THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
KUNG PHOOEY THE SCREEN Beyond Death Wish, Taxi Driver and A Clockwork Orange, beyond Sam Peckinpah, Clint Eastwood and spaghetti Westerns, beyond even samurai films, what kung fu movies accomplish...
...Like the science in a porn film, the poetry in kung fu is a lot of eyewash...
...Oshima also refuses to provide even the minimal plot most porn films have, the idea seems to be that pure sex, cut off from all other reality, will become like a Kabuki play...
...With this image of the monk silhouetted before the sun, the film ends...
...The main villain, a warlord, doesn't appear until about an hour into the story, and he is killed off another hour before the end...
...A lot of it belongs to kung fu itself, which is just an Asian form of fascism...
...All these years now we have been spending money and blood to contain Communism in Asia, and what happens...
...But it quickly becomes apparent that this induction is mere window dressing, like the prologue by some "doctor" with which porn films pretend to be legit documentaries or sex-education films...
...Irrefutable evidence of this comes from yet another film that was shown at the New York Film Festival, Nagisa Oshima's The Empire of the Senses...
...Well done, boys...
...And kung fu movies are the perfect expression of such a culture...
...We don't care that the makers of martial arts movies give us Chinese history in a garbled and indifferent version, for we know as well as they do that the story lines in these films are, like those in porn films, just a clumsy pretext for the action...
...The film begins with a long, meditative passage of shots establishing the Chinese countryside and some ruins...
...In point of fact, Touch of Zen, whose title suggests it is hip to the religious appeal violence has for its audience, ends with an epiphany...
...The only thing that has saved us from this seditionist propaganda is the U.S...
...Rather, violence dictates culture...
...At least these protagonists are consistent enough to last the whole movie, however...
...Customs service, which confiscated the film after the Festival press screening, revoked its import license right on the spot, and shipped it back to Japan before it could corrupt the minds of us Americans...
...His actors really-and-(and even-now and then to break the monotony...
...The personal sort of story that those lyrical opening shots suggest would require a consistency and development of character which director King Hu simply isn't up to...
...Only he is able to beat the warlord's general, who must at last resort to deception to get close enough to the good monk to stab him...
...While we have been vigilant against Communism, kung fu movies have spread their filthy aesthetic influence all the way to Japan, which we had always hoped would be democracy's first line of defense in the Orient...
...Since Mr...
...In a society where everyone not only comes from someplace else, but hopes to go on to someplace else, the only indigenous culture is bound to be based on the worship of raw power...
...What a breakthrough...
...The hero is a fey, bumbling artisan for half the film, and then, inexplicably, he turns out to be a brilliant military strategist...
...What this atmosphere of incoherence lends to kung fu films is a kind of mysticism...
...Oshima's film attempts to do for sex what kung fu has done for violence-to isolate it from all other human activity, to aggrandize it in and for itself, to turn it into a mystical experience...
...As two hours of this would be hard to fake, Oshima doesn't...
...They detach violence from social reality the way a mystical experience detaches one from earthly cares...
...As I guess a few snide remarks I've made here demonstrate, the equation between king fu and pornography is made readily enough...
...Sex becomes, like kung fu, a religious experience...
...By this feat of self-transcendence, pornography now presumably makes itself more meaningful than conventional movie drama instead of less meaningful, as it used to be...
...It's an opening that might almost suggest a tragic love story instead of a martial-arts epic...
...The antagonists don't do even that well...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...It will become a symbolization of all life rather than a part of it...
...Even in Touch of Zen, a three-hour epic currently making inroads into the highbrow audience kung fu has not reached before, the flaws that seem to inhere in the genre by its very nature persist...
...A baby left on a monastery doorstep in the hope not that it will be taken in, but that it will be taken out, is a novel twist for us Westerners...
...Thus detached-we can't tell within 1000 years when King Hu's film is set-the violence becomes a religious experience, an epiphany...
...Of course, it's no good laying all the blame on kung fu movies...
...The combination of mysticism, discipline and violence in kung fu is nothing but the old Nazi Kraft durch Freud dressed up in a ghi instead of a brown shirt, and its popularity with Americans is unpropitious to say the least...
...The film deals with the love affair of a gangster and a prostitute who, after the first twenty minutes, spend all their time in hotel rooms -ing and -ing...
...In a place like this violence is not contained by culture as it is, however imperfectly, in traditional societies...
...One whom we at first mistake for a hero gets bumped off incidentally halfway through the film...
...With Oshima's film, kung fu extends its own empire not only from the Chinese mainland to Japan, but from violence to sex...
...This moment of spiritual uplift, of transcendence, is in effect what the whole three hours of hand springs, knife thrusts, dart throws and elbow chops are all about...
...As almost everyone else left in the cast staggers around in a death agony, the monk, bleeding not red but gold from his knife wound, retreats to the mountaintop and assumes the lotus position before the setting sun...
...Like the moviemakers themselves, we know little and care less about the public issues or private motives that might give all this violence, if not justification, at least comprehensi-bility...
...Keep up the good works...
...When even the heroine and her best general are unable to beat the warlord's general in hand-to-hand combat, their rescue falls to her teacher, the leader of the Buddhist monks...
...Almost as if he were then caught off guard by the warlord's untimely demise, King Hu must then scrounge around for a new villain, one of the warlord's generals heretofore unseen in the film, who can carry the balance of the fight scenes...
...In the end, in other words, the total alienation of violence masquerades as total harmony, oneness with the universe, inner peace...
...America is an immigrant society, but Hong Kong is a transient one, which gives it the far greater capacity for glorifying violence in its art...
...KUNG PHOOEY THE SCREEN Beyond Death Wish, Taxi Driver and A Clockwork Orange, beyond Sam Peckinpah, Clint Eastwood and spaghetti Westerns, beyond even samurai films, what kung fu movies accomplish is the total alienation of violence...
...Perhaps this is because the kung fu movie is an art form that came into being in a totally alien society, Hong Kong, where Chinese live cut off from both the traditional culture of China's past and the neighboring culture of her Communist present...
...For Western audiences, too, kung fu movies have their appeal because they purify our experience of violence...
...The heroine first refuses to be courted by this artisan, then seduces him, and finally enters a Buddhist monastery, leaving her baby by the artisan outside the walls for him to bring up...
...Something far more insidious sneaks up behind usr kung fu movies...
...It becomes the whole of culture...
Vol. 103 • November 1976 • No. 23
