Chang Cheh on 60s wuxia and their social context

"swordsmen, assassins, martyrs and death-defying fanatics ... tragic men who defy authority and the establishment": Jimmy Wang Yu as the eponymous hero of Chang Cheh's The Assassin (1967). An icon of anti-authoritarian revolt for the counterculture?

"The 60s and the 70s were the most energetic periods of Hong Kong – the period when young people exerted themselves. The age of love tales was past. The masses were striving ahead in a rebellious mood and the colonial administration was receiving a shock to the system ... The martial arts pictures represented this spirit of the times. After I made The One-Armed Swordsman (1967), riots broke out in Kowloon. Then, during the riots, I made The Assassin (1967). In an [sic] Ming Pao Monthly article published on May 1968, titled 'Hong Kong's Anti-Establishment Movies and the Mass Movement,' Law Kar wrote: 'Zhang Che's movie characters are young swordsmen, assassins, martyrs and death-defying fanatics. His heroes are tragic men who defy authority and the establishment.' At the time, people called my movies 'violent', and 'bloody'. I always thought this was a very shallow way of looking at my movies."

From Chang Cheh's essay, "Creating the Martial Arts Film and the Hong Kong Cinema Style," in The Making of Martial Arts Films: As Told by Filmmakers and Stars (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 1999).

Chang Cheh was one of the key directors who transformed the martial arts genre in Hong Kong cinema during the late 1960s, pioneering the "kung fu" film. It's interesting to see him contextualise his practice in this way, considering that he is often counted a cultural conservative, with politics far from the radical left.

Brechtian Pirates?

In a Chang Cheh movie, The Pirate (Da hai dao), of 1973, there is an almost Brechtian moment.

The hero, swashbuckling historical buccaneer Chang Pao-Chai (played by Ti Lung), has been stranded in town where he is a wanted man, but instead of running, he has decided to stay to help a group of villagers who are being exploited and driven into bankruptcy and slavery by a corrupt, monopolistic magnate, who owns both the local shipyard and the brothel and has dodgy dealings with the local authorities. Chang has decided to rob the magnate in order to give the locals cash to have their boats repaired and thus to get out from under the heels of their tyrant.

Finding out about his scheme, one of Chang's piratical followers, turns to another fellow (or actually to us, the audience), wondering at their chief's generosity, bravery and humanity:

Pirate 1: Pao-Chai is really great, which makes me feel great too.

Pirate 2: Even if we have done good deeds, we are still pirates.

Pirate 1: That's true. But we were not born pirates. We were born as men. We became pirates since we had no choice. When there's an opportunity, we'll do as men will do.

Pirate 2: (lauging) You still know this principle!

Work in Kung Fu Films 1 (Or: Wax on, Wax off!)

Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita waxing lyrical in John G Avildsen's The Karate Kid (USA, 1984).

One of the central themes that this blog will set out to explore is the question of work in kung fu cinema. At least, let's call it work for now, though the word stands at the heart of a complex of related terms, ranging from labour to effort, for example, and from toil to craft. Quite precisely the best term for that to which I am referring will have to be a subject for further investigation.

Indeed, in order to show how this thing I am (for now) calling 'work' is so very much at the heart of the martial arts film, and in order to begin to develop a closer investigation of quite how I would inflect this term, I propose a translation of kung fu itself as work (or, even, labour). If this seems a slightly wilful translation of the Chinese term gongfu (which is the pinyin spelling of the word rendered more commonly into English as 'kung fu'), the distortion is less shocking than it may at first appear to the untutored English ear, used as we are to understanding the word as simply the name for a Chinese style of fighting.

The first thing to say, of course, is that gongfu in its proper sense does not strictly speaking refer to martial arts: the Mandarin term for martial art is in fact wushu (wu=martial, shu=art). In contrast, before being taken up as a buzzword in the martial-arts movie craze, gongfu really simply meant any kind of a high level of skill or attainment: artistry, if you like. Thus one can have gongfu in a martial art, but also in cooking, painting, making tea, metalwork, arranging flowers, baking, firing ceramics, calligraphy, etc., etc.

