Cinema China Day 5 - The Arch & A Touch of Zen

A day of unconventional Hong Kong movies with Cecile Tang's The Arch (1970) and King Hu's A Touch of Zen (1969), although the latter was made in Taiwan. Of these the former was breathtaking; chronicalling the repressed sexual desires awakened in a widdowed mother and her daughter when a soldier is billeted at their home during the Ming dynasty. Meanwhile an arch is being built in the village in honour of the mother's chastity, a symbol of social propriety that prevents her from acting on her emotions, which results formally in the increasingly abstract montages that end the film. The film boasts astonishing contrasty black and white photography depicting images of jaw-dropping poetic resonance. It is little wonder that Partha Panchali comes to mind throughout the film as the DOP is Satyajit Ray's regular Subatra Mitra. The film also anticipates the more human interest work of later female New Wave directors Ann Hui and Clara Law.

A Touch of Zen is an uneven masterpiece. Ku Shen Chai, a small town artist and scholar lives alone with his mother who is constantly bemoaning his lack of ambition, is drawn slowly into a conspiracy that seems to be unfolding around him but remains tantalisingly out of reach. Many early scenes are perfectly controlled, putting one in mind of Japanese Chanbara films of the same period, particularly in terms of the slow pacing and tight editing. In one scene, for instance, the protagonist explores the supposedly haunted fort he lives next to, the incredibly long scene building and building in tension, only for it to anti-climax in a moment of bathos when his mother appears and criticises him for wandering around so late. This constant putting off of the action, very uncharacteristic for the genre, gives the film an immensely allusive quality. Ku's sexy new neighbour, who he rather embarrasingly initially takes for a ghost (turning up at the door with spirit wards rather than the traditional welcome of homebaked cookies), the blind fortune teller and the herbalist who has recently set up his stall in the town square, turn out to be fugitives from the soldier's of Eunoch Wei. Finally putting his studies of military tactics to good use, Ku aids the outcasts in fighting off their assailants in a haunted fort, and as a result Ku ironically takes on the persona of Kong Ming, the arcitypal scholar in Chinese tradition - standing on the battlements with his fan, observing the aftermath of his successful strategy.

The latter half of the film is perhaps one of the best examples of artistic over ambition in cinema, with King Hu jettisoning the narraive in favour of a highly abstract and impressionistic exploration of buddhism, ending in a final sequence as bewilderingly abstract as 2001: A Space Oddysee. The plot doesn't quite so much break off after the highly influential Bamboo forest fight (see House of Flying Daggers), as it does violently disintegrate. Yet this unravelling, this lack of narrative coherance, is one of the film's most fascinating elements, along with its potent Daoist symbolism in the recurrent shots of nature (i've never seen so many establishing shots in a film before). The English title, with its Japanese allusions, is interesting given that the film won the Palme D'Or at Cannes in 1969 (one of the first Chinese films to do so), placing it within the context of the Japanese cinema, which had come to considerable fame in the West whilst the Chinese cinemas remained generally uncharted territory. It speaks volumes about the Western consumption of Asian films; the tendency to assimilate them into a familiar context. The ending, in this light, would perhaps have been seen in light of the Modernist works of directors such as Antonioni and Bergman.