King Hu (Director)

Born: 1932, Beijing. Died: 1997, Taipei.

Moved to Taiwan, from the Shaw Brothers production company in Hong Kong, where he was not on favourable terms.

It was King Hu who brought a new focus on a stylised kind of action in wuxia films, even introducing the credited role of “martial arts director” or fight choreographer as an official job description.

King Hu was from Beijing and incorporated many techniques from the capital’s opera stage. He too was a teacher of sorts, being an avid scholar of Ming dynasty literature, history, and the arts. Drawing on this knowledge, he injected period accuracy but, unlike his friend and mentor Li Hanxiang, accelerated the pace of movement and editing in action sequences.

King Hu’s martial arts style adds a large dose of athleticism in addition to grace. To make fight scenes look dynamic—fast, efficient, lethal—he used hidden springboards and trampolines to add power to combatants’ leaps. Wide-angle shots, swish pans, and rapid tracking are employed to enhance involvement with the total action, lending panoramic views to the surrounding space as well as the combatants. These are mixed with close-ups of only a few seconds, inserted to suggest the blinding impact of a body blow. He was also very dedicated to the historical accuracy of even the smallest details in his period productions.

King Hu was not really interested in kung fu or swordplay except insofar as it illuminates practices of Ming dynasty intrigue. Themes are equally classical, rendering but not dwelling on conflicts of good and evil, or the rigors of acquiring knowledge, intelligence, and (occasionally) enlightenment. The transcendent epiphany of Zen Buddhism is powerfully expressed at the end of A Touch of Zen, but this is an anomaly; the later pictures have the mystical, specifically Chinese atmosphere of Touch of Zen but lack the explicit visualization of religious power.

With the phenomenal success of Dragon Inn, Union Pictures and Hu signed up to do A Touch of Zen, and though Hu continued to work with Union, relations were increasingly strained. Hu was working at an unprecedented scale and expense on what would become his mystical epic A Touch of Zen. Continuing interference and nagging from Union producers prompted Hu to move postproduction on the film back to Hong Kong. From there, he eventually sent a director’s cut to Cannes, where he received a special award for technical achievement. The prestigious recognition—foreshadowed by Li Hanxiang’s Cannes prize for his Yang Kwei-fei (1962)—allowed Hu to earn an international reputation no other Chinese directors enjoyed. By then, King Hu had severed ties with Union and moved his production base back to Hong Kong. When he did return to Taiwan in the early 1980s, the films he made—The Juvenizer (Zhongshen dashi, 1981), All the King’s Men (Tianxia diyi, 1982), The Wheel of Life (Da lunhui, 1983)—no longer generated much impact or new sensations. King Hu’s historical archaism yielded to a different historical authenticity coming from the New Cinema movement.


Quotes:

"Some people say I come from the kung fu genre; that’s a mistake. I know nothing about kung fu. Action sequences in my films are neither kung fu nor martial arts, neither judo nor karate. In fact, they are just two fighters dueling, a form of dance. . . . Because I was exposed to Beijing opera when I was little, my action sequences are not real fights. They are “wuda,” [stage combat] in Beijing opera. There’s no such term as “kung fu” in the Beijing dialect. This is a Cantonese term used by Hong Kong people as a synonym for martial arts. In fact, Dragon Inn belongs to a kind of ancient Chinese espionage. It was made to respond to the prevalent James Bond 007 spy genre. The Ming dynasty is the era that has the strongest concentration of spies. They were controlled by eunuchs that were so powerful that they were immune from imperial authority. Dragon Inn is full of suspense and intrigue, and this is why it appealed to the audience."

Li Han-hsiang (Director)

Aka Li Hanxiang. Born: China 1926. Died: China, 1997.

Moved from the Hong Kong industry to work in Taiwan during the 1960s. Li cut ties with the Shaws and started up a new company in 1963. He entered a partnership with Union, the distributor of Shaw and Cathay films in Taiwan and founded Grand Pictures, whose Chinese name (Guolian) combined the first character of each partner: Cathay (Guotai) and Union (Lianban).

One of the films he made for the Shaw Brothers studio was The Magnificent Concubine (1962), a 'remake' or retelling of the same Chinese Tang dynasty story as Kenji Mizoguchi's 1955 colour film Yokihi (which had been co-produced by Shaws but had been a commercial failure).

Li’s ideal was to set up a studio with management made up of practicing filmmakers whose decision-making was collaborative rather than dictatorial. Collaborative meant that Grand, a “director-as-producer” company, allowed directors to have more say in production. It also meant that Li himself would direct fewer films (he only made six and a quarter films), to give new directors more opportunities.

