Dragon Inn (Long men kezhan)

 

Director King Hu

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DRAGON INN (Long men kezhan)              A-                                                                           aka:  Dragon Gate Inn                                                                                                               Taiwan  (111 mi)  1967  ‘Scope  d: King Hu

It’s a particularly controversial period... there was a much discussed book by Wu Han about Ming politics.  It was on the one hand the period when Western influences first reached China; on the other, it was one of the most corrupt periods in Chinese politics.  Most of the Ming emperors were bad; some were drug addicts, some were very young indeed when they came to the throne.  Power was effectively in the hands of the Court Eunuchs, who created their own secret services, the “Dongshang” or “Eastern Group.”  Without exaggeration, you could say that the power of the Dongshang exceeded that of the German Gestapo.  They could arrest and execute virtually anyone, including ministers of the Courts, without accountability or, indeed any legal process.  Both Dragon Gate Inn and A Touch of Zen deal specifically with the operations of the Dongshang.…At the time I made those movies, the James Bond films were very popular, and I thought it was very wrong to make a hero of a secret service man.  My films were kind of a comment on that.

—King Hu

Among the more original filmmakers of the 60’s and 70’s, where his artistry has less to do with narrative story telling than an emphasis on form, making beautifully stylized films with meticulously authentic costumes and set designs, where the dance and musical-like nature of Hu’s work is more painterly and poetic than novelistic or dramatic, and appreciated more intrinsically for its relevance to Chinese opera, painting, literature, and history, with this film setting the standard.  Born in Beijing, King Hu (aka Hu Jinquan) moved to Hong Kong at the age of 18 and started work as an illustrator for film advertisements, painting billboards or designing handouts, later becoming a director, graphic artist, set builder, actor, and screenwriter, best known for his Wuxia films that became popular in Hong Kong cinema in the mid 60’s and onwards.  It was his proficiency at speaking Mandarin, his native language, that helped him get a start in Hong Kong studios, initially assigned as a set decorator before appearing in 37 films as an actor between 1954 and 1965, joining the Shaw Brothers Studio in 1958, working as a second unit director and screenwriter until finally directing his own film, COME DRINK WITH ME (1966), his first wuxia film, a transitional work as it was still a Shaw Brothers Studio movie, combining fantasy and special effects with elements of realism.  Yet the success of the film allowed him to break away from the Shaw Brothers in 1966 and go his own way.  Making only fourteen films in his thirty year career, his fame is largely based on six wuxia features.  Before him, filmmakers shot fight scenes based on the acrobatic techniques of Beijing opera, often resembling a staged show, but Hu was the first director to use sophisticated cinematic techniques achieved through editing and multiple camera angles while shooting on location, combining Chinese history with religion and philosophy while also expressing military strategy, elevating martial arts action into a sense of cinematic poetry, featuring skilled female combatants to counter male-dominated themes, drawing inspiration from art and literature, never viewing himself as part of the movie industry, but as part of the wider body of the Chinese arts.  Hu consulted with historians when writing his movie scripts, choosing the Ming dynasty for most of his movies, known for being one of the most chaotic periods in Chinese history.  Hu often gave historical lectures throughout his career, speaking in Paris and at Harvard in the mid-70’s discussing the literary career of Lao She, later conducting a series of lectures in the 80’s on Italian Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci.  Traveling to Taiwan to make this film, the Chinese Cultural Revolution particularly inspired its making, specifically the struggle against intellectuals and the disgrace of Ming dynasty historian Wu Han in 1966, who doubled as the deputy mayor of Beijing, targeted for having written a play set in the Ming dynasty where a court attendant chastises an emperor, a thinly veiled reference to an actual occurrence between Mao and one of his top generals during the disastrously managed Great Leap Forward of the late 50’s and early 60’s when famine caused the death of up to 30 to 40 million Chinese, leading Wu to become one of the first victims of Mao Zedong’s persecution.  Left to die in jail while an entire generation of young Chinese were taught to denigrate their own culture, some even actively seeking to destroy it, Hu was provoked into making the film as a tribute to Wu’s career, as his work on the imperial secret police, the dongchang (Eastern Depot), had particularly influenced Hu as a young man.  For the exiled Taiwanese, ruled by a repressive one-party system that purged its own political and cultural elite (murdering as many as 40,000 victims), while remaining under martial law for almost four decades, they took a personal interest in Hu’s allegorical connection to the Mainland, giving them a taste of a mythical China that blurred into the present, where a heroic fantasy evokes the tragic Chinese experience of endless tyranny, oppression, and exile.  Blending Chinese traditions with Hollywood westerns and Japanese samurai movies, Hu created ballet-like fight sequences taking the audience on spiritual journeys that confound expectations, featuring sword-wielding heroines, mistaken identities, secret allegiances, rooftop chases, and showdowns in taverns and bamboo forests, breaking box office records in Taiwan, Korea, and the Philippines on route to becoming a cult classic. 

