By the end of the seventies, in HK, the fame
of directors, who had appeared in the sixties, has started to decline. The studios
supporting them slowed down as well on the artistic front. Even Chang Cheh's inspiration
was fairly tired and the audience interest for the Wu Xia Pian genre (Chinese Chivalry
genre) felt. Breathless, these studios shut down or diversified their activities.
Moreover, the Hong-Kong New Wave was on its way: Butterfly Murders and The Sword
were nearly there. At this time, King Hu directed in 1978 what we may call now his swan
song of the Wu Xia Pian genre, i.e. Raining In The Mountain and Legend Of The
Mountain. He created as well the basis of the revival of the genre for the new
generations. Swept from the box office by Kung Fu comedies, the Wu Xia Pian genre would
reappear after Tsui Hark made it fashionable again in HK theatres, with Swordsman for
instance (funny enough, co-directed by King Hu).
The recent release of Legend In The Mountain in DVD
allows us to contemplate the importance of the diptych Raining In The Mountain and Legend
Of The Mountain, and reveals us new elements. For instance, how come only one of these
two very close movies was available?
Shot in Korea in the same locations, both movies deal with
the same story but with two different points of view. Each film is the mirror of the other
and both bring us to the same conclusion: the greed for power and the human impulses.
Moreover, they have the same structure, typical from King Hu's feature; a lengthy and
contemplative introduction then comes the intrigue whose construction is based on the
introduction model. Eventually the pace is quickened in the confrontation and the
resolution parts of the story. It even ends up frenetically and in total contrast with the
serenity of the beginning of the film.
In Raining In The Mountain, the Master of a Buddhist
temple invites a general and a patron in order to prepare his legacy. But both general and
patron don't come on their own and we'll soon find out that their intentions aren't that
pure. Both actually came in order to steal a priceless sutra (a sacred hand-written
scroll). On top of that, pretenders to the inheritance plot and try anything possible to
take the Master's seat.
Raining In The Mountain is considered as King Hu's
masterpiece, and this is without a doubt the film where he archived a synthesis of his
various influences the best. King Hu once explained that he draws more his inspirations
from literature, painting or Opera than from the actual cinema. That's a main difference
between King Hu and his contemporaries. He was well educated in history, art, Chinese
literature and he never really got inspired from the popular cinema to make movies. He
preferred to have a more general approach to moviemaking by incorporating all these forms
of art. The way he represented the natural environments is a good example to understand
the importance of painting in his movies (mostly etchings).
"Mist and smokes are the equivalent to the empty spaces left by artists in their
paintings" : admitted King Hu. The beginning of the movie, where the patron and
his wife (a thief in reality) are on their way to the temple and crossing forests and
mountains, participates to this search for something new by mixing off camera-works and
paintings. In such beautiful scenery, King Hu stretches elegantly the time to allow the
audience to feel in a movie and a painting at the same time.
In addition to that, for both movies, King Hu has chosen to
shot in cinemascope format (the lengthier format) in order to integrate the most vertical
elements possible such as waterfalls, cliffs, trees or ray of light through the leaves. He
has then changed our understanding of the framing process. The natural environment has
rarely been shot this way. It's even more obvious in Legend Of The Mountain where
the immensity of the nature contrasts with its infinitesimal composition: men, insects,
leaves or flowers. The characters must reach the temple and only then the eye would
perceive complex perspectives. The man's hand shows horizontal, vertical and oblique
lines, and right from the start King Hu demonstrates his pictorial skills.
But King Hu is skilled in story-telling as well, and the
scenario contains various perspectives. He's built his script as a labyrinth of coherent
plots. With a great deal of humour, he draws a parallel between the futile desire of the
general and the patron to own the sutra and the desire of the monks to access the Master
seat thanks to the Buddhist initiation from Qui Ming, a former thief who tries to
integrate the religious community. Desire is then one of the main theme of the diptych. In
one of the most gorgeous scene, monks are meditating under the Venerable care. This time,
the daily meditation is disturbed by the Venerable female escort bathing near a waterfall.
Not only King Hu shows an unexpected eroticism (to which Tsui Hark made a tribute in the
wonderful Green Snake), but also shows the
difficulties to comply with the moral ethic, by using a subtle game of looks and glances,
for instance. The road to wisdom is still very long. By using a cinematographic language
(editing and framing) close to the one he adopted for fighting sequences, King Hu shot a
real quiet duel between the Venerable and the monks.
