiong (1971)

The Black Pirate (1926)

The Black Tavern/Heidian (1972)

The Blade/Dao (1995)

Blood Brothers/Ci Ma (1973)

The Boxer from Shantung/Ma Yongzhen (1972)

The Boxer Rebellion/Baguo lianjun (1975)

The Brave and the Evil/Heibai dao (1971)

The Bride with White Hair/Baifa monü zhuan (1993) (see also The Story of the White Haired Demon Girl)

Brothers Five/Wuhu tulong (1970)

Buddha's Palm/Rulai shenzhang (1964-1965)

The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple/Huoshao Honglian si (1928-1931)

The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple/Huoshao Honglian si (1940)

The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple/Huoshao Honglian si (1963)

The Butterfly Chalice/Hudie bei (1965)

The Butterfly Murders/Die bian (1979)

Challenge of the Masters/Lu Acai yu Huang Feihong (1976)

The Chinese Boxer/Longhu dou (1970)

A Chinese Ghost Story/Qiannü youhun (1987)

A City Called Dragon/Longcheng shiri (1970)

Clans of Intrigue/Chu Liuxiang (1977)

Cold Blade/Long Muxiang (1970)

Come Drink With Me/Da zuixia (1966)

Confucius/Kong fuzi (1940)

Crippled Avengers/Can que (1978)

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon/Wohu canglong (2000)

Curse of the Golden Flower/Mancheng jindai huangjin jia (2006)

We now reach the concluding chapter of this monograph to examine the status and nature of the wuxia genre in its present development. In the new millennium, we see the genre's tendency to manifest as made-in-China historicist blockbusters mixing the epic form with wuxia. Examples are Tsui Hark's Legend of Zu (2001), Qi jian (Seven Swords, 2005), Zhang Yimou's Hero (2002), House of Flying Daggers (2004), Curse of the Golden Flower (2006), He Ping's Tiandi yingxiong (Warriors of Heaven and Earth, 2004), Chen Kaige's Wuji (The Promise, 2005), Feng Xiaogang's Yeyan (The Banquet, 2006), Jacob Cheung's A Battle of Wits (2006), Peter Chan's The Warlords (2007), Ching Siu-tung's Jiangshan meiren (An Empress and the Warriors, 2008), and John Woo's Chibi (Red Cliff, first instalment 2008, second instalment upcoming at the time of writing).

Having been grafted onto the period epic, wuxia becomes a showcase of Chinese history, seeking to be universally accepted while at the same time locating itself within the historicist confines of the nation-state. In this chapter, I examine how wuxia in the new millennium shifts back and forth between two currents, nationalism and transnationalism, and in the process, question how the genre's characteristics and themes are refashioned or remain the same. The film that initiated the whole process was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, released in 2000, and which became the first Chinese film to score a huge success at the box-office in the West.

General editors: Linda Badley and R. Barton Palmer

Founding editor: Steven Jay Schneider

Traditions in World Cinema is a series of textbooks and monographs devoted to the analysis of currently popular and previously under-examined or undervalued film movements from around the globe. Also intended for general interest readers, the textbooks in this series offer undergraduate- and graduate-level film students accessible and comprehensive introductions to diverse traditions in world cinema. The monographs open up for advanced academic study more specialised groups of films, including those that require theoretically-oriented approaches. Both textbooks and monographs provide thorough examinations of the industrial, cultural, and socio-historical conditions of production and reception.

The flagship textbook for the series includes chapters by noted scholars on traditions of acknowledged importance (the French New Wave, German Expressionism), recent and emergent traditions (New Iranian, post-Cinema Novo), and those whose rightful claim to recognition has yet to be established (the Israeli persecution film, global found footage cinema). Other volumes concentrate on individual national, regional or global cinema traditions. As the introductory chapter to each volume makes clear, the films under discussion form a coherent group on the basis of substantive and relatively transparent, if not always obvious, commonalities. These commonalities may be formal, stylistic or thematic, and the groupings may, although they need not, be popularly identified as genres, cycles or movements (Japanese horror, Chinese martial arts cinema, Italian Neorealism).

In the previous chapter, I stated that King Hu and Zhang Che were the two most recognised directors of the new school wuxia movement. To Hu, the wuxia genre was a vehicle with which to transmit his thoughts on the historicist model of the female knight-errant in at least two key films of the movement, Come Drink With Me and A Touch of Zen. Zhang Che on the other hand fashioned the masculine identity of xia as a heroic archetype in the Hong Kong cinema and changed its culture of the feminised leading man that had prevailed for nearly two decades. Zhang saw the wuxia genre as a reaction against the Hong Kong cinema's conservatism as well as against the staid norms of the genre itself, particularly in the depiction of xia heroism which he interpreted as a predominantly male form and activity. Given that Hu is generally recognised for his self-fashioning identification with the female knight-errant, it is worth asking whether the prominence he gave to the female knight-errant was eventually a reaction against the trend of the masculine hero which gathered momentum under Zhang's direction. At the same time, it is also worth investigating how the male and female knight-errant archetypes interacted with each other in his films.

