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Ashes of Time Redux (1994/2008)
Oct. 31st, 2008 08:52 amSaw this at the Varsity last night with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
holyoutlaw. I had previously seen Ashes of Time a couple of times on a VHS dub of the laserdisc, but it has been so long since I saw it that I couldn't tell you what the differences are. This is a re-edited version, with changes in the music as well, from what I've read. One thing I will say is that overall it seemed a lot clearer -- more coherent -- than the previous times I'd seen it, although it's still an elusive film.
This is Wong Kar Wai's take on wuxia -- the Chinese genre of swordplay and chivalry. Just as my impression of Fallen Angels was that it was an inverted John Woo gangster movie, with almost all the gunplay cut out, this is a wuxia movie with almost all the swordplay cut out. It's sort of the secret lives of swordsmen, with a heavy emphasis on romantic melancholy and betrayal. Indeed, like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, it's about the painful memories of lost love and the question of whether to erase them.
Now I'm not a big fan of Wong Kar Wai. I've seen four of his films, and they are all about romantic melancholy. This would seem to be natural territory for me, since I'm pretty heavily invested in romantic melancholy myself, but I find I get tired of his approach after a while. I feel like he wallows in it, and I start wanting to tell him to go take a long walk and accept his losses. Ashes of Time certainly suffers from this, although it didn't seem as slow and heavy as the last time I saw it. Maybe that's where some of the editing happened. For example, the final scene of the grieving Maggie Cheung didn't seem to go on for ever this time. On the other hand, it was still hard to muster much sympathy for her or Ouyang Feng, both of whom pine for each other and regret the pride that kept them apart. Maggie in particular is stuck in a one-note performance, which even in a cameo role is shortly trying.
This is still probably my favorite Wong Kar Wai movie, however, just for the visuals. Apparently the cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, doesn't like this new version, which tweaks the colors. Sometimes the color looks so artificial and thick that it looks like a painting by Klee or Kandinsky. Sometimes the artificial colors looked a little off to me, almost solarized, but mostly I thought it was very beautiful and gave the film a fairytale look. There are also some absolutely gorgeous shots of light reflecting on water -- images of transformation and restless form, utterly magical. The fight scenes, choreographed by Sammo Hung, are chaotic and enigmatic. Again, they reduce wuxia tropes to something schematic and abstract -- whirling figures, flashing blades, the thump of the foot before the leap.
Oh yeah, the soundscape is the other thing I really like about this movie. It reminded me at times of Ridley Scott's Legend, with all kinds of fluttering wings, deep bass string swellings, and haunting wails in the background. Fits the evocative, estranged mood of the story very well. On the other hand, Yoyo Ma has found his niche, as Luke said.
One thing that may have been trimmed (I'm going to have to dig out that videotape to see) is the scene of the nearly-naked babe lounging mournfully on the horse in the water. I remembered that as being more extensive. Perhaps Wong was reacting to the parody -- I'm forgetting the title of the film now -- where he's sent back to the '60s and has to try to make films in that era of of the Hong Kong film industry. He attempts to create the sexy girl on the horse scene and is roundly mocked for it. Ah well, at the same time Wong was filming Ashes of Time, his producer, Jeff Lau, was using the same cast to film a very silly parody of the source novel of Ashes of Time, The Eagle-Shooting Heroes. Just as incoherent in its own way, but a lot funnier. That's how I learned the Monkey Stealing Peaches technique, for example.
holyoutlaw. I had previously seen Ashes of Time a couple of times on a VHS dub of the laserdisc, but it has been so long since I saw it that I couldn't tell you what the differences are. This is a re-edited version, with changes in the music as well, from what I've read. One thing I will say is that overall it seemed a lot clearer -- more coherent -- than the previous times I'd seen it, although it's still an elusive film. This is Wong Kar Wai's take on wuxia -- the Chinese genre of swordplay and chivalry. Just as my impression of Fallen Angels was that it was an inverted John Woo gangster movie, with almost all the gunplay cut out, this is a wuxia movie with almost all the swordplay cut out. It's sort of the secret lives of swordsmen, with a heavy emphasis on romantic melancholy and betrayal. Indeed, like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, it's about the painful memories of lost love and the question of whether to erase them.
