King Hu's A Touch of Zen
Publication Year: 2007
Published by: Hong Kong University Press, HKU
Series: New Hong Kong Cinema
Cover
Series Preface
The New Hong Kong cinema came into existence under very special circumstances, during a period of social and political crisis resulting in a change of cultural paradigms. Such critical moments have produced the cinematic achievements of the early Soviet cinema, neorealism, the...
1. Introduction
A Touch of Zen is one of the essential films of the Chinese-language cinema. It achieved a “double first”: it was the first Chinese-language film to win an award at the Cannes Film Festival, in 1975, and the first...
2. Pu Songling and the Spider
In chapter 1, I have given a sense of the unprecedented scale on which the production of A Touch of Zen was undertaken, and the extraordinary advantages that Hu enjoyed under Union which he exploited to make his mark as a free, creative artist. The large scale may seem surprising...
3. Ghosts and the Desire to See
A Touch of Zen begins with the proposition that the Chinese fort where the bulk of the story takes place is a haunted place and that the xia n
4. Seduction and Politics, Fight and Flight
In this chapter, we pick up on the scene of Yang Huizhen’s seduction of Gu Shengzhai which takes place under moonlight in a water pavilion, part of the grounds of the “haunted” general’s mansion. To entice him there, Yang had...
5. The Battle of the Haunted Mansion
Part 2 of A Touch of Zen contains the title Lingshan jianying (literally, Sword’s Shadow on the Divine Mountain)1 , an indication of Hu’s Zen theme. Depending on one’s point of view, Part 2 is either flawed by this need to...
6. The Zen Finale
In the aftermath of the Battle of the Haunted Mansion, the film moves on to its fantastic-marvelous phase. At the end of the last chapter, I pointed out that Yang Huizhen had fulfilled her central mission as the...
7. Conclusion
I began by suggesting that A Touch of Zen is a subversive work because of its feminist sensibility and sexual ambiguity. But by delivering a fantastic-marvelous conclusion that exposes us to the supernatural, the film appears to override the earthly human concerns of our sexual roles...
E-ISBN-13: 9789888052486
Print-ISBN-13: 9789622098152
Page Count: 196
Illustrations: 32 b/w tables and images
Publication Year: 2007
Series Title: New Hong Kong Cinema
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