Hu has designed something that quite simply doesn’t exist anymore, often imitated but rarely equaled, creating an exaggerated picture of perpetual exile and nomadic instability, defined by the restless and rootless lives of his characters who thrive in a seemingly endless wasteland, lavishing attention on detail, displaying a rare economy, creating one of the more darkly humorous and deeply entertaining Scope spectacle films of all times.  Set during the Ming dynasty, the opening scene exhibits pageantry and is given plenty of colorful Kurosawa costume drama in the vast emptiness of an open plain, resembling Shakespeare’s King Lear, surrounded by his massive armies, reading his decree of how he intends to abdicate power and divide his extensive domain among his three children,  Yet here, given similar pomp and circumstance, the emperor’s minister of defense, General Yu, is executed for betrayal and insurrection, framed on trumped up charges by an all-powerful court eunuch, Cao Shao-qin (Bai Ying), a tyrant who controls both the secretive Eastern Agency and Palace Guards, representing the worst excesses of ruthless ambition, where Cao is meant to resemble Mao, surrounded by devoted followers who are meant to resemble Mao’s Red Guards.  The Emperor has allowed Wu’s family to live in exile, but Cao has other ideas, dispatching a clan of elite assassins known as the Black Arrow Troop to cut off the bloodline, to hunt down the minister’s escaping, exiled children with a planned ambush taking them to the remote mountainous location of the Dragon Inn, a northern border region where mysterious strangers begin to congregate, each with growing suspicions of the other.  In examining the corruption and suppression of intellectuals by the eunuchs, the film is not only meant as an allegory to reflect the chaos occurring on the Chinese Mainland, but also as an attack on the Communist Party regime.  In using the wuxia genre as his vehicle, it allowed Hu to criticize without politicizing, while simultaneously illustrating nostalgia for his homeland.  There are masterful compositions by cinematographer Hua Huiying featuring breathtaking landscapes, as Hu paid tribute to classical Chinese landscape paintings, yet bloody swordplay battles featuring inexplicable aerial jumps are the highlight and main feature of the film, as each extended scene leads to yet another extended swordfight, turning into a battle royale that borders on dream fantasia.  The narrative plot is kept at a minimum, yet every scene feels like a showdown of deception, as there’s a battle of wits taking place in attempting to outmaneuver the other, with neither side willing to reveal their hand, meant to hide their intentions, with the dongchang resorting to poisoned liquor, small darts, flaming arrows, including a battalion of trained assassins to annihilate anyone that gets in their way.  Yu’s former subordinates appear, like apparitions, attempting to usher the children to safety, but Cao’s secret police are blocking the way, led by Pi Shao-tang (Miao Tien) and Mao Zong-xian (Han Yingjie).  We see the elegance of a female warrior, Miss Zhu (Shangkuan Ling-fung), fending off soldiers with ease, the equal to any man, along with her hot-tempered brother Zhu Ji (Hsieh Han), who arrive at the inn along with a secret traveler that arrives earlier, Xiao Shaozi (Shih Chun), who dazzles with his ability to thwart opposing trickery or sneak attacks, catching darts with his chop sticks, or arrows with his bare hands, simply defying the laws of physics, yet he’s there to meet the innkeeper, Wu Ning (Tsao Chien), who was one of the the executed General’s lieutenants.  So without realizing it at first, these four align to counter the full force of the dongchang, who subject the inn to a flamed aerial assault of burning arrows, tricking them into a fight in the dark of night, accompanied by fiery musical excerpts from Mussorgsky’s orchestrated Pictures at an Exhibition, specifically The Hut on Hen’s Legs (Baba Yaga), Mussorgsky Baba-Yaga and The Knight's Gate from "Pictures at an Exhibition" YouTube (9:30).  

