Opening remarks of the "Opening of Hong Kong" column
Most people born in the 1970s and 1980s grew up watching Hong Kong movies. Like Jia Zhangke's reappearance in his films, many people watched "Drunken Fist", "Eagle Claw Iron Cloth Shirt", "Young Master Dragon", "Police Story" in the tapes that had been ripped more than a dozen times when they were children, and repeatedly watched Zhou Runfa, Wan Ziliang, Li Xiuxian, Zhong Chuhong, Lin Qingxia, and Wang Zuxian in the video hall and the closed-circuit television in the compound, and they and they cultivated our earliest interest in movies.
Hong Kong cinema in the 1970s and 1990s was the golden age of Chinese cinema and the only Asian film that had a real impact on the world film industry. Even today, when Hong Kong cinema is in full decline, the ideas, genres, technologies and talents it exports still play a pivotal role in the mainland market.
How does this land, which is less populous and in size than a second-tier city on a continent, do you do this? What has it done to really prop up this powerful film industry?
I wrote this column to try to explore some answers as an outsider/outsider. However, we will not start with an overly grand perspective, an overly regionalized content or an overly academic point of view, nor will we repeatedly "chew" those classic films and characters that have been chewed through by film history, experts, media and online texts, but we will try our best to find some details about the film itself that may be ignored by the vast majority of audiences, and examine those old films, people and events from some microscopic and interesting perspectives, so as to give Hong Kong films another possible appearance.
Wen 丨 Kaiyin
1
In 1978, Zhang Che had four works released in Hong Kong. Two of them, "Five Poisons" and "Crippled", were subsequently touted by Western B-movie fans as classics of cult kung fu films. "Five Poisons" was even included in Entertainment Weekly's list of the world's top 50 cult films, and Quentin Tarantino praised it and adapted some of its bridges to the concept of "Kill Bill".
The Five Poisons (1978)
Compared with "Five Poisons", which has a well-set concept, the design of the eccentric torture device and the plot suspense that runs through it, the "evil" of "Mutilation" takes a different path: despite the premise of the physical and mental disabilities of the four protagonists, it no longer has too much entanglement with the concept of the text throughout, but allows the characters to concentrate on immersing themselves in a state of silent fighting with paranoid techniques, so that the film as a whole forms a sense of "zombie" movement outside the plot. When you taste it carefully, the method of creating such a full of physical "evil qi" is actually inextricably linked to the aesthetic methodology of classical Chinese opera.
Mutilation (1978)
2
Chinese opera has an important influence on the development of Hong Kong cinema that cannot be ignored. Since the late 1950s, the rise of Wong Mei Tunes has applied many of the external formal elements of opera (costumes, props, steps, singing voices, and narrative structure and rhythm) to film production, and its great commercial success has laid the foundation for Shaw's leading position in the Hong Kong film industry. A new generation of Hong Kong commercial film directors who rose in the 1960s, such as Zhang Che, Hu Jinquan, Cheng Gang and others, are all Peking Opera lovers. Among them, Zhang Che is a high-level ticket holder, who has a deep understanding of the history and aesthetics of Peking Opera.
Zhang Che (first from left)
In the late 1960s, Zhang Che and Hu Jinquan promoted the improvement of the format of costume films. They drew on the characteristics of Westerns and Japanese sword films, and removed the stage-based elements of Shaw's costume films, such as excessively cumbersome costumes, slow and fine steps of the characters, exaggerated and detached performance methods, and lines with the color of the opera text, making the film more sensory impact as a whole.
But on the other hand, the core aesthetic characteristics of Chinese opera (especially Peking Opera) are subtly preserved by directors in Chinese-style action movies. It is reflected in the fact that the film's emphasis on dance movements and formal beauty is far greater than the construction of plot content, and the shaping of characters with external personality characteristics is far better than the creation of a logical connection twist and turn plot.