The implication of the term, however, (missing in Western words such as artistry) is that the skill which one has attained is mastered through long, patient and arduous work. The character for 'gong' (功) - usually translated as attainment - includes the element 工 (also pronounced as 'gong') which means work or worker, labour or labourer. In quite literal terms, then, the question of work or labour lies inscribed at the very heart of the term kung fu itself, in the very name given most commonly to the genre of the martial arts film. As a pictogram, 工 may itself be derived from a tool, the tamper, with which earth was laboriously compressed by repeated pounding to make it into a building material. Furthermore, the other element of gong (i.e. 力, which on its own signifies power or strength) is derived from a pictogram representing a plough, doubly inscribing work at the heart of the word, and linking the 'kung fu fighting' we are dealing with in cinema to the old practices of peasant labour which were at stake in the martial arts discussed in a previous post on this blog. 功 is usually thus translated as power or strength: one online reference source on Chinese characters proposes a possible formation of it as 'power through work'. This same dictionary defines the whole word gongfu (功夫) as 'skill; art; kung fu; labor; effort'. If my translation lays central stress on one particular aspect of this little cluster of meanings, it nonetheless has the virtue of explaining something about how they fit together, and it also brings to the fore what is so insistent in the etymology of the character. (This insistence is so strong that one might be led to inquire as to what form of modern disavowal may be at work to erase it as a content from common translations which define 'kung fu' simply as a level of high attainment, or even as a term for the martial arts...)

Any forcing in my definition, I feel, is in any case validated by the fact that 'kung fu' is now not simply a Chinese term: torn from its 'original' linguistic use, it is now part of the vocabulary of a global popular-cultural phenomenon, and I am primarily concerned with this, modern, transnational word, transformed by its relation to and meaning within a cinematic genre.

The measure of the translation would thus be in what it clarifies about this global cultural phenomenon – and in how we might use it to understand something about the reality from which it springs. Whatever gongfu may have meant in the past, this meaning, having work at its heart, will have been transformed by the transformation of the nature and experience of labour itself by capitalism and by globalised, (post-)colonial relations.

My argument is that the kung fu film, which just like the cowboy film is so often set on a (heavily mythologised) temporal borderline between modernity and tradition, and which takes as its topic of fascination the labour-intensive and highly skilled military arts made obsolete by the import of modern firearms technologies, serves as a somewhat disavowed meditation on the vicissitudes of work: alienated and unalienated, ancient and modern, feudal and commodified...

Of course, to establish that what I propose here is a valid approach to kung fu cinema will involve looking in more detail at a set of examples, and demonstrating that work indeed is an important theme within the films (or at least one that illuminates them in a significant way). I will also have to show a link between the "kung fu" (i.e. martial arts) which forms the thematic core of the films, and to which the genre name "kung fu" refers and the representations of labour or work that the films develop.

This task is, obviously, beyond the scope of a single blog post, but to indicate a direction, I'll finish this with a few pointers to where I'm heading. The sub-genre which most clearly brings work to the fore of the genre is the 'training film', where a significant part of the film will be dedicated to depicting the hero straining to develop his skill, strength and flexibility through a montage of gruelling exercises. There are many of these films – the Jackie Chan vehicle Drunken Master, for example, or Lau Kar-Leung's 36th Chamber of Shaolin and its sequels – and I shall have to come back to enumerate more about these at a later point. Perhaps the film most familiar to the Western audience is John G. Avildsen's American revamp of the kung-fu flick, The Karate Kid (1984). Here the theme of training and the nature of work are picked up from the narrative pattern drawn from the Hong Kong originals it copies (perhaps in particular from Return to the 36th Chamber, of which I will certainly have more to say in this blog at a later date...).

In Karate Kid, then, 'Daniel-San' is taken on by teacher Mr. Miyagi, who, it seems, rather than teaching the punches and kicks his student expects to learn, sets him off to work on back-breaking menial tasks around his home – famously waxing cars, sanding decking, and painting both fence and house. Daniel despairs that he has learned nothing and just been conned into doing unwanted tasks, but, of course, it turns out that in these tasks he has been training his arms in the precise mechanics of a sequence of blocks and strikes, along with the strength and stamina to perform them effectively and repeatedly. Of course, what is at stake here in Daniel's acquisition of 'kung fu' is the line between alienated and unalienated labour: the work which consumes the worker's life draining the energies and resources of his or her body, and whose value accrues to a boss, set against the work which reproduces life and whose whose fruits return to the worker. Daniel's investment in the work of training accrues not only, or not centrally, to Mr. Miyagi, but to Daniel himself, who gains from his toil an enhancement of power, energy, wisdom and ability.