Now I'm not a big fan of Wong Kar Wai. I've seen four of his films, and they are all about romantic melancholy. This would seem to be natural territory for me, since I'm pretty heavily invested in romantic melancholy myself, but I find I get tired of his approach after a while. I feel like he wallows in it, and I start wanting to tell him to go take a long walk and accept his losses. Ashes of Time certainly suffers from this, although it didn't seem as slow and heavy as the last time I saw it. Maybe that's where some of the editing happened. For example, the final scene of the grieving Maggie Cheung didn't seem to go on for ever this time. On the other hand, it was still hard to muster much sympathy for her or Ouyang Feng, both of whom pine for each other and regret the pride that kept them apart. Maggie in particular is stuck in a one-note performance, which even in a cameo role is shortly trying.
This is still probably my favorite Wong Kar Wai movie, however, just for the visuals. Apparently the cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, doesn't like this new version, which tweaks the colors. Sometimes the color looks so artificial and thick that it looks like a painting by Klee or Kandinsky. Sometimes the artificial colors looked a little off to me, almost solarized, but mostly I thought it was very beautiful and gave the film a fairytale look. There are also some absolutely gorgeous shots of light reflecting on water -- images of transformation and restless form, utterly magical. The fight scenes, choreographed by Sammo Hung, are chaotic and enigmatic. Again, they reduce wuxia tropes to something schematic and abstract -- whirling figures, flashing blades, the thump of the foot before the leap.
Oh yeah, the soundscape is the other thing I really like about this movie. It reminded me at times of Ridley Scott's Legend, with all kinds of fluttering wings, deep bass string swellings, and haunting wails in the background. Fits the evocative, estranged mood of the story very well. On the other hand, Yoyo Ma has found his niche, as Luke said.
One thing that may have been trimmed (I'm going to have to dig out that videotape to see) is the scene of the nearly-naked babe lounging mournfully on the horse in the water. I remembered that as being more extensive. Perhaps Wong was reacting to the parody -- I'm forgetting the title of the film now -- where he's sent back to the '60s and has to try to make films in that era of of the Hong Kong film industry. He attempts to create the sexy girl on the horse scene and is roundly mocked for it. Ah well, at the same time Wong was filming Ashes of Time, his producer, Jeff Lau, was using the same cast to film a very silly parody of the source novel of Ashes of Time, The Eagle-Shooting Heroes. Just as incoherent in its own way, but a lot funnier. That's how I learned the Monkey Stealing Peaches technique, for example.
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.
Dragon Gate Inn (1967)
Jan. 31st, 2006 01:51 pmKing Hu is widely considered the first great director of wuxia, or martial chivalry (or, as I first thought of them, flying swordsman), films. His movies have been very influential on later directors, and some of us first became aware of him after Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) came out and Ang Lee spoke of how the scene in the bamboo forest was a tribute to the one in King Hu's Touch of Zen (1970). On the Crouching Tiger commentary, Lee apparently talks about the influence of Hu's Come Drink With Me (1966), which he refers to by a literal translation of the Chinese title, Big Drunk Hero. That film starred Cheng Pei Pei, who shows up in Crouching Tiger as the villainous Jade Fox. More recently, Zhang Yimou also included an homage to the bamboo forest scene in The House of Flying Daggers (2004), and this is only the tip of the iceberg of King Hu's influence.
Come Drink With Me, which was made in Hong Kong for the Shaw Brothers studio, is often cited as a revolutionary moment in the tradition of wuxia films. (Stephen Teo has written an excellent overview and analysis of Hu's career.) After the success of that film, he broke away from the Shaw Brothers and made Dragon Gate Inn (also known as Dragon Inn) in Taiwan the next year. I "saw" it a few years ago on a bootleg tape that was so awful that I couldn't really make out what was happening. Recently I picked up what is apparently a bootleg DVD, and it is very good quality for a bootleg. There is apparently also a legitimate German DVD, but that's about it if you need English subtitles as I do.
( It's worth hunting it down one way or the other ... )
Come Drink With Me, which was made in Hong Kong for the Shaw Brothers studio, is often cited as a revolutionary moment in the tradition of wuxia films. (Stephen Teo has written an excellent overview and analysis of Hu's career.) After the success of that film, he broke away from the Shaw Brothers and made Dragon Gate Inn (also known as Dragon Inn) in Taiwan the next year. I "saw" it a few years ago on a bootleg tape that was so awful that I couldn't really make out what was happening. Recently I picked up what is apparently a bootleg DVD, and it is very good quality for a bootleg. There is apparently also a legitimate German DVD, but that's about it if you need English subtitles as I do.
( It's worth hunting it down one way or the other ... )
