“King Hu’s A Touch of Zen” by Stephen Teo June 2, 2008
Posted by Cal in : Book Reviews , trackback
Asian action cinema tends to get a raw deal when it comes to serious critical analysis, so it is initially refreshing that Stephen Teo approaches the subject of King Hu’s magnum opus A Touch of Zen with a scholarly eye. The movie is, as far as I’m concerned, the greatest achievement of the wuxia genre – an opinion that is reinforced by the fact that its influence is still obvious in films lauded as masterpieces by western audiences ignorant of the source material.
Previous works by the author made me a little wary of this book. Teo tends to overanalyse things in my opinion and his writing can be very “dry” and dispassionate. The book (119 pages in an approximately A5 sized book, with a further 50 or so pages of appendices and an index) is split into several chapters dealing with different segments of the film running roughly parallel with the film’s narrative.
By far the most interesting sections are the introduction and conclusion, where Teo sheds light on the film’s background with information I’ve not read anywhere else. We learn how the fantastically dilapidated Ching Lu Fort set was constructed and aged (with a flame-thrower, apparently!) and how the film’s failure at the box office (it only became successful after a screening at Cannes some years after release) led to the production company’s slow demise.
After reading the introduction, we are instructed to skip to the first appendix which gives a plot synopsis for the 17th century short story Xia Nü by Pu Songling, upon which certain elements of A Touch of Zen are based. After we return to the text, Teo begins psychoanalysing the work in earnest. He comes up with some great theories and discusses the symbolism on display in the film, even approaching the spider motif that crops up continuously throughout the film from different angles. Several times, he spots things that I’d completely missed or he points out cultural or linguistic subtleties that had completely gone over my head – especially on the subject of Zen itself and the character Hui Yuan’s rebirth, which was a complete revelation to me. Certain of his arguments do strike me as quite subjective, however, and Teo has a tendency to state his opinions as fact – a practice that can become frustrating to the reader.
Nowhere is this more in evidence than in Teo’s repeated claims regarding the homosexuality (or bisexuality – Teo tends to use the terms interchangeably) of the lead male character Ku Shen-Chai (written as Gu Shengzhai in the text). In the short story, his bisexuality isn’t in question (he and the Ouyang Nian character become lovers), but Teo keeps insisting that this is also the case in the film adaptation, even going as far as to claim that A Touch of Zen is “a film of repressed bisexuality” – a claim I can see no evidence of whatsoever. Teo writes that Ku considers marriage “despite his homosexuality (which we perceive in the film but know to be a fact from the original story)”. However, my own reading of Ku’s reaction is that he seems keen on the idea of marrying Yang and is visibly disappointed when his mother tells him she doesn’t want to marry him. Teo argues that Hu “played down” the homosexual elements for political and cultural reasons but I feel that Hu simply did not include that element of the story at all. It seems more likely to me that the character Ku is an under confident, somewhat unambitious man (as seen by his constant rejection of the idea of applying for the governmental exam to become an officer) whose bumbling oafishness slowly dissolves after his first sexual encounter with Yang awakens the confident, scheming strategist that he would become. However, only once does Teo ponder the possibility that Hu may have written Ku as heterosexual and does not offer a single shred of evidence in support of his theory. We are also told of Ku’s supposed scopophilic tendencies and that “the spider denotes…a repressed scopophilic instinct”, but again there seems little hard evidence of this.
The theming of each chapter to a specific set piece of the film does occasionally feel as if you’re reading a hasty novelisation of the film, but Teo interjects his own thoughts and quotations from other critics and reviewers into the text along the way. Teo’s writing hasn’t become any more accessible, I’m sorry to say, and you may want to keep a dictionary handy for when he really start to let fly with his vocabulary. He breaks up the text with some very grainy monochrome screenshots from the movie (I’m betting he took the shots from the Tai Seng DVD) to help explain visually some of his points, and the aforementioned appendices offer a little more background (although feel more like padding) as well as copious notes at the end of the book.
I would have preferred more background on the film and less psychoanalysis. If you don’t believe wholly in what Teo tells us, you will have a hard time accepting some of his conclusions. However, the fact that the book exists at all is something of a minor victory as the film itself seems totally ignored today, and the book does rekindle the urge to go and revisit wuxia’s finest three hours.