At the same time, the "dissociative" characteristics of Peking Opera performance, summarized by the German drama theorist Brecht– that is, the performance mode of the characters get rid of the Western drama system of "entering the play", cut off the inevitable connection between the stimulation and response in the performance and plot construction, and focus on the formal beauty of the body and posture outside the drama - have also been completely inherited by Hong Kong action films.
It developed into the 1970s, and finally expanded the special genre of kung fu films: in the history of world cinema, there has never been a commercial film in the history of world cinema with the theme of tempering a certain human body skill.
Drunken Fist (1978)
In this type of film, the long and whimsical training, duels, and fights often occupy the main length of the film, and the plot becomes a secondary series of cutscenes. In particular, the design and presentation of the action often jumps out of the narrative framework of the film, forming a kind of rough fracture and a very sensory stimulation of the viewing experience. These can be seen as a screen aesthetic extension of the "separation" performance method of Peking Opera, which adds a strong cult color to the film.
3
Zhang Che, who is well versed in the aesthetics of Peking Opera, has played a decisive role in promoting the innovation of costume action films. He not only changed the dominance of the female "Danjiao" in the film, injecting male "masculinity" into the film, but also constantly thought of ways to create formal elements with sensory impact effects, so that it could drive the development of the plot story. The intention to break a limb in three "one-armed knife" works is a typical example.
The One-Armed Knife (1967)
The genre of Zhang Che's work is also divided into different stages: in the 1960s, he pioneered the new martial arts films; in the early 1970s, he was keen on fashion and action films in the Republic of China; in the second half of the 1970s, with the rise of kung fu films, he also turned to the screen to develop a variety of strange kung fu and tricks.
By 1978, when bruce Lee's post-bureaucratic kung fu films had flooded the screen, Zhang Che began to study how to combine the formal elements used in martial arts films in the past with some stylized treatment techniques with typical B-grade film colors to inject some different author colors into kung fu films. "Broken" is the direct result of this series of reflections.
The plot of "Broken" is very direct and simple: Du Tiandao, the lord of The Heavenly DaoZhuang, is famous for his black tiger fist and runs rampant in the countryside. Because his son was cut off from his arms at an early age and could only learn martial arts with a pair of iron arms, he was keen to humiliate his opponents with physical disabilities. The four protagonists of the film, Cargo Lang, Blacksmith, Short Worker, and Chivalry, are violently tortured by Du Tiandao and others into blindness, deafness, legless disability, and idiot cerebral palsy. These four people then turned their physical weaknesses into advantages under the guidance of Gao Ren, and after practicing martial arts, they fought with Du Tiandao to avenge their blood and hatred.
In martial arts films in the late 1960s, Zhang Che often used the bridge section of the disemboweled stomach, severed limbs and broken arms, and rivers of blood, adding sensory impact expression to the film. In particular, the setting of the broken arm adds the intention of the "male root" to the action that is full of "masculinity", so that the humiliation suffered by the protagonist and the martial arts practiced again exude a strong desire to recreate masculinity.
In "Crippled", Zhang Che simply melts all the physical disability pain that human beings can suffer, so that all the men in the film suffer physical destruction blows, and ignite the fierce fire of male revenge for the audience in the subconscious.
However, completely different from the "One-Armed Knife" series, Zhang Che's emotional portrayal brushstrokes this time are very restrained, he neither renders the protagonists' pain after losing their limb function, nor does he portray their humiliating mentality after being crippled, but after these strokes are directly cut into the paragraphs of practicing martial arts, they each design corresponding skills and imaginative props, and depict how they exercise their martial arts skills with great interest in large paragraphs. The main trunk of the film then slides from a narrative of revenge to a large-scale spectacle display of indulging in the practice of learning art and understanding the magic of magic.
