King Hu First Draft

Complete first draft for Imprint Asia.

When viewed from a broad vantage point, the breadth of King Hu's filmography is easy to encapsulate: only thirteen feature films across a thirty-nine year directorial career, almost all in the wuxia action genre that he invented and reconfigured multiple times during his first decade before finding ever-greater difficulty raising the financing he needed to continue making his increasingly out-of-vogue movies. But to confine one's understanding of Hu's achievement to simply his given genre, even more than other masters of their specific foci like Lau Kar-leung, John Carpenter, or Louis Feuillade, is to miss out on the pleasures and depths of one of cinema's greatest artists. As relayed in the essential documentary The King of Wuxia (2022, Lin Jing-jie), King Hu was a voracious learner and avowed perfectionist, exacting control over every aspect of production, with actors, cinematographers, action choreographers, production designers, costumers, and editors all following his careful example. He had a keen eye for detail, endlessly dedicated to creating authentic renderings of his film's physical and temporal time periods, coupling these vivid settings with his long-held appreciation for Peking opera to place stylized characters in archetypal scenarios. Hu, it can be reasonably argued, was not just the foremost director of action films but also the premier director of action on screen period, so fluid and dynamic were his sequences of combat and perambulation alike. The concept of the deluxe box set you're now in possession of, or indeed the ability to even begin to contemplate the extent of Hu's work, would have been unthinkable even ten years ago for the average cinephile in the West. As was and is the case far too many Chinese-language directors, few of his films were available on home video, often forcing a curious cinephile to find bad bootleg rips in an effort to glimpse images more talked about than actually seen. However, in the last decade, there has been a sea change, with virtually all of Hu's most significant films receiving sparkling digital restorations from the Taiwan Film & Audiovisual Institute that, in turn, have led to a growing appreciation of his work apart from his three most well-known films, as deservedly recognized as they are. Born in Beijing in 1931, King Hu was one of many who fled to Hong Kong in 1949 at the close of the Chinese Civil War. He initially worked a succession of poor-paying jobs before happening into filmmaking almost by accident, where he was an actor of some note for eight years. Under the tutelage of his sometime director Li Han-hsiang, Hu became an assistant director at the famed Shaw Brothers studio, including on Li's smash-hit masterpiece The Love Eterne (1963), before making his debut with The Story of Sue San (1964), a by-the-book but powerful melodrama in the huangmei musical tradition that Li mastered. Hu's follow-up, Sons of Good Earth (1965), was the first film that truly bore his signature. Aside from the impossible-to-see The Juvenizer (1981), it is his only film set in the 20th century, following a Northern China community that is eventually beset by the Japanese invasion of the mainland. Taking place across an extended timespan and featuring a large ensemble of characters, it is the closest that Hu ever came to making a conventional war picture. An undeniably patriotic film, it remains of considerable interest for a multitude of reasons: the sole chance to see Hu handling action scenes with guns, the engagement with a small-town setting where allegiances are more forthrightly established than in his later films, and, perhaps most tantalizingly, the only time Hu acted in one of his own films: in his former career, he often played insolent youths, but here he takes on the role of a resistance military captain. The famously short and stout Hu is a somewhat odd fit for a military figure, but the fervent conviction on display, especially during a pivotal scene where he counsels the main characters while silently enduring surgery for a bullet wound, offers a rare chance to see the passion Hu continually had for his filmmaking onscreen. That filmmaking would come to the fore in what, until relatively recently, was Hu's most widely recognized film: Come Drink With Me (1966), commonly regarded as the film that codified the wuxia genre, shifting Shaw Brothers's focus away from huangmei and towards the martial arts films that the studio is best known for today. Musicality, however, was never far from Hu's mind: the film stars Cheng Pei-pei in her star-making role, utilizing her dance background to bring forth a heretofore-unseen grace and rhythm to the extensive action choreography and establishing a template that would propel future female martial arts stars like Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi. Hu, along with martial arts director and actor Han Ying-chieh, established many of his signature techniques here: the use of an inn as a meeting ground for skilled warriors of uncertain allegiances, match-cut editing to evoke the impossible