Fully integrated into the fabric of the narrative, indoor tavern sequences are staged with attention to characterization and a keen sense of atmosphere, demonstrating Hu’s intimacy with the decor and lifestyle of traditional Chinese inns.  These “inn films,” aptly named because they are almost wholly set in the tavern, are notable as political allegories, where one side fights for a political or patriotic cause against a side representing the forces of repression and authoritarianism, perhaps mirroring the Cold War conflict between the Communist Party and the Nationalist Party, yet exhibiting a pursuit of righteousness, which has its roots with Chinese opera, with the motivations of the characters onscreen clear from the outset.  The inn itself is not much to look at, drab, somewhat rundown, with wooden tables below and rooms upstairs, all under a mud-thatched roof.  Not much of a décor, commandeered by a military unit of the dongchang, located in the middle of nowhere, where emerging from the jagged mountain edges are soldiers challenging anyone that passes nearby.  Both Xiao Shaozi and Miss Zhu have handled Cao’s minions with ease, where one fights against many, dispatching the bad guys with nonchalance, where each confrontation is a challenge of honor where only one side can prevail.  Because of the collection of freedom fighters who display a spirit of rebellion, this breaks down into an ensemble piece, moving from one figure to the next, yet an early extended sequence with an emboldened Xiao Shaozi may be the most exemplary, as it displays humor and daring wit, along with a series of surprises, where the man refuses to reveal his identity or be broken by a series of deadly attacks, handling each confrontation with ease, eventually forcing the dongchang to submit by asking him to join forces, yet he resolutely refuses, as he’s a free spirit.  This appears to be the heart and soul of the film, that you can’t kill an idea, that it will somehow thrive and survive, even if under a hidden identity.  So much information is given at the opening voiceover narration of the film establishing the historical and narrative parameters that it is almost impossible to digest, yet many heroic characters die at the end after facing seemingly insurmountable odds.  While the direction is stunning, this epic film is also an extended choreography of superlative martial arts confrontations that seemingly go on forever, featuring some of the most brilliantly designed sword fights and hand-to-hand combat to ever grace the screen in martial arts films, with an unmatchable mix of rhythm and movement.  The stunts and fight scenes were choreographed by Han Yingjie, also one of the principal actors and a Peking Opera performer, creating acrobatic set pieces, introducing ballet-like leaps and jumps into the final sequences, displaying superhuman speed and agility in an inevitable showdown with Cao Shao-qin, often veering into mystical realms of the supernatural, where his action is faster than the eye can see, quite stunning, really, especially considering the time it was made.  Sound is as important here as it is in Kurosawa films, very percussive, again drawing a certain musical rhythm and timing from the staged opera, yet adding his own personalized aesthetics, infusing his films with energy and finesse, lavishing attention on set pieces, drawing every shot in advance, supplying the cast and crew with photocopies, studying them from many angles, preoccupied with the visual design even before shooting begins, where the shot is a meticulous reconstruction of an idea.  Hu was a talented calligrapher, painting the opening credits himself.  Tsai Ming-liang’s GOODBYE DRAGON INN (2003) is a tribute to this film, set during a deluge of rain in a decrepit Taipei movie theater on its final night in business, where the last few mysteriously elusive customers are either drawn to the movie screen playing this film, or are humorously distracted from it.  Wong Kar-wai’s ASHES OF TIME (1994) and the significantly improved 2008 REDUX version bears a similar remote setting, also exuding philosophical themes, with both films resembling a Chinese version of the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns.  Ang Lee’s CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON (2000) and Zhang Yimou’s HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS (2004) are both tributes to this film, while Tsui Hark remade it twice, in 1992 and 2011.  To celebrate one hundred years of Chinese cinema, the Hong Kong Film Awards released a list of The Best 100 Chinese Motion Pictures, with this listed at #7, Hong Kong Film Awards' List of The Best 100 Chinese Motion. 

2020 Top Ten List #4 I Wish I Knew (Hai shang chuan qi)

Director Jia Zhang-ke







 

 

I WISH I KNEW (Hai shang chuan qi)                   A-                                                          China  (119 mi)  2010  d:  Jia Zhang-ke

If you don’t care, why let me hope and pray so?
Don’t lead me on, if I’m a fool just say so.
Should I keep dreaming on, or just forget you?
What shall I do, I wish I knew.     