Published by Hong Kong University Press - 2007.
Comments»
“Previous works by the author made me a little wary of this book. ”
Are you referring to his Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions? A book I actually like, but yes he can overanalyze certain issues and he has a fondness for discussing homoerotic influences (though it is hard to avoid with Chang Cheh
). Also there are several errors in the Jackie Chan chapter.
What is the best release of this? I’m suspecting that Dragon Dynasty is going to re-release this, but when is the question.
I will eventually pick this up and possibly the To book by Teo, but first I have to watch this film
and more To.
On an aside: I am reading an excellent book (his diction is quite sagacious like Teo’s though he doesn’t always eschew obfuscation) on John Woo by Kenneth E. Hall.
Yes, I had to put down “Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions”!. The “best” version of A TOUCH OF ZEN is the Tai Seng DVD but there really isn’t a lot to recommend it - poor letterboxing, awful transfer (the screen bugs out on a few occasions) and when there’s a night scene (and a lot of the film’s drama hinges on a night time scene) you can’t really see a lot of what’s going on. The only good thing is the surprisingly good subs on a “grey market” release. I know nothing of a Dragon Dynasty release, but if ANYONE can come up with the goods and finally does a version worthy of the film, I’ll be their sex slave forever!
Anyway, I digress a little. I’ve thought about the To book (as you’ve probably gathered, I’ve become a bit of a To fan over the past few months) but I’m not sure after reading this - no doubt Teo’ll pick up on some homoerotic subtext I’ll have missed (I’m surprised HE hasn’t done a John Woo book!). I’m definitely getting more books and reviewing them here - makes a change from the usual film reviews that you can read at the HKMDB after a week or so anyway :p . Next up should be Fonoroff’s “At the Hong Kong Movies” unless I reread Bey Logan’s “Hong Kong Action Cinema” which I’ve already read so many times I can quote whole passages of…
The Germans are supposed to be prepping a 16:9, english subbed DVD of Touch of Zen
I find Teo a despicable little rat. According to one source, he kept bullying Chang Cheh into admitting he (Cheh) was gay, reducing the old man to tears (gay or not, he had endured a lot of homophobia in the press) and eventually teo was booted off the premises by Chang’s wife.
“Next up should be Fonoroff’s “At the Hong Kong Movies” unless I reread Bey Logan’s “Hong Kong Action Cinema” which I’ve already read so many times I can quote whole passages of…”
A quick warning about the Fonoroff book. It works decent after you watch a movie, though while very inclusive about the movies that came out during 1988 to handover, he does not go into much detail, he does not like movies much (not kidding on this, he complains way too much and is quite wrong on many good HK films, try finding one he likes) and he can spoil a bit.
I’ve read Bey Logans book also a few times, though as time goes by it is easier to find more errors with that book (mostly dates and some of his opinions have changed
) and with the amount of Shaw material that has come out (really looking forward to China Forever: The Shaw Brothers and Diasporic Cinema (Pop Culture and Politics Asia PA)) it is a bit outdated. But still, I check it every time I watch a movie that I think might be in there (the same with Paul’s book).
That IS despicable if true, and I can kind of believe it of the guy from his evident obsession with the subject.
That’s great news about a 16:9 version of A TOUCH OF ZEN. I’ll be first in line for that one if it comes about!
Shawn: yes, I read about Fonoroff’s approach on the HKMDB, so I’m going in with both eyes open. I do like the guy’s style (so far) so I’ll see how it goes and I’ll try not to let his opinions colour mine if I can help it.
I’ve always found Bey Logan incredibly easy to read from his days on Impact years ago, and that book kind of became a bible to me in the days when there wasn’t THAT much available. I know he had a very pronounced leaning towards Sammo Hung when it came to action movies (although I can’t remember whether it was in this book that he came out and said it), but I think he gave a very well-rounded account. Obviously, time has moved on and not everything he wrote about is still valid, but I still refer to it occasionally.
Yes, “China Forever: The Shaw Brothers and Diasporic Cinema” looks mouth-watering EXCEPT I know if I read it I’m going to want to buy this and that and of course some of the Shaw titles are starting to become very thin on the ground. I had to pay over the odds recently for a Thai edition of Sentimental Swordsman on eBay, and the situation’s only going to get worse…