speed and precision of his characters, and hidden trampolines that pushed ordinary aerial motion into the realm of the superhuman. Before the twilight of his career, no film better captures the clash in personalities between Hu's and his producers' vision than Come Drink With Me, which received a sequel—Golden Swallow (1968, Chang Cheh)—that sidelined Cheng's title character in favor of One-Armed Swordsman star Jimmy Wang Yu. Even here, it is not Cheng who participates in the final, overtly supernatural showdown (far bloodier than any subsequent Hu film) but the drunken swordsman played by Yueh Hua. Cheng is by no means ill-served however, and it is her poise and indomitable will that continues to captivate, her and Hu's slow construction of her skillset and willingness to use deadly force that would serve as the bedrock of Hu's next period. Increasingly stifled by Shaw Brothers's formulaic strictures and the general confinement of studio sets, Hu broke his contract and decamped to Taiwan. His first film there was Dragon Inn (1967), possibly the most perfect of action films. Taking full advantage of the dazzling natural vistas of the Taiwanese countryside and the desolate inn custom-built to serve as the main setting of the film, Hu creates an endlessly shifting interplay between his characters and their surroundings, setting our expanding group of valiant heroes against a governmental force hellbent on purging any potential resistance to their rule. Among its cast of King Hu regulars—one of the great pleasures of his oeuvre is seeing familiar faces cast in often diametrically opposed roles—two newcomers, Shih Chun as a wandering warrior and Hsu Feng in a small part as one of the betrayed official's children, would become the actors perhaps most closely associated with Hu's cinema. It's certainly no coincidence that avowed Hu fan Tsui Hark has essayed no fewer than two iterations on Dragon Inn—New Dragon Gate Inn (1992), produced by Tsui and directed by Raymond Lee, and Flying Swords of Dragon Gate (2011)—the scenario is at once readily understandable and yet full of so many little parcels of motivation and mystery that allow each member of the cast to have their own moments to shine. The climax, where it takes a whole crew of warriors to take down the main villain (Pai Ying, another Hu regular), reaches a formal fever pitch that presages the spiritual turn that Hu's cinema would take, and yet it's the final shot, barely twenty seconds long, which seems to most fully communicate the spirit of this masterpiece: a quiet repose, an acknowledgment of these fighters' never-ending quest to seek justice for the downtrodden, a vivid demonstration that heroism lies just as much in the act of living as it does in the ultimate sacrifice. Perhaps the most curious (and by no means undeserving) inclusion in this box set is Hu's 40-minute contribution to the omnibus film Four Moods (1970), made in an attempt to help his old director Li Han-hsiang's financial troubles; alongside the two, Lee Hsing (Execution in Autumn) and Pai Ching-jui also directed segments. Amidst three crepuscular, frenzied tales of ghosts, Hu's story, titled "Anger," stands out all the more for its clarity and fleet execution. Adapted from a Chinese opera traditionally staged with minimal props, Hu returns again to an inn setting that eventually comes to house three factions, including an honorable soldier seeking to rescue a captive general, a quartet of guards plotting to murder their prisoner, and a criminal couple posing as innkeepers. Taking place over a single night often in near-darkness, Hu's work with these unstable relationships and shadowy rooms is so captivating that the lush exteriors of the other three parts, which all have their own intriguing merits, feel almost extraneous by comparison. Beautiful landscapes, however, are a major part of A Touch of Zen, the summit of Hu's body of work and one of the greatest of all films. Released in two parts across 1970 and 1971 and loosely adapted from a short story by Pu Songling, this three-hour epic is by turns ethereal and brutally grounded, light-hearted and shrouded in darkness, rational and beguiling, all without shortchanging any aspect of its construction. Its common description as a wuxia film that doesn't have a fight until almost a full hour has passed is certainly accurate, but such a designation only hints at the dexterity of Hu's plotting and camera movement, the bemused befuddlement of Shih Chun and piercing mien of Hsu Feng (both never better than they are here), the howling power of the natural world that seems to propel the characters onto collision courses. In its original form, the bamboo forest fight, one of the most astonishing sequences in cinema, concluded the first part, and yet it's not impossible to imagine a lesser version of A Touch of Zen that concluded right after the ostensible main villain is defeated two-and-a-quarter hours in. But in a film whose expansiveness of outlook is only matched by Hu in his last masterpiece Legend of the Mountain (1979), such a neat ending is insufficient, and it keeps moving