Zatoichi

Some of my favourite moments from the original series of Zatoichi films are not fights but songs.

This from Zatoichi's Cane Sword (1967)

The lyrics are:

Maybe you wear rags, but your heart is more beautiful than any flower.

It is young once so enjoy it.

If you're a man, do something that nobody else would.

A man hides his tears and forced himself to smile, but some women

do not know.

You say you're in love, but there's nothing to say.

If you're a

man, catching a smile

I sent you

This is rapidly turning into a blog on musicals!

Can Dialectics Break Bricks?

Yesterday I was telling a colleague about the film La Dialectique, peut-elle casser des briques?, known in English as Can Dialectics Break Bricks? It was made in 1973 by Situationist René Viénet, and has been counted as the first full-length détourned feature film by the Situationist group. Similar to the Situationists' recaptioning of cartoons with anti-capitalist analysis, it involved the re-dubbing of a then-recent kung fu movie – Crush – with Situationist slogans and with commentary on recent world events. In the film's re-engineered narrative, the good guys become 'the Proletarians' and the bad guys become 'the Bureaucrats' (c.f. the 1968 slogan: 'We will not rest until the last capitalist is hung with the intestines of the last bureaucrat!')

The effect aimed at is, of course, largely somewhat comical, and undercuts any narrative involvement with a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt.

From YouTube: excerpts from Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (1973)

As I was saying to my colleague, I've not managed to dig up much about the background of Viénet's film, or why this martial arts movie was chosen for détournement, and I find myself with some perplexing questions about this, and about how the original film (directed by Tu Guangqi) might have been understood by Viénet and the Situationist group. Wikipedia (that great authority!) suggests that the aim was 'to adapt a "spectacular" film into a radical critique of cultural hegemony,' and the general strategy of détournement would indeed seem to suggest that it was precisely the most crude and commercialised products of Spectacular society which were targeted by the SI for appropriation, to be refitted as weapons of revolutionary consciousness. Indeed, in the 70s, at the height of the kung fu craze, these films often tended to be regarded by critics as cheap, worthless, contentless, exploitative and mind-numbing products of a culture industry seeking to distract its popular audience and brutalise its sensibility.

However, Crush might also have been a strange choice on such grounds. Like many Hong Kong productions of the early seventies (in particular in the wake of Bruce Lee's Fist of Fury) the scenario of the original film is clearly one in which colonial exploitation and resistance are at issue. Set in Korea under the Japanese occupation that lasted much of the first half of the twentieth century, the heroes (those turned by Viénet into 'the Proletarians') are the members of a martial arts school who start to resist the colonial violence of the militaristic Japanese forces. However potentially conservative the nationalistic dimension of its narrative, this is also a work about struggle and liberation from tyrranny in some of its most typically modern forms.

This is to say, the film was already highly suited to the new story which Viénet constructed. Crush is not just a tale of conflict and violence, but also a tale of (revolutionary?) struggle against oppression, and of the violence of an imposed bureaucratic regime. Viénet's 'Proletarians' are, in matter of fact, already very much proletarian in Tu Guangqi's original movie. The native martial arts they train in are antithetical to the violence and deculturation imposed by their oppressors, and in this much, and within the colonial context of the film's setting, whether or not dialectics really breaks bricks, brick-breaking is certainly a kind of a dialectic practice. In this regard, the détournement works so well only because the film was at least some distance towards being the critique which the Situationists wanted to make it into. The refashioning of the film thus starts to appear a little less devastatingly witty than it might appear to those for whom the historical situation alluded to in the original film is obscure. For evidence of such an audience, one can look at the comments on the film on its IMDB page, one of which, completely muddling the national origin of the film, mistakes the film as 'a hokey Japanese karate movie', hence not only missing the anti-colonial premise of the original, but even showing a complete blindness to the differences between Asian nationalities on the basis of which such might be read. Another comment wonders 'what the hell' the original was about, and a third proposes that the détourned film is 'a standard martial arts movie with all its gratuitous, relatively content-less violence'.

