The story, which takes place during the Ming Dynasty era, is set largely in and around a small, rural village near an abandoned military fort that is purported to be haunted. Unlike most wuxia films, the protagonist is not an accomplished swordsman, but rather a rather shy and awkward scholar named Gu (Shih Chun), whose mother (Zhang Bing-yu), with whom he still lives, is constantly berating him for still being unmarried and not having taken the civil service exam that would make him eligible for a government job (a high point of social standing in Ming-era China). Rather, Gu is perfectly happy studying for the sake of knowledge and making a meager living drawing portraits (he and his mother live in the aforementioned haunted fort because they don’t have to pay rent).

Gu’s staid life is upended with the arrival of several new people in town, particularly Yang (Hsu Feng), a beautiful young woman who also moves into the fort along with her mother. Gu’s mother is sure that Yang is perfect marriage material for Gu, but it turns out that Yang is actually a fugitive on the lam from the Eastern Depot, the notorious secret police used by the Ming Dynasty to suppress any form of opposition. Yang is the daughter of a man who tried to warn the emperor of a corrupt eunuch, and she has been hiding out along with General Shi (Bai Ying), another political dissident who is pretending to be an herbalist. When a member of the Eastern Depot arrives in town looking for them, Gu’s life is turned upside down, eventually bringing him into contact with not only a small army of Eastern Depot goons, but also Abbot Hui-yuan (Roy Chiao), a legendary Buddhist monk who presides over a monastery high in the mountains and becomes Yang’s chief ally against the Eastern Depot, particularly Men Da (Wang Rui), the corrupt eunuch’s fearsome commander.

King Hu derived the basic narrative from “The Gallant Girl,” one of the more than 500 stories contained in Chinese writer Pu Sung-ling’s Strange Tales From a Chinese Studio (1740), his most famous work. King Hu had long been intrigued with the idea of conveying the spirituality of Zen Buddhism in cinematic terms (although he did not identify as a Buddhist, himself), and much of what makes A Touch of Zen so entrancing is the clever visual means by which he and cinematographers Yeh-hsing Chou and Hui-Ying Hua (the former of whom worked as assistant cameraman and the latter of whom worked as cinematographer on Dragon Gate Inn) imbue the film with a consistent otherworldly quality. There is already a subtext of the supernatural relating to the abandoned fort in Gu’s village, although no ghosts ever arrive except the ones that Gu, Yang, General Shi, and their allies construct in an elaborate scheme to frighten and ultimately defeat the Eastern Depot army that arrives for them.

The film’s mystical qualities are conveyed in purely visual terms, as King Hu douses every scene in a haze of smoke and mist that creates piercing shafts of light and an ethereal quality (the gorgeous Taiwanese landscape, which offers expanses of grassland, bamboo forests, craggy caves and waterfalls, and dramatically pointed mountains, is like its own character). He is careful to set many scenes early or late in the day, thus capturing the elusive illumination of “magic hour” while also creating dynamic lens flares that, at the time, were radical departures from traditional cinematography. The film’s visual tone is the epitome of the Chinese word mi, which translates as “amorphous” or “mysterious” and has, according to film scholar Héctor Rodríguez, “often been employed in connection with Chinese landscape painting to evoke an experience of gazing at, roaming about, and being engulfed in a deep, obscure, illimitable, and oneiric space.”

King Hu also revitalized the wuxia film, not only by making the primary warrior a woman (something he did in numerous films), but also by incorporating elements of Peking Opera into the fight choreography, turning what would otherwise have been rather traditional swordfights and standoffs into glorious ballets of impossible human performance. The characters leap and bound through the air, soar into trees, and clang swords while airborne, their dynamic movement often punctuated with what sounds like the flapping wings of a bird (I imagine the sound is supposed to represent the wind in their flowing robes, but it has a decidedly bird-like quality). There is no explanation for the characters’ superhuman abilities, which encourages us to see them symbolically, rather than literally. The acrobatics, which are largely constructed through rapid-fire editing (King Hu even experimented with subliminal shots that were less than eight frames), enhance the action, turning the violence into poetry and boost the intensity of the film’s clear-cut good-versus-evil dynamics. The film’s aesthetic qualities deepen with the arrival of Abbot Hui-yuan, whose spiritual mastery also elevates him physically, making him the ultimate warrior and representative of Buddhist thought.Unfortunately, King Hu’s ambitions for A Touch of Zen worked against him from a distribution standpoint, as producer Ma Rongfeng, whose Union Film Company hired him as director and production manager, was concerned about trying to release a wuxia film that ran nearly three hours. Rongfeng ultimately forced him to divide it into two separate films, which were released in Taiwan in 1970 and 1973 (the first half was released while the second half was still in production, and the infamous bamboo forest fight sequence closed the first film and was then repeated at the beginning of the second). It wasn’t until 1975 that King Hu was able to edit the two halves back together, where it “premiered” at the Cannes Film Festival to much acclaim, the Grand Prix de Technique Supérieur (Technical Grand Prize), and recognition in the West, where King Hu was largely unknown.

The film’s success allowed him to create his own production company and continue to work independently, making more martial arts films like The Fate of Lee Khan (1973) and The Valiant Ones (1975), both of which featured fight choreography by the legendary Sammo Hung, the drama Raining in the Mountain (1979), and the supernatural mystery Legend of the Mountain (1979), both of which were based on stories from Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. Unfortunately, he was never quite able to replicate A Touch of Zen’s critical and commercial success, and while he continued to direct films into the early 1990s, he was ultimately eclipsed by those who drew from his works, particularly Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and Yimou Zhang (Hero, House of Flying Daggers). However, the restoration of A Touch of Zen and its theatrical re-release has rightly reignited interest in King Hu’s work, which should return him to the stature he deserves.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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