#1102
Post
by Cold Bishop » Thu Sep 25, 2014 4:28 am
I don't know guys… I've been so burnt out on movie watching for the last few months I almost considered sitting this project out. Despite my lack of participation, I'd like to throw out one last Hail Mary spotlight title, that I've been holding off talking about until I could rewatch it. That might have to wait for it's inevitable panda status, but nevertheless I feel I should compose a few words, meager and hard blown though they may be, hoping that some of you may track it down in these last few days (after Long Arm of the Law, of course).
The Sword (Patrick Tam, 1980) – While mostly remembered nowadays for his famous protégé (Wong Kar-Wai) or his curious decision to give up the directing chair for the editing booth, Patrick Tam was one of the major figures of the Hong Kong New Wave. A disciple of the European art house tradition, he made his name in television by bringing Godardian aesthetics to his television projects. Unlike his fellow "art film" peers like Ann Hui or Allen Fong, Tam attempted to meld his modernist sensibilities with commercial genre cinema in a manner singular even for that period. It's hard not to read his premature retirement into the increasing impossibility of such a project.
This, his first film, is his best, not just a classic text of the New Wave (and one of its few martial-arts films) but also a culmination of the "cruel" trend of the wuxia… Really a culmination of the classical era of the entire genre. The plot is a classic chestnut – a skilled martial-artist determined at all costs to gain the title of supreme swordsman – but it's distinguished by a masterful formal rigor and psychological dexterity. Yes, this counts as a revisionist text, a martial arts film-which dissects the genre's will-to-power narratives and adherence to violence. Clean cut lines of good and evil become tangled as we realize the full extent of the hero's vanity and inflexibility. Likewise, the film's initial simple, if still outré Oedipal conflict expands outward, the film's cast of characters forming a web of familial and social interconnections. It's a microcosm of society that splinters and disintegrates in the neurotic drive for power and control (in various forms).
Yet for all its New Wave aplomb, the film feels almost Classical thanks to Tam's austere and measured staging and stylization, borne as much from the late 60's height of the genre as from his modernist influences. The moody novelistic influence of Chor Yuen is here, but Tam cuts his cast down to a minimum, keeps the plot clearly delineated, and adopts a much more subtly baroque visual palette, often giving way to sparse outdoor locations. The action, likewise eschews the constructive, choreographic influence of the kung fu film, updating the montage-based strategies of an earlier era. In fact, the film is arguably the work of two auteurs, as it is deeply impressed by the work of action-choreographer Ching Siu-Tung, himself on the cusp of his own storied directorial career (Duel to the Death, A Chinese Ghost Story). Ching brings his trademark frenzied and hyperbolic style to the action, while Tam manages to restrain the more outlandish and incomprehensible faults of that style. It's a perfect marriage of their two sensibilities.
Vividly dramatized, artfully rendered, and subsumed in an air of fatalism, this perhaps more than any King Hu film provides the prototype for the art-wuxias of a later generation (Ashes of Time, The Blade)… but this iconoclasm would not be nearly as effective if Tam didn't show a masterful control of the traditional elements of the genre. Standing at the end of the classical era, it provides as forceful and mournful a period point as Man of the West or Hara-Kiri did for their respective genres. A masterpiece… New Wave, wuxia pian, Hong Kong, cinema.
Last edited by
Cold Bishop on Sun Sep 28, 2014 8:20 am, edited 1 time in total.