From today's perspective, it would seem strange if the Situationist group, with the history of anti-colonial struggle in France's own colonies (from Algeria to Vietnam) still fresh, and with the attention that these gained from the French left – and even within the Situationists' own critiques – would not have picked up on the political dimensions of the film which these IMDB reviewers miss. Viénet, in particular, was trained as a Sinologist and spent many years in China before being ejected for his opposition to Mao. However, there seems little in its redubbing which would seem to exploit or thematise such a relation to a pre-existing narrative of struggle and revolution. Could Viénet and colleagues possibly have been blind to it? What were, exactly, their attitudes to the film?

One might, for example, more generously set out to read the task of détournement here as attempting to 'liberate' a hidden subtext, to dredge it up to the light of day. This would fit the film into a certain tradition of critical theory which has attempted to look at (popular) cultural products as at once carrying the ideological purposes of the dominant class who control their production, but as also depending on a kernel of 'truth' and genuine need or desire which it must address in order not to entirely fail to interest its audience. However, this, too, would not seem to quite hit the mark: the 'anti-colonial' theme in Crush is so prominent as to hardly seem even a 'sub'-text, let alone something that anyone who has noticed it would think of as a repressed content which would need to be made conscious.

Alternatively, perhaps we might conceive of Crush – or more generally of the Parisian movie houses where 'chop-socky' flicks may have been playing matinee double bills – as a special site for Situationist pleasure, rather like the inner-city streets where Debord and his colleagues liked to drift in search of 'moments' of desire and truth within the everyday, places of special ripeness for the engineering of a 'situation' or an 'event'. Does Viénet's film thus mark the kung fu movie, then, for them, as one of the privileged locii in which one might go on a sort of a cultural dérive?

So in the end, I find myself running up against a question I cannot very simply answer (since my knowledge of Viénet and the Situationists is only rather general): what kind of a reading of Crush would have been available to the Situationist group? Would the status of such a product as 'schlock' have entirely determined their response, or might they have viewed it generously? Are we to read those more recent comments on the film which see it as deliberately refashioning a piece of the most debased cultural production for new ends as having missed a set of subtleties in its relation to the original, as having rather caricatured quite what such a détournement was supposed for the Situationists to do? Would the kind of 'postcolonial' discourse that might highlight themes of insurrection in the original film have been current? (Fanon had after all been writing since the 50s, but in many ways the kind of reading I am thinking of might be more associated with the wake of British Cultural Studies and the like from the later part of the 70s on...)

If anyone reading this blog knows more about this – or knows of anything written on the film – I'd be VERY glad to hear from you!

The full film is, by the way, available on UBU-web, at the following address:

http://www.ubu.com/film/vienet_dialectics.html

(Given that Can Dialectics Break Bricks?, in its very title and in its content too, sets out a certain discussion of revolutionary force/violence, the other question one might pose would be how Crush might open into such debates, too. What might it be like if we were to turn things around and imagine Crush as a redub of or a commentary on Can Dialectics Break Bricks?, rather than vice versa? How does Crush's depiction of violent resistance unsettle the arguments which Viénet attempts to impose on it? Would the understanding of Viénet's film that would emerge from such an analysis tell us something more generally about the attitudes and ideas of the European avant-garde?)

More on Hong Kong Context of the Wuxia Revival – Riots in 1967

I came across this footage of the unrest in Hong Kong in 1967 on Youtube:

It was linked to a clip from a musical, Hong Kong Noctune, from the same year, which starred Cheng Pei-Pei. Cheng was at the time also becoming the #1 swordswoman of the wuxia revival, starring in (for example) King Hu's ravishing Come Drink with Me (1966) and Chang Cheh's Golden Swallow (1968).

(For those more familiar with more recent films, she also plays a role as the embittered Jade Fox in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000).)

Cheng is the one in the blue dress in the second number, and who sings third in the first. How should we take the words she sings?

Cheng: "Even when your woes are great

Tears are bitter sweet

Everyone has his heart's desire

May all wishes be fulfilled"

chorus: "Hold you head high and strive on

Let no barriers stop your advance

New dancers and singers must arise

Let the world ring with music"

Does this work as a soundtrack to the first video, too?

