Wu Xia: A Grand Genre of World Cinema at NYAFF

Like most Americans, I first became familiar with the wu xia style of Chinese martial arts film in 2000, with the release of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” Ang Lee’s highly successful and Oscar-beloved epic kicked off a series of wu xia pictures marketed to international audiences including “Hero,” “House of Flying Daggers,” and “Curse of the Golden Flower” (all three directed by Zhang Yimou). I loved these movies growing up for their over-the-top plotlines, wildly entertaining action sequences and lush art direction. “Crouching Tiger” was the first subtitled movie I saw in the theater, and it set me off into foreign films as an intrepid 11-year-old. Yet the handful of these period action flicks that made it to the US in the early 2000s is hardly the whole story.

This year’s New York Asian Film Festival has a special wu xia focus, featuring six films ranging from new releases back to the early 1980s. The genre itself is much older , with films dating back to the 1920s and a roots in literature as old as the youxia stories of the Han Dynasty. The modern form, however, really didn’t come into its own until 1983 with Tsui Hark ’s landmark film “Zu: Warriors from Magic Mountain.” The first to use advanced special effects, inspired by American action films of the time, Hark brought bravura effects filmmaking into an already florid genre. For his work, NYAFF is honoring him with the Star Asia Award and showing four of his films: “Zu,” “Dragon Inn” (1992), “The Blade” (1995), and “Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame” (2010).

A filmic journey through Hark’s films is a primer on the history of wu xia and its stylistic hallmarks. The surreal “Zu” is the kind of experience you simply can’t see coming, and it rocketed the Hong Kong film industry into the future. Hark brought in special effects engineers from the original “Star Wars” trilogy and “TRON” to create the strange and magical universe he needed for this trippy film. It’s indicative of the direction wu xia filmmaking would go in the coming years, both in its whimsy and its dedication to impressive visual fireworks. There are colored lights flying everywhere, clearly taken from the lightsabers of Lucas’s special effects epic, and everyone does a bit of obligatory martial arts flying. There’s even an aging hero with magic eyebrows that he uses to hold off the forces of evil. The film does seem a bit silly now, but for the most part it’s held up remarkably well and really puts the wu xia films of the last 30 years in context. This is a grand genre that lives for magnificent excess, in every aspect.

goldlenmuring: carina lau 2011

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