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It's only after the success of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon that
people realised King Hu left us. There were and there still are some traces and influences
of his cinema in the works of the most acclaimed Hong-Kong directors. King Hu has probably
lift the HK cinema to another level. His features were very much influenced by various art
forms (dance, opera and painting), which he transcended by integrating them into his own
work. |
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Legend In The Mountain
King Hu (Wu
Kam-Chen, 1931-1997)
BIOGRAPHY
 Born in 1931
in Beijing, King Hu (Wu Kam-Chen) seemed to have had
experienced everything such as hosting radio programmes or editing Buddhist books. He was
a left-winger militant when he studied at the Beijing Art School. He decided then to carry
on studying in HK. He didn't know such decision would change his life. Indeed, China
became communist and borders got shut. He then had to rethink about his political
commitment and he spent time learning Cantonese. He took the opportunity to approach the
local cinema world by various indirect means.
He became set designer and he and his
friend Li Hangxiang painted posters and leaflets for cinemas. A few second roles later,
King Hu followed Li at the Shaw Brothers. He worked there as an actor and a scriptwriter
for almost ten years, and he then tried film direction thanks to Li, who had already made
a name for himself as a movie director. On the set of The Love Eterne (1963), Li
Hangxiang let Hu direct several scenes. Although King Hu wasn't credited as a second unit
director (but he was as an actor), he directed all the action sequences. Li could
therefore get concentrated on the romance between the characters. Tsui Hark, who enjoys
exploring the Chinese cinema patrimony, remade the movie in 1994. He called it The Lovers (with Nicky Wu and Charlie Young).
 
King Hu's first official movie was the
period film The Sons Of The Good Earth. Not only he directed it but he also wrote
the script. The pertinence of his style was, however, truly revealed in 1966 with Come
Drink With Me. King Hu's first Wu Xia Pian (Chinese chivalry genre) was a huge success
all over Asia and Chang Cheh even made a sequel in 1968: Golden Swallow. The same
year, Chang Cheh made The Magnificent Trio. In a couple of years, both directors
managed to bring up to date the HK cinema. Come Drink With Me was influenced by
Japanese cinema like a fair portion of the Cantonese cinema at that time. The Shaw
Brothers being very impressed by their moviemaking, sent some of their protégés to study
on Japanese sets. The plot of Come Drink With Me focused on female characters. At
the time, the true cinema stars were women (Hsu Feng, Chan Peipei among others), but they
progressively disappeared in the seventies under the influence of Chang Cheh movies for
instance. But King Hu ended up being the only director to still give women an important
place in his films.
  
Come Drink With Me was also the sign of Hu's break
up with the Shaw Bros. His perfectionism and his desire to be independent were too strong
to fit the Shaw Bros diktat. The following year, King Hu joined a small Taiwanese
production company called Union. While Chang Cheh was directing The One Armed Swordsman,
King Hu made The Dragon Gate Inn. Two years were enough to get rid of 30 years of
Wu Xia Pian tradition. King Hu used the Cinemascope process and very complex camera
movements, he appropriately mixed editing with choreography and music and he developed a
pictorial sense of framing. The story was stunning as well: historical context, complex
characters and plot. Despite a slow-paced introduction, the movie was a huge success at
the box office. King Hu was finally acclaimed as a great director.
Such triumph allowed King Hu to finance his most ambitious
project: A Touch Of Zen. He took him three years and lot of money to complete this
masterpiece. Indeed, he cared for every single detail and worked at his own pace. A
Touch Of Zen was originally supposed to be a ghost story, but it gradually became a
political intrigue with such a philosophical and spiritual content rarely achieved in the
rest of Hu's work. The movie was however badly cut by producers and released in two parts.
A Touch Of Zen was released in 1971. It wasn't a great success but it gave King Hu
the status of auteur. Shocked by the studio behaviour that mistreated the movie, King Hu
left and came back to Hong-Kong where he established his own film production company King
Hu Film Cie. Four years later, A Touch Of Zen was presented at the 1975 Cannes Film
Festival and won the Technical Award. It took eleven years for producers and distributors
to release A Touch Of Zen in France.
After A Touch Of Zen , Hu raised funds during 3
years in order to make The Fate Of Lee Khan (1973). It's his last Wu Xia Pian where
the main intrigue takes place in an inn (favoured place for fights in traditional Wu Xia
Pian, like in Dragon Gate Inn), and a film of which the story deals with spies.
Indeed, Hu never really hid the fact that the James Bond success in HK bothered
him. "I don't like James Bond. They made him a super hero, but he is just an
agent, a human being. In my movies, secret agents are more realistic, I didn't want to
portray them in the most glowing colours" : stated King Hu. Again, The Fate Of
Lee Khan was distributed in France only in 1986, 13 years after it was made.
Two year later, Hu made The Valiant Ones (1975), and had much difficulties to
finance it. His capricious-mood genius reputation was already well established.
 
In 1979, King Hu had finished his ambitious diptych Raining In The Mountain & Legend In The Mountain.
The scenario was written by his wife and not by himself. Shot in location in Korea with
the same cast and crew, both films tend to describe temptations and difficulties to accept
one's condition, first from the human point of view and then from the ghost point of view.
This diptych was most probably the peak of his career. The following films would be
failures or actes manqués.
 