forward, exposing its characters to all the destructiveness of the world and the possibilities of transcending it. Just as Hu's penchant for strict realism allowed his formal interventions to push his films' registers into the surreal, so do his characters' quests, explicitly in A Touch of Zen and implicitly in his other wuxia films, search for the possibility of bettering oneself. The hallucinatory, spiritual conclusion would be nonsensical in practically any other director's hands; here, it's the only way to finish a film of such staggering beauty and foresight. After the financial failure of A Touch of Zen—it eventually became the film that made Hu briefly famous in the West, thanks to a belated Cannes selection in 1975, where it won the Technical Grand Prize—Hu returned to Hong Kong and signed a two-picture deal with upstart Shaw rival Golden Harvest. In that sense, The Fate of Lee Khan (1973), the final film in this box set, serves as a nice transitional title, returning for the last time to the inn setting, this time with Sammo Hung (who had a small role in A Touch of Zen) as martial arts director. In some ways it's even more straightforward than Dragon Inn, establishing its characters' allegiances more quickly and thus taking even greater pleasure in the dynamics of its four color-coded fighting waitresses, the lengthy sequences of inn operation, and the casual cruelty of the eponymous villain (celebrated Shaw repertory player Tien Feng). Hung's more aggressive and fist-forward approach suits the propulsive nature of this film, in its own way as engaging and finely tuned as any of Hu's films. To take stock of King Hu's influence would be an impossible task, and the list of filmmakers who appear to sing his praises in The King of Wuxia speaks for itself: John Woo, Tsui Hark, Ann Hui, Sammo Hung. But it is still worth considering just how many of the Chinese-language films comparable in quality and influence to his oeuvre follow in his wake. Tsai Ming-liang's Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) is certainly the most famous, a film that follows in the ethos if not the style of Hu's work. The early 2000s revival of wuxia sparked by Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)—featuring Cheng Pei-pei in a role that brings the entire tradition of wuxia to bear—and Zhang Yimou's Hero (2002) and House of Flying Daggers (2004) would have been unthinkable without the grace and edge of romanticism present in Hu's films. Hou Hsiao-hsien's The Assassin (2015), another unique take on the wuxia, goes so far as to include Shih Chun in a cameo role as a man leading the heroine towards her own form of transcendence. (This even extends to films not directly inspired by Hu: Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine was produced by Hsu Feng.) Just as the chivalrous people in those and Hu's films are on a constant quest, their mission never fully resolved, so too does our collective attempt to understand the gravity of this consummate artist, to give him his rightful place in cinema's pantheon.

Happyend First Draft

Complete first draft written for Vinegar Syndrome/Film Movement.

Neo Sora's fiction feature debut, Happyend, begins with an image almost unimaginable in his body of work thus far. A multitude of red dots blink off and on, looking for all the world like some agglomeration of eerie creatures peering out of the darkness, before the image brightens, revealing that these are lights outlining various buildings in a cityscape. The camera then pans down, at first slowly then with increasing speed, until the screen becomes a void once more, from which the film "proper" fades in. This opening is too short to be called a full-on overture, yet its magisterial, mysterious nature sets the tone for the next steps in its director's oeuvre. Happyend comes on the heels of two recent shorts and a feature-length documentary directed by Sora, all very different in tone and subject matter yet tending somewhat towards the hermetic. Of these, only "The Chicken" (2020) is set outside of Japan, taking place in New York—where Sora spent much of his childhood—as a young couple prepares to move to a new apartment. Though a number of scenes take place on the city streets, its most compelling moments are interior, mirroring its interest in the quiet emotional upheaval triggered by a life change rather than the actual physical exertion it entails. Even more gloriously confined is Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus (2023), Sora's documentary about his legendary musician father. Perhaps the purest film about performance of this decade, it observes in black-and-white as Sakamoto performs a number of his most iconic compositions solo on an acoustic piano in an immaculate studio. Aside from a few off-hand remarks or pauses, the flow of music is uninterrupted, and the different formal schema Sora finds to capture each song are restrained and tender, a lovely film treatment for the final concert his father ever gave. Of these works, "Sugar Glass Bottle" (2022) most readily hints at what Sora would go on to accomplish in Happyend. Both