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The imperfections of King Hu
May. 1st, 2007 03:30 pmSo I finally bought the French DVD of King Hu's Raining on the Mountain (Kong shan ling yu, 1979), on the Films Sans Frontieres label. It has English sub-titles as well as French, and it's a high quality image as well. So now I've seen all the movies from King Hu's prime except for The Valiant Ones (Chung lieh tu, 1975), which is not available on any DVD that I'm aware of. (Please let me know if you know otherwise!)
Raining in the Mountain was made as part of a diptych with Legend of the Mountain (Shan-chung ch'uan-ch'i, 1979). They were filmed back-to-back in the mountains of South Korea, and they both use many of the same actors. I had seen Legend of the Mountain before and thought it was pretty boring and corny, but I watched it again this weekend after a first viewing of Raining in the Mountain, and it was as though I'd never seen it before. I think that previously I had been expecting an action movie, much as the other King Hu films I'd seen (all of them wuxia, or chivalric swordsman stories), and I wasn't prepared for a ghost story that is largely an exercise in design, rhythm, and mood.
Raining in the Mountain is definitely the better film, although it may be even less focused as a narrative. It is the story of a power struggle around the succession of the abbott in a Buddhist temple, with not only the monks but a general (or he may be a provincial governor) and a businessman involved in the fray. There is a maguffin of a sutra that is being chased after. The beautiful Hsu Feng spends most of the movie running around the elaborate grounds of the temple with her partner in thievery, trying to find the maguffin. All of the action is an excuse to compose beautiful shots of all manner of spaces both within and without the temple. Hu claimed that he was more influenced by Peking Opera and Chinese painters than by other movie directors, and there are many landscape shots that look like classical paintings of pine trees and streams. The temple becomes a labyrinth of passageways and courtyards, walls and doorways, stairways and rafters. Everything becomes abstract and super-stylized, and with all the running around going on, you begin to feel that this world is huge and deep and convoluted. The main problem is that the space defined by all this also begins to feel very unreal, because none of the running around ever seems to lead anywhere. The climax of the action is a transcendentally beautiful cascade of fluttering, somersaulting, powerful warrior women plummeting down from the rocky crags on high that is worthy to stand with the brilliant action sequences of Hu's wuxia films, and the ending is a very satisfactory commentary on greed and corruption and worldly vanity and the proper humility to counteract it. However, with the meandering of the plot, attention may have drifted elsewhere in the meantime, like a lotus on a wandering current.
But as I was rereading Stephen Teo's wonderful overview of Hu's career, I was struck by this description of Hu's technique: 'Hu's style of action choreography (with input from Han Yingjie as martial arts director) is complemented by his editing technique -- a treatment of action which David Bordwell has called the "glimpse", a tactic of adding deliberate "imperfections" that make the action partially indiscernible, so as to "express the other-worldly grace and strength of these supremely disciplined but still mortal fighters."' The imperfections mentioned here are various, from cutting out frames so that a leaping warrior suddenly crosses the screen without moving through the filmic space, to the camera chasing after a leaping warrior but never quite getting her in the frame, as though the camera can't keep up with her supernatural energy. In Raining on the Mountain there's a shot where we cut to a scene of several people fighting in which we just barely see the leg of one warrior as she leaps off screen. Again, the effect is that the camera can't capture the movement, can't frame the awesome action, and the eye is teased by the glimpse of an incomplete detail.
This notion of intentional use of imperfections is of course reminiscent of the concept of wabi-sabi that I've written about here before, and this is a great example of the practical application of the concept. The incompleteness of what we see implies a perfection and beauty of movement that cannot be captured or represented in its wholeness. We can only catch a glimpse before the beauty moves on and is lost.
Raining in the Mountain was made as part of a diptych with Legend of the Mountain (Shan-chung ch'uan-ch'i, 1979). They were filmed back-to-back in the mountains of South Korea, and they both use many of the same actors. I had seen Legend of the Mountain before and thought it was pretty boring and corny, but I watched it again this weekend after a first viewing of Raining in the Mountain, and it was as though I'd never seen it before. I think that previously I had been expecting an action movie, much as the other King Hu films I'd seen (all of them wuxia, or chivalric swordsman stories), and I wasn't prepared for a ghost story that is largely an exercise in design, rhythm, and mood.
Raining in the Mountain is definitely the better film, although it may be even less focused as a narrative. It is the story of a power struggle around the succession of the abbott in a Buddhist temple, with not only the monks but a general (or he may be a provincial governor) and a businessman involved in the fray. There is a maguffin of a sutra that is being chased after. The beautiful Hsu Feng spends most of the movie running around the elaborate grounds of the temple with her partner in thievery, trying to find the maguffin. All of the action is an excuse to compose beautiful shots of all manner of spaces both within and without the temple. Hu claimed that he was more influenced by Peking Opera and Chinese painters than by other movie directors, and there are many landscape shots that look like classical paintings of pine trees and streams. The temple becomes a labyrinth of passageways and courtyards, walls and doorways, stairways and rafters. Everything becomes abstract and super-stylized, and with all the running around going on, you begin to feel that this world is huge and deep and convoluted. The main problem is that the space defined by all this also begins to feel very unreal, because none of the running around ever seems to lead anywhere. The climax of the action is a transcendentally beautiful cascade of fluttering, somersaulting, powerful warrior women plummeting down from the rocky crags on high that is worthy to stand with the brilliant action sequences of Hu's wuxia films, and the ending is a very satisfactory commentary on greed and corruption and worldly vanity and the proper humility to counteract it. However, with the meandering of the plot, attention may have drifted elsewhere in the meantime, like a lotus on a wandering current.
But as I was rereading Stephen Teo's wonderful overview of Hu's career, I was struck by this description of Hu's technique: 'Hu's style of action choreography (with input from Han Yingjie as martial arts director) is complemented by his editing technique -- a treatment of action which David Bordwell has called the "glimpse", a tactic of adding deliberate "imperfections" that make the action partially indiscernible, so as to "express the other-worldly grace and strength of these supremely disciplined but still mortal fighters."' The imperfections mentioned here are various, from cutting out frames so that a leaping warrior suddenly crosses the screen without moving through the filmic space, to the camera chasing after a leaping warrior but never quite getting her in the frame, as though the camera can't keep up with her supernatural energy. In Raining on the Mountain there's a shot where we cut to a scene of several people fighting in which we just barely see the leg of one warrior as she leaps off screen. Again, the effect is that the camera can't capture the movement, can't frame the awesome action, and the eye is teased by the glimpse of an incomplete detail.
This notion of intentional use of imperfections is of course reminiscent of the concept of wabi-sabi that I've written about here before, and this is a great example of the practical application of the concept. The incompleteness of what we see implies a perfection and beauty of movement that cannot be captured or represented in its wholeness. We can only catch a glimpse before the beauty moves on and is lost.