King Hu's following films became less and less successful
and he had increasing troubles to finance some more. The eighties were years of hassle for
him. After seven years of aborted and delayed projects, Tsui Hark proposed King Hu to
direct Swordsman for him, and allowed the old master to
work behind the camera again. After all, Tsui Hark made a lot of tributes to King Hu in
his own movies. Early nineties, the HK cinema industry has, however, changed a lot. What
seemed a good idea at the beginning turned quickly into a nightmare. Tsui Hark got
exasperated with King Hu's slow pace and Hu couldn't bear Tsui Hark interventionism and
Ching Siu Tung's visual ideas. Finally King Hu was sacked. He was however still credited
as director even if in the final cut, none of his scenes were kept. The eighties were
therefore fatal for King Hu: the new wave changed the face of the local film industry and
Hu wasn't able to fit in or to meet new challenges.
Painted Skin (1992) confirmed that the HK cinema had
evolved without King Hu. A recurrent reproach to this movie was that it was considered as
a copy of Tsui Hark's A Chinese Ghost Story because it
dealt with ghosts and it starred Joey Wong. Actually, it's only a pale King Hu's movie but
it's still far from being as bad as its reputation. It's just that it was already
old-fashioned when it came out. At this time, the Wu Xia Pian pace was faster and faster
and hysterical. Swordsman 2 was released the same year. King Hu slow pace didn't
work any more.
 
Exiled in the USA, King Hu tried until his death to sort
out another film dealing with Chinese immigrants who built the American railways network.
Ironically, King Hu died after gathering half of the money needed for the film production.
This project isn't dead yet though, since John Woo and Terence Chang saved it and plan to
make it with Chow Yun Fat and Nicolas Cage.
The death of King Hu in 1997 in Los Angeles, USA, almost
went completely unnoticed. He has however written some of the most beautiful pages of the
Asian cinema history in general and the Wu Xia Pian in particular. His one of the rare
directors to have seen his own Wu Xia Pian winning an Award at Cannes, and he was also a
director whose films, apart from his most prestigious ones, are still hardly accessible.
Now it's time for local or worldwide distributors to mend this matter.
Written by
David Aneas, May 2002.
Freely translated by Thomas December 2002.
See also King
Hu's Swan Song: Raining
In The Montain/ Legend of The Mountain
Homepage - Biography -
Filmography - Film Availability - Raining/
Legend In The Mountain - Top
Filmography
1962: The Mix Up (sc)
1963: The Love Eterne (2nd unit dir)
1964: The Story of Sue San (sc)
1965: Sons of the Good Earth (dir, sc)
1966: Come Drink With Me (dir, sc)
1966: Downhill They Ride (sc)
1967: Dragon Gate Inn (dir, sc, art dir.)
1970: Anger (2nd episode of The Four Moods, based on Sancha Kou opera,
dir, sc)
1971: A Touch Of Zen (dir, sc, ed, art dir.)
1973: The Fate of Lee Khan (dir, sc, art dir.)
1975: The Valiant Ones (dir, prd, sc, art dir.)
1976 : Heroes Of The Underground (sc)
1979: Legend of the Mountain (dir, art dir., ed, costume designer)
1979: Raining in the Mountain (dir, sc, art dir., ed, costume designer)
1981: The Juvenizer (dir, prd, sc, ed)
1982: All The King's Men (dir, art dir., costume designer)
1983: The Wheel of Life (first episode) (dir)
1990: Swordsman (dir)
1992: The Painted Skin (dir, sc, ed)
dir : director, sc : scriptwriter, ed
: editing, prd : producer
Homepage - Biography -
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Film Availability
The Love Eterne : VCD no
subtitle, DVD (Chinese with English subtitles, out of stock)
Sons of the Good Earth :VHS (Chinese with English subtitles) ed. Tai-Seng
Come Drink With Me : VHS (Chinese with English subtitles) ed. Tai-Seng, DVD
VOSTA ed. Celestial released 05/12/2002
Dragon Gate Inn : Japanese DVD (Chinese with Japanese subtitles)
A Touch Of Zen : DVD released 10/12/2002 (Chinese with English subtitles) ed.
Tai-Seng; Korean DVD (Chinese
with Korean subtitles) & Japanese DVD (Chinese with Japanese subtitles)
The Fate of Lee Khan : VHS (Chinese with English subtitles) ed. Tai Seng &
ed. Made In Hong Kong
The Valiant Ones : VHS (Chinese with English subtitles) ed. Tai Seng
Legend of the Mountain :VCD no subtitle, HK DVD (Chinese with English subtitles) ed. Winson
Raining in the Mountain : French VHS (Chinese with French subtitles) ed. Films
Sans Frontiéres, Japanese DVD (Chinese with Japanese subtitles)
Swordsman : HK DVD (Chinese with English subtitles) ed.
MegaStar
The Painted Skin : VCD, DVD & VHS (Chinese
with English subtitles) ed. Tai-Seng
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