are stories about Japan in the near future, centered upon two male high schoolers who love music and pranks, and feature a surveillance apparatus that warns of impending earthquakes. But the action here is compressed to a single night, albeit a busy one that plays out across three clear movements: the boys practicing the prank where one hits the other with a bottle made of sugar glass—based on a real prank played on Sora by his high school friends—the friends meeting an old unhoused person and former acquaintance, and a confrontation with a real estate developer who wants to buy out and demolish one of their mother's restaurant. The short is spare and direct in its depiction of rampant gentrification's effects on the underprivileged, and it's especially noteworthy that it does not conclude with the friends' unplanned, private yet jubilant victory—set to a song by Sakamoto's Yellow Magic Orchestra bandmate Haruomi Hosono—but with a reassertion of oppressive forces only temporarily held at bay. What makes Happyend such a remarkable achievement lies in all the ways that its surfeit of interests could go wrong, the balancing act perched on the razor's edge that this navigates almost effortlessly. In the Q&A I conducted with Sora, as well as a conversation between him and Ryusuke Hamaguchi moderated by Fumihisa Miyata for CINRA (translated by Happyend producer Aiko Masubuchi for the Metrograph Journal), he noted that the starting place for the film was not the high school, the strained friendship, or the music, but rather the cataclysmic Nankai Trough earthquake long predicted to hit Japan, relating those fears to both his own experiences with the 2011 Fukushima earthquake and the historical declaration of martial law and widespread murder of Zainichi Koreans in the wake of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. That such an origin is not readily apparent while watching the film is in fact a compliment: the film is concerned above all with its present moment and the future possibilities for his characters, with Sora expressing to me that he hopes his films lead people to want to explore and educate themselves on their own time, rather than limiting the flow of information to the singular experience of watching. The significantly expanded timescale of Happyend, taking place over a few months at the end of Kou and Yuta's high school tenure rather than the single day/night of Sora's other recent narrative works, allows for the narrative to proceed in little fits and starts, more properly reflecting the often messy and irresolute development of interpersonal relationships. One particularly emblematic moment comes almost exactly halfway through the film, right after Kou's first significant break with Yuta and the rest of the Music Research Club: after a cut to black, Yuta is shown applying for a job at a music store. Though in actuality little time appears to have passed, one would be entirely forgiven for assuming that this brief interspersal of black spans months, even years, showing that Yuta has grown up and decided to take some responsibility, though the earthquakes and government crackdowns on protests persist. To a degree unseen in his past works— even "Sugar Glass Bottle" featured conspicuously empty streets save for the main actors and never shows their high school onscreen—Sora is also able to showcase and situate his characters within their environment, here Kyoto standing in for future Tokyo. He has cited the films of the Taiwanese New Wave, especially those by Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien, as a primary influence, and many of the long-shot compositions bear a marked resemblance to the former's compositions, instantly striking and rooted in the particular vistas of modern urbanity. Placed amid towering buildings, large groups of students, or on the Panopty surveillance screens, our two heroes Kou (Yukito Hidaka) and Yuta (Hayato Kuihara)—both models making their screen acting debuts—are repeatedly shown to not be the only figures of concern, no matter how moving or central their waxing and waning relationship is shown to be. One of Sora's most revealing comments about his film is in the CINRA conversation: "With Happyend, I wanted to maintain a certain distance. I wanted it to feel like Yuta and Kou are my age now [33, at the time], and are drinking and reminiscing together about these events." Coupled with reflections on his own high school experiences struggling to connect with longtime friends due to his own political awakening—Sora has been one of the most consistently outspoken filmmakers on the genocide in Gaza—the personal resonances of Happyend are abundant, and yet neither of the main characters are valorized or idealized, allowed to simply exist in all their youthful flaws and well-meaning intentions. That kind of balanced, "objective" viewpoint is found throughout Happyend, in which everything is exactly what it appears to be and yet able to contain great depths. This is most apparent in the high school setting itself, which scans here as a microcosm of society itself, albeit one where people are