At the end of the 1970s, Liu Jialiang, Yuan Heping, and Jackie Chan's kung fu films also had large practice sessions, but they would still construct some changes in the psychology of the characters in the narrative (the most common is the psychological curvature of the characters who were defeated and humiliated, who worked hard to learn the art of xue shame and then became famous in the world), and were accustomed to attaching a set of philosophical and rational words to each move, elevating its cultural connotation, and supplemented by comedy and male and female feelings as a condiment, so that the overall appearance of the film was richer and more entertaining.
Zhang Che also used this approach from time to time in previous martial arts films and Action Films of the Republic of China. However, in "Broken", he and screenwriter Ni Kuang do the opposite with a very simplified approach, not only with the all-male cast completely excluding women (the emotional drama disappears), nor wandering outside the practice of gags, and even the "theoretical" summary of the martial arts practice is omitted.
Therefore, in addition to a brief explanation of the plot as a cutscene, the film is a large number of action demonstrations like dance acrobatics (such as Guo Chai and Jiang Sheng's demonstration contest with an iron ring as a prop weapon). Its compositional logic is reminiscent of the Peking Opera martial arts "Three Forks": after a short story, the actors do not say a word, and the interaction of body movements and the superb display of skills constitute the main body of the repertoire.
This sense of processing brings a very special atmosphere of withdrawal to the film, and it seems that the reaction of the characters in the film to external stimuli does not conform to the prescriptive routine: for example, Du Tiandao, played by Chen Guantai, witnesses the killing of his wife at the beginning of the film, and his son loses his arms, he does not have any grief, but only has a heavy face, and then opens his posture to fight with the enemy; in the film, his master and brother are kicked in the stomach by iron feet, and at the end of the film, his son dies. But he almost did not change his face and was indifferent, just frowning and fully engaged in the next stage of the fight.
Such a completely "indifferent" performance would certainly not have been possible if it had not been approved by director Zhang Che. According to the theory of stanislavsky's system, Chen Guantai's performance is a zero point of failure. However, according to Brecht's summary of the Peking Opera "separation" performance model, such a character performance in "Mutilation" reverses the film's conventional routine, giving the kung fu film a strange and withdrawing killing atmosphere and a fierce posture of Mu Ne with a strong sense of strangeness.
When each character in the film is more or less dealing with the interaction and reaction in the performance in the same indifferent way, we get a new film perception experience: all the characters are like silent "zombies" obsessively focused on the martial arts action of suppressing the flow of the clouds, which seems to transcend all the enmity and hatred and tenaciously reach the state of perfect action performance. Invisibly, such a form coincides with the "strange" internal aesthetic principle of Chinese opera, especially Peking Opera.
Perhaps it is Zhang Che's subconscious knowledge of the principles of Peking Opera that allows him to design such a strange and interesting overall sensory intention for "Broken". The unique "cult" color in the film is not essentially derived from the amputated limb setting, nor is it a variety of techniques and props, but relies on the strange atmosphere of withdrawing from the strange, and finally being set off to the peak.
4
The American literary critic Susan Sontag once said of the French director Robert Bresson: he aims to provide a sensory pleasure that does not depend on "content", so that the audience can feel a sense of distance from the matter, not to empathize with the plot and characters, and Bresson does this by creating de-dramatic situations, the rupture of the actor's performance, and the indifference of the characters' emotions.
Interestingly, Sontag's evaluation of Bresson can almost completely translate to describe Zhang Che's idea of directing "Crippled": replacing the intention of the storyline with strong martial arts movements, creating a withdrawal effect with the indifferent reaction of the characters, and creating a strange anti-dramatic overall atmosphere with emotional fractures and postured performances (such as the unconventional solemn posture of the three protagonists at the end of the battle, silently leaving the scene and ignoring the corpses of their comrades) and so on.
If Bresson in a parallel world were to shoot a Chinese kung fu film, he would probably create a distancing atmosphere like "Broken". On the other hand, it is these distinctive aesthetic considerations and choices that make "Broken" stand out from a group of kung fu fist and foot films in the late 1970s, with a touch of the unique style of cult authors.