Last year, around this time, I was watching Tang Chia’s first film, Shaolin Prince, when I came to a halting realization: I wasn’t really enjoying it. The film, Tang’s directorial debut after two-and-a-half decade’s worth of action choreography and stunt work, boasts quite a reputation among genre fans. Its witch’s brew plot and style combines a fairly rote super-plot involving delayed revenge against a traitorous imperial usurper with physical comedy, unusually intricate wire-work and practical effects, an interlude with supernatural conflict, blistering hand-to-hand combat and swordplay, and one of the oddest weapons that Tang Chia, known for designing choreography for esoteric arms, ever devised.
And yet, I turned it off about fifty minutes into the film. One of the villains, a pyromaniac with a huge, flaming saber, was just about to die under Ti Lung’s Shaolin cudgel.
I worried that I had stumbled into the beginning stages of what we fans refer to as “burn-out” on our forums. But I worried that I had burnt out as I devoured Robert Chard’s unfortunately scarce translation of Huanzhulouzhu’s Blades from the Willows, a wuxia novel penned by one of the few first-generation wuxia authors to receive a relatively modern film adaptation (Tsui Hark’s Zu films). I really liked that book, for all of its faults, and another halting realization hit me in my huge lack of self-awareness.I liked reading Blades from the Willows because of its wacky story, the strange and dramatic descriptions of clashing cultural mores and expectations. I loved its weird scenery, the sort of weirdness that verges on a sort of Chinese eldritch. The godlike Taoists and political intrigues and mystical rendering of esoteric martial arts were all the entertainment I couldn’t find, for whatever reason, in a competent film like Shaolin Prince.
And, having finished that novel, I went back to my DVD collection, deciding that I would prove that my preferred genre could still provide me with the entertainment that I crave. I passed over the next three movies in my “to watch” pile.
Choy Lee Fut Kung Fu? Pass.
Showdown at the Cotton Mill? Pass.
Flag of Iron? Forgive me, Venoms fans; I passed on that one too.
And then I looked at a DVD-r of Young Flying Hero. Now we’re talking.
From that point on, my outlook on the genre changed. I wasn’t watching for fight choreography or amazing feats of physical prowess. I watched movies for reasons other than the martial arts, which, for a lot of fans, seems like an outrageous proposition. But, really, a lot of movies contain the same sort of elements that I loved reading in literary form, visualized, even if cheaply, in brain-melting cinema.
Since I’m Chinese illiterate, my options for reading wuxia are limited to what is available in translation, in which wuxia is still, unfortunately, underrepresented. So films, many of which are either subtitled or dubbed in English, are the best way to experience the sort of odd imaginative landscape with which I found myself enamored. Pearl Cheung’s films, long known as the wackiest and strangest kung fu movies around, were now contextualized. And, even in context, movies like Wolf Devil Woman are among the most disconcerting viewings I have witnessed.
We watch and collect movies in this genre for different reasons. Some people watch solely because they love fight choreography; they love the physicality or they appreciate the very high-level applications of often very real martial arts technique. Some people collect because the act of collecting is a hobby in and of itself. Some have a favorite actor or a favorite recurring theme. And those are perfectly valid reasons to watch and collect.
But I’ve found my own reasons. Every time that I pick up a movie, I feel like a sort of cultural archeologist. And searching for another fix of that odd feeling of dizzying cultural vertigo has lead me into Cantonese films from the sixties, those oddities starring Connie Chan and Josephine Siao; I have watched films without subtitles and started collecting, intermittently, films from Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia.
My burn-out, for what it’s worth, was a result of watching these movies for reasons that were not my own. I don’t know Hung Kuen or Nan Chuan and, while I do love a good flick in the style of what we used to call “chop-sockey,” these films do not play on my nostalgia. I was not fortunate enough to grow up with them in the cinema.
It is the continuous search for the new experience, even if found in an old film, that keeps me going back to the genre. Whether I get it from seeing mind-blowing fight choreography or mind-blowing camera work and editing or mind-blowing low-fi special effects, I don’t care.
It’s one of the wonderful things about a genre so huge that it encompasses nearly a hundred years worth of cinema across nearly every country on the continent of Asia, as well as, more recently, America and Europe. There is lots of room to explore.
So, as I said in my previous article for Shaolin Chamber: Let’s watch some movies, kung fu brethren, and if you’ve ever worried that you’re burning out, let’s do some exploring. The undiscovered continent is the most exciting.
And, incidentally, I watched Shaolin Prince again – last night, in fact. I was enthralled.
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