In the previous chapter, I accounted for some of the factors contributing to the rise of the wuxia shenguai genre. Intellectuals initially regarded the warrior tradition in the genre as one of the elements that could provide a positive counterweight to China's image as the ‘sick man of Asia’. The genre would function as a tool to encourage heroism along the line of New Heroism which could eventually help to foster a military tradition that had long disappeared in China. According to this line of thought, the scholar tradition that took over had atrophied and let the nation down badly, contributing to its decline. However, the genre did not live up to the humanist ideals of New Heroism and, according to its detractors, descended instead into the lower depths of pornography, feudalism and superstition. The genre was now seen as backward, running contrary to the principles of the May Fourth Movement that was driving China since 1919 to refashion itself as a modern nation conforming to the precepts of science and democracy.

This chapter recounts the literary antecedents of wuxia, examining the ideals and characteristics of Chinese knight-errantry as they have passed down through historical records and fiction, before proceeding to a review of the wuxia literature of the early twentieth century which directly preceded the cinematic genre and helped to bring about its birth. The cinema in turn has become a major historiographic apparatus of the wuxia genre, creating new filmic texts often to support and bolster the literary opuses on which directors and screenwriters had drawn. I explore the beginnings of the cinematic genre in the Shanghai film industry, tracing its growth through the early studio system of production and its culmination, four short years later, as the genre fell out of favour with intellectuals and the government, which then declared a ban on the genre.

Literary and Philosophical Traditions

The literary and philosophical antecedents from whence the character of xia was derived may be traced as far back as the Warring States period (403–221 bce) and perhaps as early as the Spring and Autumn period (722–481 bce). But it was not until the time of the Han dynasty (206 bce–220 ce) that a substantive history of the lives and traditions of xia was written. Sima Qian's Shi ji (Records of History), written between 104–91 bce during the reign of Han Wudi (the ‘Martial Emperor’) contains two chapters, ‘Biographies of Knights- Errant’ (‘Youxia liezhuan’), and ‘Biographies of the Assassins’ (‘Cike liezhuan’), which are usually cited as the historical records of remarkable personalities broadly described as xia and their feats of chivalry and loyalty in the Warring States and Qin periods.

It is only fitting for me to point out that this study of the history of the wuxia film genre is inevitably incomplete, and that there are many spaces still left to fill. Some of the omissions are dictated by certain constraints. There are areas and periods I have omitted out of necessity because either the films are lost or that there is simply no critical impetus to study them due to long-held perceptions that they are too minor and that it is just too time-consuming to uncover extant film texts and other research materials. Much of the Cantonese cinema's wuxia films of the 1950s and 1960s belong in this category as do the Taiwanesedialect wuxia films produced in Taiwan in the 1960s.

I have also largely omitted the Taiwanese Mandarin cinema's wuxia films, essentially for lack of space in this monograph which demands a high degree of selectivity. Thus while I would have liked to write more on the films of Jimmy Wang Yu, Joseph Kuo (the ‘Bronzemen’ series), Wang Xinglei and Zhang Meijun (who made the first 3-D wuxia picture which I first saw when it was released in the late 1970s but which I have never had occasion to see again), it is impossible to cover them all in this volume. Similarly, much of the work in the Hong Kong Mandarin martial arts cinema (by such directors as Huang Feng, Luo Wei, Cheng Gang, Zhang Zengze) is left out simply because it is too voluminous to cover comprehensively.

The wuxia film is the oldest genre in the Chinese cinema that has remained popular to the present day. Yet despite its longevity, its history has barely been told until fairly recently, as if there was some force denying that it ever existed. Indeed, the genre was as good as non-existent in China, its country of birth, for some fifty years, being proscribed over that time, while in Hong Kong, where it flowered, it was generally derided by critics and largely neglected by film historians. In recent years, it has garnered a following not only among fans but serious scholars. David Bordwell, Zhang Zhen, David Desser and Leon Hunt have treated the wuxia film with the critical respect that it deserves, addressing it in the contexts of larger studies of Hong Kong cinema (Bordwell), the Chinese cinema (Zhang), or the generic martial arts action film and the genre known as kung fu (Desser and Hunt). In China, Chen Mo and Jia Leilei have published specific histories, their books sharing the same title, ‘A History of the Chinese Wuxia Film’, both issued in 2005.

This book also offers a specific history of the wuxia film, the first in the English language to do so. It covers the evolution and expansion of the genre from its beginnings in the early Chinese cinema based in Shanghai to its transposition to the film industries in Hong Kong and Taiwan and its eventual shift back to the Mainland in its present phase of development.

As the Wong Fei-hung series reached the end of the 1950s, it inevitably wore itself out through repeated variations of a theme, and although it would continue to run on throughout the 1960s, audiences were beginning to tire of the series and they returned once again to the wuxia film seeing it as a refreshing and exciting if also familiar genre. The freshness of wuxia in this period emanated from the ‘new school’ (xinpai) fiction that had seized the popular imagination by way of the newspapers and its practice of serialisations of martial arts novels. This literary phenomenon began in the mid-1950s, and introduced new writers of wuxia fiction such as Jin Yong and Liang Yusheng to the public for the first time. The new school rejuvenated the genre and the popularity of their stories increased the circulations of the newspapers that serialised them.

Liang Yusheng, born in 1922, started writing in 1954 for the New Evening Post (Xin wan bao). Liang wrote his first ‘serial’ Longhu dou jinghua (The Lion and Tiger Vie in the Capital), apparently at the behest of his editors who wanted to take advantage of the great public interest in martial arts following a contest fought in Macau on 17 January 1954 between a master of the White Crane school and a Taiji master. This event received intensive coverage from the press, and is generally considered by historians to have been the catalyst of the ‘new school’ wuxia literature.