![]() The action choreography is by Lau Kar-leung, who would spend most of the next decade working for Chang alongside fellow choreographer Tong Gaai. ![]() Chang brings a morbid psychology to the genre, obsessed with death and honor, his films are bloody and operatic. Learning an entirely new fighting technique thanks to an old, mangled manual, he carves a sad swath of destruction through his enemies. Resolved to retire from the world of violence, he is sucked back in by the need for revenge after that same master is murdered. Jimmy Wang Yu plays the eponymous swordsman, a terrific fighter who suffers his grievous injury at the petulant hands of his master’s daughter. The One-Armed Swordsman (Chang Cheh, 1967) The finale erupts in a magical spectacle, equal parts The Wizard of Oz and Kurosawa’s Sanjuro.Ģ. With careful framing and rhythmic editing, director King Hu emphasizes the grace and beauty of Cheng’s movements: she was a trained dancer, not a fighter. The first half plays out in what would become one of the genre’s most iconic locations (an inn), as she meets an array of increasingly powerful villains. Cheng Pei-pei plays a highly-skilled warrior investigating the capture of her brother. Come Drink with Me wasn’t their first wuxia, but it was their first great one. In the mid-1960s, the Shaw Brothers studio shifted emphasis from brightly-colored musicals to brightly-colored action films, launching an explosive transformation of the Hong Kong film industry the effects of which are still being felt today. ![]() The following is a list of 30 of the genre’s highlights, taking a reasonably expansive view of generic boundaries and arranged in chronological order: King Hu and Tsui Hark are the essential wuxia directors, and Jet Li, Ti Lung and Jimmy Wang Yu the genre’s greatest stars. Strictly speaking, wuxia should probably be confined to stories of code-following traveling knights-errant, but genres are a fluid and conventional thing, especially in Hong Kong, where films regularly mash together comedy, action, romance, melodrama and horror elements into a single impure whole, and as such, stark lines are difficult to draw. Wuxia films often incorporate fantasy elements, using special effects to allow their heroes to fly, shoot concentrated chi energy out of their hands (or eyes) and in other ways violate the laws of physics. Its heroes follow a very specific code of honor as they navigate the jianghu, an underworld of outlaws and bandits outside the normal streams of civilization. Wuxia is a much older form, based ultimately in the long tradition of Chinese adventure literature, in classic novels such as The Water Margin or Journey to the West, or more contemporary works by authors like Louis Cha and Gu Long. Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan are its most famous practitioners and Lau Kar-leung its most important director. The kung fu film is newer and focuses primarily on hand-to-hand combat, it’s steeped in traditional fighting forms and there’s a general emphasis on the physical skill of the performer: special effects are generally disdained. With the highly-anticipated release of two King Hu masterpieces on home video by the Masters of Cinema organization, as well as the critical success of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin last year, it seems like the wuxia film is making some inroads into the Western critical consciousness. So I thought I’d put together a guide to some of the essential films of the genre. The Chinese martial arts movie is generally split into two primary subgeneres: the kung fu film and the wuxia film.
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