⸺Mack Gordon and Harry Warren, from Diamond Horseshoe, 1945, Betty Grable - 'I wish I knew' (2:06)                

Premiering at Un Certain Regard at Cannes ten years ago but never released here, this film has a belated distribution with a slightly shorter edit, an extremely poetic time capsule made in coordination with the upcoming 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, commissioned by the Expo’s planners, as Jia explores and re-evaluates Shanghai’s identity as transnational, unstable and in constant flux, drawing a connection between the historical and contemporary setting, inquiring about the history of the city by speaking to older, influential people whose lives were shaped there, heard describing their family memories, revealing how the city affected their often shattered lives, delivering a personal meditation on China’s recent past.  Initially interviewing over 80 people, it is cut down to only 18, very rich in detail, with the same sense of urgency as Jia’s majestic film STILL LIFE (2006), using an elder generation for historical purposes, as they lived in an Old Shanghai that no longer exists, having transitioned to a modern global city, yet an essential component of the film is capturing their memories before they fade away, as their personal testimony is as revealing as it is riveting, providing a collective living history that often deviates from official accounts, describing an era of assassination and revolution, pitting Chinese against one another in a civil war, where the military leaders were familiar with one another, having attended the same military schools, now divided strictly on political grounds, where the cost of Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army victory over Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists was enormous, resulting in a fractured nation and constantly changing Chinese identities.  Perhaps the most revealing were open discussions about the impact of the Cultural Revolution, where the city was a stronghold of radical leftism, requiring mandatory confessions on what was perceived as counter-revolutionary activity, which included family migrations to Taiwan and Hong Kong, often for safety purposes to avoid arrests and political persecution, but these visits had negative repercussions long afterwards, as the state was interested in the reasons for leaving Shanghai.  Using clips from older films, while speaking to artists associated with those films, Jia cleverly interweaves images of past and present-day Shanghai, suggesting the thriving film industries in Taiwan and Hong Kong were nurtured by Shanghai refugees who fled the mainland during the Communist takeover.  Omitted, however, are the films of Stanley Kwan, a Hong Kong director whose historical pieces set in Shanghai are legendary, Center Stage (Yuen Ling-yuk) (1991), Red Rose, White Rose (Hong mei gui bai mei gui) (1994), or Everlasting Regret (Changhen ge) (2005), where the latter film is set through different historical periods spanning some fifty years from the 30’s to the 80’s, and is as much a love story to the city of Shanghai as to the people whose lives passed through there, where the roving eye of the camera curiously becomes an unseen character.  In much the same manner, Jia links his connecting pieces with an anonymous character portrayed by his wife, Zhao Tao, who never speaks, dressed all in white, walking through the contemporary city as an eye witness, sailing through the seemingly interchangeable straits of both Hong Kong and Shanghai, gazing upon the futuristic architecture or the muddied Expo construction site filled with workers in hard hats, where streets still under construction reveal demolished buildings, vacated lots, and newly renovated neighborhoods, with Zhao soaking it all in, mirroring the perception of viewers watching and evaluating this film. 

Early on, a woman tells the story of her Communist father’s execution at the age of 24, ordered by Chiang Kai-shek just before Shanghai was liberated, now a little known revolutionary martyr, an event that happened shortly before her birth, recorded by a Hong Kong journalist in black and white photos, where the last image moments before execution is described as a brave revolutionary with a fearless smile.  “I only know my father through these images,” she tearfully reveals, recalling that her mother went a little crazy afterwards, running alongside the Communist troops when they entered the city in 1949 still searching for her dead husband, much like the wives and girlfriends of lost or missing German soldiers greeting each incoming train to Berlin in Fassbinder’s THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN (1978).  This personal recollection of family heartbreak is contrasted by propaganda images from the Wang Bing film TO LIBERATE SHANGHAI (1959), featuring deliriously happy crowds greeting victorious Communist soldiers, red flags waving, with an officer proudly declaring, “The liberation of Shanghai marks the complete smashing of imperialist forces in China!”  In accordance with the revolutionary fervor, Jia speaks to textile worker Huang Baomei, who recalls being called into an ordinary factory plant meeting and being floored to see none other than Chairman Mao Zedong present, congratulating her on her profession, as the nation was relying on her for clothing, becoming one of the “model workers” in a 1958 film by Xie Jin where she plays herself in a film named after her, becoming the face of the Great Leap Forward, emblematic of a patriotic Socialist working class heroine and a household name in Mao’s China (occurring simultaneously to the great famine when millions starved to death), spending decades in the same factory, now seen shut down and empty (with songs of union solidarity faintly heard offscreen), an abandoned relic of what it once was.  Wang Toon, director of the Taiwanese film RED PERSIMMON (1966), reflects on his childhood recollections of fleeing Shanghai as the Communists closed in on the city, where the chaos surrounding a departing ship to Taiwan was so severe his grandmother had to tie together ten children to prevent them from being lost in the swelling crowd.  Other elderly Shanghai residents stranded in Taipei since 1949 are interviewed as well, offering their experiences, including legendary Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien, interviewed on a train crossing through the mountains, recalling similar imagery from Dust in the Wind (Lian lian feng chen) (1986) while also showing brief moments from the luminous introductory scene from Flowers of Shanghai (Hai shang hua) (1998), where he expressed great curiosity about returning to the city to shoot the film, describing how prominent arranged marriages have been throughout Chinese history, with little concept of love, yet was excited at the prospects of opening up 20th century floodgates for romance, also showing clips from Hong Kong director but Shanghai-born Wong Kar-wai’s DAYS OF BEING WILD (1990), where actress Rebecca Pan plays an aging Shanghai refugee.  Speaking to the director, Ms. Pan is herself the daughter of a Shanghai woman who fled to Hong Kong in 1949, choking back tears as she describes her mother’s plight, seen singing bits of a song she recalls, perhaps the title song of the film.  It’s curious how these other cities of Taipei and Hong Kong play a part in Shanghai’s legendary history, but Jia’s film does a formidable job connecting them all to one another, as that’s something not seen in other films with this degree of complexity.  According to film historian Tony Rayns (Currency | I Wish I Knew (Jia Zhangke. China) - Cinema Scope, who provided the English subtitling for the film, “these Taiwanese voices have never been heard in Mainland China before.”  