In 1965 Li lost his two major backers. Cathay’s owner Lu Yuntao and Taiwan Studio’s director Long Fang were both killed in a mysterious air crash. By 1966, Li had woefully overspent in the new company’s first years, and Union refused to extend more credit. By 1967, Grand was in serious financial difficulties and broke off from Cathay and Union. Li quickly sought outside funding to maintain production and formed an alliance with another distribution company. Without Union’s powerful distribution network, and lacking the mighty financial backup from Cathay, Li was not able to sustain his quality production. By 1970, Grand Pictures ceased operations. It had made a total of just twenty-two films.

Bai Jingrui (Director)

Born: China, 1931-1997.
Like Li Xing made contemporary dramas, in the 'healthy realism' and Qiong Yao adapted melodrama genres. Unlike Li Xing, he started out not in taiyu pian but in Mandarin language productions.

He went to study in Italy. After he returned to Taiwan, as the first Chinese graduate from Rome’s Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in 1963, he was hired by CMPC.

In his first feature, 'Lonely Seventeen' (1967), Bai intended to criticize the stifling lives of youth in the industrialized towns of Taiwan, but CMPC insisted it be a “socially responsible” film and, hence, the happy ending. Bai had to apply a “romantic” treatment to mask his social critique. Here is his complaint about this interference:
"Teenagers in our times are under a lot of stress—from the lack of parental care and rigid training in schools as well. They have to resort to fantasy to seek paradise. Hence all sorts of twisted psychology and weird behaviors. I was going to directly tackle this serious phenomenon but CMPC was afraid that the Communists would use it to attack our government. As an artist, I should have insisted on my original intention, but as a CMPC director, I also needed to understand my responsibility. So I changed the story quite a bit and turned it into a romantic film. Anyone can see that this film has no business being a romance story! No matter how well it has been received, I am not happy with it at all." [From Taiwan a Treasure Island]

He turned to comedy in the immediate years after this. Then later would make 'healthy realism' but with his own touches of modernism and experimentation, e.g. the split-screen techniques in the multi-strand plot of 'Home Sweet Home'. But the messages of filial piety in his films often feel tacked on, a coda inconsistent with the narrative and stylistic excess that dominates the film.

Between 1974 and 1979, an unprecedented boom for Taiwan popular cinema, Bai made a total of eighteen films. Sixteen of these films are romantic melodramas. By the early 1980s, when romance could no longer sustain the industry, Bai Jingrui tried to reinvent his career with the support of Hong Kong–based First Film Enterprise. He made an anti-Communist film, The Coldest Winter in Peking (Huangtian houtu, 1981), which was banned, expectedly, by the Hong Kong government for endangering its “friendly relations with neighboring countries.” In following years Bai appeared to run out of ideas and blindly followed the current fashions (including trying to mimic the style of the New Taiwan Cinema).

Li Xing (Director)

Born: 1930, Shanghai.

Grew up in Shanghai before moving with his family to Taiwan after the war. His first Mandarin film was Our Neighbours (Jietou xiangwei, 1963), a 'realist' portrait of an impoverished Taipei neighbourhood. He also made the influential 'healthy realism' films Oyster Girl (1964) and Beautiful Duckling (1965).

Before this he had made Taiwanese (taiyu pian) films including comedy serials. Precisely because of its low budgets, Taiwanese film production was in urgent need of new directors, even if
they had little or no experience. This was how Li got into directing in 1958, although he never went back to this after making the move to the larger Mandarin-language film industry in 1963. He thus worked across the various genre and linguistic and industrial divides in Taiwan, and is a key figure of pre-1980s Taiwanese cinema.

Li is known for his filial piety. He openly acknowledged that parental love supersedes any other kind of relationship in his world. This explains the centrality of the father/son duo in many of his films.
Criticism arises when Li’s auteur signature becomes “backward,” when his traditional values appear to obstruct any possibility for “social and cultural reform.”

Parallel to his lifelong relationship with CMPC, Li continued to make films for himself and for other small independent companies. For instance, Li also made films for Union Pictures and codirected an omnibus film with Li Hanxiang, King Hu, and Bai Jingrui for Grand Pictures in 1969. This film, in which each emotion is treated by a different director, is called 'Four Moods'.

In 1973 and 1974, Li became the number one box office director in Taiwan and Hong Kong with his two hits, The Young Ones (Caiyun fei, 1973) and Where the Seagull Flies (Hai’ou fei chu, 1974). Both were based on Qiong Yao novels. These melodramas not only established him as a ruling commercial director, they also helped mark the peak of Taiwan film’s so-called Golden Age (when Taiwan films were popular enough to get advance financing from around Southeast Asia). Romantic melodramas, dominated by Qiong Yao adaptations, comedies, and martial arts films made up the core that supported a flourishing industry.

















References:
Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island, 30-.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0497359/