"gung fu is, gung fu" - Cato 1968

Everything is sacred
In martial-arts films such as Hero, ritual finds its place again
Robert Fulford
National Post
Tuesday, August 31, 2004

Have martial-arts movies like Kill Bill and Hero arisen among us to satisfy
our ancient need for ritual? We methodically expel ceremony from most of
life, stripping church liturgy down to basics and draining the esoteric
meaning from royal and military rites. Egotism and TV have long since eroded
formal political tradition -- during Question Period, Parliament looks like
a yapping kindergarten class.

But in Zhang Yimou's Hero, ritual recaptures its old role as an essential
element in human society, at least for an hour and a half. Our secular
culture has been living through generations of (as they say in comparative
religion courses) "desacralization," turning public activity mundane,
formless and emotionally empty. The dean of religious anthropologists,
Mircea Eliade, gave in The Sacred and the Profane his opinion, since
frequently echoed, that "Desacralization pervades the entire experience of
the non-religious man of modern societies."

Not, however, the world imagined by directors such as Yimou, who made Hero
(his earlier films include Raise the Red Lantern and Red Sorghum). In
ancient China, he creates a stylized theatre of war where freelance soldiers
give sacred meaning to their every action -- even when, as in this film, no
formal religion is mentioned by name. These renegade killers commit
themselves first of all to refinement and style. For them, calligraphy
matters as much as swordsmanship; when you are practising one, you are
preparing for the other. The beauty of calligraphy will reappear in the
grace with which weapons are thrown and wielded.

They also believe in a chivalric warrior's code. Not surprisingly, these
Chinese virtuosi of the sword resemble the heroes who have always influenced
oriental action films, the gunmen of the American West, now relatively
unfashionable but once Hollywood's favourite protagonists. Even when their
lives were in danger, the western gunmen maintained (so the movie-created
myth tells us) a code of honour as strict as the Marquess of Queensberry
rules.

A true martial-arts warrior learns the nobility of restraint. In Hero, some
of the swordsmen who set out to assassinate the king of Qin, a tyrant,
decide instead to let him live. They recall the men in the Shakespeare
sonnet that begins "They that have power to hurt and will do none." In the
end they inherit heaven's graces: "They are the lords and owners of their
faces,/Others but stewards of their excellence."

The Chinese cinema has also borrowed one of the standard characters
developed for the imaginary Old West by John Ford's American generation of
legend-building directors: The renowned fighter who longs to hang up his
weapon and live in peace, a convention last put to good use by Clint
Eastwood in his classic Unforgiven.

To that tradition, China has added conventions of its own, including the one
that always looks as if it were borrowed from the Magic Realism of Latin
America: Great warriors not only use their weapons faster than the eye can
see, they also float through the air like birds, dancing over mountains,
sometimes even fighting in the sky. A martial-arts film director ignores the
surly bonds of Earth.

Yimou has said that he was inspired by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the
Ang Lee film that became famous for its highly aesthetic approach to martial
arts. As far as we can tell from Hero, Yimou lacks Lee's ability to import a
compelling narrative into an action film. Hero's plot sometimes becomes
engaging when the filmmakers tell and retell it in different versions, as
Akira Kurosawa did 54 years ago in Rashomon, the first Asian film to reach a
large audience in the West. Otherwise, the story verges on the
simple-minded.

But as a work of visual art, Hero effortlessly improves on its model. While
there's no denying the beauty of Crouching Tiger, Hero sets a higher
standard.

It exhibits the talents of four remarkable actors, but the real stars are
the cinematographer (Christopher Doyle) and the production designers (Huo
Ting Xiao and Yi Zhen Zhou). They show us so many magnificent images, and
use colour with such precision and imagination, that we never get around to
wondering why we don't care about the characters or the plot. They spell out
one scene in red, another in blue, another in white, and finally an
exquisite passage in pistachio green. At one point the designers make
vibrant art out of the movement of fabric falling to the floor. The garments
of the actors have an almost ecclesiastical dignity.

The foley artists who built the soundtrack intensify the experience; every
clank of swords, every crash of arrows hitting a building, creates a
slightly distinct aural effect. The swish of a sword coming out of its
scabbard becomes a little sound poem that could be the opening notes for a
modernist concerto. Tan Dun's music, with violin solos performed by Itzhak
Perlman, has a wondrous urgency.

An old rule holds that a movie doesn't work when you notice the sets, the
costumes and the music. That's true sometimes, but false in martial-arts
films. Not to notice such details here would be like not noticing the sets
of an opera or the costumes in a production of Shakespeare. It would be
missing the point, or part of the point.

But of course ritual must always be charged with meaning, and the ritual in
Hero is no exception. It carries a political message, and it's not at all
subtle. The theme is national unity. Warriors sacrifice themselves so that
the King of Qin can govern all seven Chinese kingdoms and thereby organize
for the first time (this is 2300 BC) a unified China, reverently described
in the subtitles as "our land." The hyper-efficient massing of soldiers and
their fanatic dedication provide a hymn to nationalism that recalls Leni
Riefenstahl's Nazi film, Triumph of the Will, or maybe the knockoff of
Riefenstahl in Star Wars. Today, computer enhancement makes those effects
even more powerful.

In the past, Yimou has had his troubles with the authorities in Beijing, but
they stand solidly behind Hero, for obvious reasons. It presents Chinese
unity as an unquestioned good. Chinese audiences have made Hero their most
successful film ever, and from a distance we can appreciate it as a work of
art. Residents of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Tibet may have a more sardonic
reaction.

http://www.canada.com/national/nationalpost/news/artslife/story.html?id=b9c2
c143-cd06-4494-a22b-ac6dfe399b2a

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