Wei Wei, the heroine in Fei Mu’s SPRING IN A SMALL TOWN (1948), describes the dismissive hostility on display from the city while shooting the film, eventually fleeing to Hong Kong afterwards, while the director’s daughter, Fei Mingyi, also describes how political unrest was so severe that the family also fled to Hong Kong, believing at the time it was only temporary, but the situation altered drastically, as Fei Mu’s reputation was ruined, vilified by the Communist Party, dying in exile only a few years later in 1951.  The film was ultimately banned for many years in China, but over time is now considered one of the greatest Chinese films ever made, voted # 2 in a 2019 poll conducted by Time Out Shanghai, The 100 best Mainland Chinese films - Time Out Shanghai.  When Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni came to China during the Cultural Revolution in 1972 to make a documentary film CHUNG KUO – CINA (1972) about China at the invitation of Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, he was welcomed with open arms to make a 4-hour film that Western viewers found sympathetic, where we hear the story from a Shanghai TV journalist that accompanied him around the city, surprised by what he felt were “backwards” images, believing it was not featuring the positive aspects of China’s resurgence.  When the film was released, providing a somewhat detached, neo-realist view of daily life (as is Antonioni’s style), it was instantly denounced in the People’s Daily, claiming Antonioni had “evil intentions,” labeled a counter-revolutionary, claiming he had defamed the image of a new China, setting off nationwide criticism (Repudiating Antonioni's Anti-China Film), officially banned by the Gang of Four, not shown in China until a 2004 screening at the Beijing Cinema Institute, and roundly condemned by people who never saw the film, including the journalist who was himself punished, losing two years of his life suffering his own political persecution, forced to attend self-criticism sessions.  Of note, China offered a public apology to the filmmaker in 1980.  Ironically, this Jia film received much of the same criticism in China, claiming it didn’t capture the boldness of the city’s colors, but much of that can be attributed to his use of a digital camera, lighter, and easily transportable, making it easier to move around with ease.  The film supposedly lacks contextualization, according to the critics, as there are no archival photos of Old Shanghai, and the director fails to provide revolutionary sentiment.  Largely overlooked at the time of its release, what critics failed to comprehend was the depth of humanism provided by those interviewed, as it’s their life stories onscreen that vividly encapsulate distinct moments in Chinese history, providing a tragic and sorrowful assessment of what it was like to live during historical times, describing the ordeals of parents and grandparents as told by the family survivors, where oral history is akin to Vertov’s symphony of voices, finding universal themes of displacement, lives uprooted, families split apart, providing innovative editing techniques showing a city under massive construction, but also under the influence of Hong Kong and the nation of Taiwan, revealing how they are all interconnected, as an ancient city is transformed into a modern metropolis seemingly overnight, revealing a natural progression from then until now, with younger people featured more towards the end.  The continual presence of Zhao Tao onscreen is significant, giving voice to the voiceless, a bystander on the threshold of history, becoming a stand-in for all the citizens of Shanghai, as it’s not just about those 18 voices.  Jia’s film construction is a composite of many forces working together, showing great insight in challenging the official explanation of history which has been appropriated by the Communist Party, with evocative music by Lim Giong, becoming an impressionistic mosaic of art and journalism, uniquely allowing viewers to make up their own minds about the human toll exacted by progress.