still somewhat unformed and thus capable of great, sudden change. The stakes, such as they are, are relatively low—the principal only states that he will reconsider his stance on Panopty, and that any changes wouldn't take effect until after the characters we have come to know have matriculated—and yet they take on great importance precisely because of the impact they will have on each young person's ability to stand up for what they believe in. Yuta and Kou's prank is not, of course, an act of terrorism, and was not intended as radical and artistic, but the simplicity and precision behind it—the school scenes were shot at an engineering school, where the students were eager to assist with realizing the stunt—contain all these potential motivations quite ably. As my friend and fellow film critic Evan Morgan remarked, Happyend is a film somehow reminiscent of both Fritz Lang (in its technological paranoia) and Nobuhiko Obayashi (in its youth movie sentimentality, and for me its approach to the future also calls to mind Jia Zhangke's frequently misunderstood Mountains May Depart, the first in his recent trilogy of films that take place across three distinct time periods. The future technology is restrained—even eschewing the robot police dogs found in "Sugar Glass Bottle" or the clear glass smartphones and tablets from Jia's film—mostly limited to the smooth (presumably AI-integrated) Panopty and the instantaneous photo IDs that the police use, as well as the looming news broadcasts and headlines projected onto clouds and building. These shots have the effect of interstitial transitions, almost functioning less as exposition and more a mental image created by the characters as they struggle to figure out the world they live in. In a similar light, Lia Ouyang Rusli's magisterial score—more than a little reminiscent of Sakamoto's own unforgettable film score work—feels grafted on in the right ways, introducing an entirely different tone to what could be mundane scenes. While the main theme is recognizably electronic, it doesn't bear much resemblance to the music that the Music Research Club adores, and the piano that dominates much of Happyend is airy and contemplative. What registers more than anything is the reassertion of importance that it engenders, the conviction that what these young people are trying to do actually matters and is worthy of such a weighty treatment, on the same level as a World War II POW camp or a Chinese emperor. The other characters, too, are just as vivid as Kou and Yuta when all is said and done. Certainly, the spark that Fumi (Kilala Inori) gives Kou propels him on his path towards activism, and Ata, Ming, and Tomu all provide a wonderful ballast that doesn't shortchange their own struggles; the scenes where they mimic the voices of others at a distance are very funny and well-done, encapsulating the film's examination of the gulf between what they (and thus the viewer) can understand and what reality might actually hold. But Sora's touch is supple enough to allow virtually any character, from Kou's mother to a random student, to suddenly snap into focus, given a little character beat that expands the viewer's conception of the society they collectively inhabit. It is especially notable that, save for Fumi, the standoff with the principal is conducted by characters not previously spotlighted in the film: their comparative lack of screentime does not mean that their own lives and experiences are not happening at the same time, and their decision to band together is given the respect and seriousness of purpose that it deserves. Happyend saves one of its best, most resonant moments for its final. As Kou and Yuta part after the former graduates, Yuta goes in for one last playful nipple pinch. The image stops, and many a viewer will recall the indelible freeze-frame ending of Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, where the two women in the final story embrace on a pedestrian bridge after jubilantly solving a shared mystery surrounding their own high school experiences. (The comparison is especially relevant, even without factoring in Hamaguchi's advice to Sora on casting and directing non-professional actors: "The Chicken" was included as a bonus feature on Film Movement's Blu-ray for that film, and Ayumu Nakajima appears in both.) A full thirty seconds passes, enough time for the viewer to recall the gravity of everything that's happened in between the most recent time they saw this in-joke and now. But here, the image continues, smiles are exchanged, and the boys eventually go on their separate paths. Rather than the finality of Hamaguchi's film or the foreboding ambiguity of "Sugar Glass Bottle," Happyend demonstrates, with one of the most unlikely accurate titles in recent memory, that life still goes on, embracing a kind of optimism that this friendship will continue to last, that better things still lie ahead for both of these young men. As it is for them, so it is for the whole city and society of which they embody the future: a message of hope that anyone can understand and, with the right mindset, believe in.