Swordsman in Double Flag Town (1991)

Swordsman in Double Flag Town (1991)


October 6th, 7:00PM in Garland 104 (2441 E. Hartford)

While a major Chinese director, He Ping has only been exposed to most American audiences through the swordplay drama Warriors of Heaven and Earth (2003,) China’s official submission for the foreign language academy award for that year. Despite not making it as a final nominee, the film with its vast prairies and bitter sweet drama found a relatively wide release on DVD. This week brings his first film as a director, another entry into the period swordplay genre, but with a very different and immensely more individualistic style then Warriors.

Swordsman in Double-Flag Town is typically categorized as a swordplay Western, and it is difficult to not to do so. In it a young man travels to a desert town in the North West to fulfill an arranged marriage. After befriending a local outlaw he finds that Double-Flag Town is a harsh place where bandits are more numerous then ideals. The esthetic of the film is full of dusty, dirty locations that attempt to bring forth the feel of a chaotic place without the glamorization normally found in swordplay cinema.

While swordplay cinema had fallen out of favor in China for most of the last century, both under the Nationalists and later PRC, it began to see a resurgence in the 1990’s. Part of this is the success of a wave of such films made in Hong Kong starting with Tsui Hark’s Swordsman in 1990. Early Chinese entries stressed a realist take on the genre, and this gritty feel in Double-Flag Town is an excellent example of this. While other films using this same approach did exist, most notably a decade before with The Enigmatic Case (1980) directed by Johnny To, arguably the first swordplay film to overtly adopt the look and feel of a American Western. As a relatively low budget film with no major stars, Double-Flag Town had the flexibility to try and create something with a very unique look and feel to it, and perhaps influence the development of Chinese swordplay cinema in the process.

Mainland China, Director He Ping, Cast Zhao Ma-Na, Gao Wei, Sun Hai-Ying and Chang Jiang, 91 minutes, in Mandarin with English subtitles.

Jade Tiger (1977)

Jade Tiger (1977)

September 29th, 7:00PM in Garland 104 (2441 E. Hartford)

Living in the harsh world of clan loyalties and martial solutions, a young man must investigate the murder of a close family member by tracking down the traitor who helped to engineer the death. While known in the 1960’s for his Cantonese dialect films dealing with social issues and the challenges of everyday life such as Young, Pregnant and Unmarried (1968,) Director Chor Yuen is at least as famous for his later Mandarin dialect output at the Shaw Brothers studio. Among this body of work one theme reappears again and again, that is swordplay films based upon the work of the popular writer Gu Long. Jade Tiger is the seventh such adaptation but hardly the final as this collaboration would eventually produce more than fifteen films.

The particular hallmarks of Gu Long’s fiction included a short, punchy style that continually keeps moving the reader along, as well as a love of absurdity and pop cultural conventions from Chinese and international fiction such as trap doors, vast conspiracies, alternate identities and fantastical weapons. A typical Gu Long hero tends to balk at social conventions and cares about brotherhood more than anything. As is typical of the literary swordplay genre, many stories also serve as ancient detective novels, with a mystery at the films center. Jade Tiger faithfully continues nearly all of these themes to one extent or another, but when injected into the studio system of the Shaw Brothers unusual changes begin to appear.

The first of these unique traits is the pure artificiality of the films world. That is, most films made by the studio in this era were shot primarily on indoor stages, although they also had an extensive back lot. The world of Gu Long was always a particularly unreal one, with impossible feats and an internal logic alien to the real world. This character interacts with a painted sky, fabricated trees, colored lights and strategic mists to create a similar kind of unreality that is very suitable to its subject matter. Secondly typical way in which a swordplay novel was adapted was to use one or a series of chapters, take out story elements that would tend to leave loose ends and then construct a new ending that frequently clashed with the tone of the original tale. A particularly good example of this is in the Taiwanese film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). But the novels of Gu Long were usually very short and to the point in terms of a central narrative based around a single character. So little cutting and pasting was every necessary, but at the same time the complex narrative would become almost manic when squeezed into less than two hours of film. But it is this quality that arguably had made these films so popular and unique.
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Hong Kong, Director Chor Yuen, Cast Ti Lung, Ku Feng, Lily Li, Lo Lieh and Yueh Hua, 90 minutes, in Mandarin with English subtitles.