But for King Hu, women aren't only a simple object of male
desire or aren't a mere symbol of temptation. They guard as well the temples and guarantee
its security (a likely inheritance from the Chinese Opera where all players were women),
hence they are the guarantee of a spiritual life. Because, from men to monks, everyone
seem to have forgotten the reason of their visit to the temple. The motives of the general
and the patron interests in the sutra are purely material (for financial or historical
reasons) but not at all due to what the sutra actually contains or deals with. To avoid
any temptation, the Master ends up burning the scroll. When the finale chase starts,
everyone will fight to the end to get the sutra. King Hu is equally gifted when showing a
wonderful nature in the beginning of the movie or when shooting a complex choreography of
moving bodies.
"I have always considered the action sequences of
my movies more like dances than like fights, because I have always been interested in the
Peking Opera, its movements and their impact on the action", stated the
director.
Moreover, King Hu wasn't fond of using wirework. "King
always preferred us [actors] to do the jumps unless they were very dangerous,"
said actress Hsu Feng, King Hu's favourite and heroine in Raining In The Mountain.
"We would do a jump and he would use a bit of that. And if there was a really
difficult stunt, he would cut in a shot featuring the stunt person. But it was his editing
style that created his rhythm." she added.
Everything is then used to represents the action a peculiar way. Bodies have a ghostly
looking. The scene where the Venerable escort tries to stop Hsu Feng in the forest appears
so unreal in that respect. Bodies are a succession of cloths (aesthetic directly inherited
from the Peking Opera) that give the impression that King Hu intends to write calligraphy
on film. He used, to do so, the whole frame to highlight their movements. He manages to
find a perfect osmosis between the bodies and the scenery. Thanks to the cinema, he found
an ideal mix between the art of etchings and the Opera. King Hu not only used these forms
of art in his cinema but he tried also to create something new.
Raining In The Mountain depicts the human actions
linked to their desire of ownership, whilst Legend Of The Mountain, built on the
same narrative pattern, deals with ghost actions to recover their human form. Shot with
the same cast and crew, Legend Of The Mountain opens on the same cliffs as Raining
In The Mountain. Legend... is actually the mirror of Raining… and
the relationship with the sutra is totally inverted. This time, the text and words are of
first importance for the ghosts and not the sutra itself. The story starts when Ho is
asked by his master to transcript some sutras. Seeking for a peaceful place to work, Ho
meets weird and worrying beings. One day, he wakes up, after a drinking session, in
Melody's bed (Hsu Feng). He remembers nothing of what happened and he is then forced to
engaged Melody. But Cloud appears. Two women and a man is a perfect mixture for troubles.
Especially when they are ghosts. Two female ghosts who want to reincarnate and a naive man
should ring a bell. Tsui Hark uses this story pattern for his A Chinese Ghost Story series.
It's obviously better to watch Raining In The Mountain
first to understand perfectly what game King Hu is playing. Each lead revealed in a movie
finds its correspondence in the other, the only changes are the references. Legend Of
The Mountain is a movie that gives a lot of importance to gestures and details. Each
gesture is thoroughly depicted and their beauty highlights the frames. Everything seems
indeed very precious here, even Ho's naivety. After telling a story from the human point
of view in Raining… King Hu shows the point of view of the deads in Legend…
Ho doesn't know, but everyone around is a ghost (e.g. women & monks). His naivety
prevents him to see the obviousness of things. "Can you get invisible?"
he asks Cloud who has already disappeared twice before his eyes!
Actually, in King Hu's movies, ghosts seem made of flesh
and bone. Their own reality seems real: they don't wait for dusk to appear, they eat,
drink and get drunk like us. They don't fight a common way but with music. Music
instruments are used in duels, adding the movie some weirdness. Each ghosts has his own
instrument that represents his own personality (drum for Melody, flute for Cloud), and the
instrument sounds are used for their apparition. Sylvia Chang always appears with a flute
melody for instance. King Hu has always taken very seriously the sound mix in his
features, with a special use of percussion for instance to emphazise drama or to enhance
the editing process. It then seems very logical to see duels not with fights but with
percussion. And that is probably King Hu best achievement: not showing any martial art
scene whilst keeping the spirit of a Martial Art movie. Legend Of The Mountain is,
however, probably more contemplative than Raining In The Mountain, but it is as
astonishing and it is both mysterious and lethal.
Finally, King Hu made a diptych that cannot be totally link
to the HK Martial Art genre (the way the genre was created by Chang Cheh, Chu Yuan or Liu
Chia Lang, for instance), but that is on the verge of such genre. Hence its specificity
and its acclamation by the occidental audience. Only King Hu movies were indeed selected
for the Cannes Film Festival for instance. The French intelligentsia may have used at the
time King Hu as a pretext to ignore the rest of the Hong-Kong film productions. It's a
shame, because both King Hu's productions and other HK movies have eventually suffered
from this.