More on Rebellion and Revolution

One of the many places that one might pick up the problem of the unstable distinction between 'rebellion' and 'revolution' is in current far-left philosophical debates. If according to some the 'revolutionary' for a while seemed somewhat out of fashion in left wing thought (I'm not quite sure it ever was), it is certainly important again in the work of such thinkers as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek.

To open up a can of worms, in this post I'm going to make some all-too-brief comments on Badiou and the rhetoric of revolution.

It's a topic that comes up in Adrian Johnston's recent book Badiou, Zizek and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change. Johnston notes that for both of these thinkers, what's centrally at stake is the possibility of thinking 'reality-shattering shifts' (xxviii) and hence of a world radically different from our own – a world which does not consist only of variations on the theme of the already-existing status quo. For Badiou the 'event' and for Zizek the 'act' (which Johnston sees as itself being a term drawing on an evental logic) are ways of imagining how such radical alterations come about. The Badiouian event is an 'abrupt rupture [...] interrupting the cohesion and continuity of whatever counts as the establshed order of things [...] [It is] that which, apparently out of nowhere, suddenly and unexpectedly catalyzes processes of transformation.' (xxviii) They are, this is to say, about revolutionary change. Badiou's writing, Johnston notes (7), is peppered with an aesthetic and rhetoric that privileges ways of imagining change that rely on a vocabulary of cataclysm and violent upheaval. (It is, this is to say, posited around a stylistic 'aesthetic' of revolution as sublime.)

There is an implicit opposition working here, which may in some respects relate to the problem I have outlined in my last post, though the terms in which it is staged are slightly different. Here, rather than rebellion, the opposite term of revolution is, essentially, reformism. Badiou and Zizek place themselves in a long line of radical theorists form whom the radical rupture of revolution is held up against some mere fiddling with details that in fact serves only to shore up the system.

There are, of course, differences between the notion of 'rebellion' as defined in my previous post (i.e. as an attempt to topple a particular holder of power, whilst preserving an overall system), and that of 'reformism' in this sense (which is more to do with the issues than personalities). However, in their polar position to the revolution, the two share quite a lot structurally. Such structural similarities are reinforced by the actualities of the actual struggles to which they might refer: a struggle against a ruler or ruling elite is hardly meaningful except in relation to some kind of abuse of power or an unpopular policy with which they are associated. Similarly, campaigns against policies are usually (though of course not universally) carried out in tandem with an opposition to instrumental individuals who are conceived as the authors of such policy, and who rapidly become imagined as an 'enemy'. (This last might perhaps need qualification, in that the identification of the enemy will often only be partial and may also be innacurate. Thus a particular ruler might be marked out, but the unpopular policies they push through may be at the service of an elite 'pressure group' who remain in the shadows and benefit from the policy, who remain, even after the unseating of the ruler, at the heart of a system of power and influence, privilege and profit. I digress, however, and in any case the same problems may well beset those who seek more properly revolutionary change...)

One of the things posed as marking the difference between 'rebellion' and 'reform' is the link between reform and a gradualism which such authors as Badiou and Zizek see as impossible or illusory, understanding 'real' change as sudden, cataclysmic and disjunctive. 'Rebellion' in the sense in which Meadows used it would lie even further along the same end of a spectrum at the other end of which was revolution, implying no change at all – a restoration of values, rather than their transformation. However, even this difference, at least as it finds its place within a revolutionist rhetoric, may itself collapse: after all, the point for such authors is that reformism is ultimately impossible, that things will not get better bit by bit, since the changes in question do not affect a core truth of the status quo, which fundamentally remains what it is, and is only revitalised by the processes of such struggle.

But do we start to run into trouble if taking up such a position? The difficulty would seem to me to be in accounting for a change which is no change – the modification which leaves things as they are. This seems a very particular way of imagining society (and/or politics, culture, etc.) that delineates between the essential and the merely contingent, imagining a set of 'core' things which determine the other things in society with no reciprocal influence. It is a model ultimately rather like the famous base/superstructure distinction: mere fiddling with culture or philosophy will not have an effect on things whilst the economic base remains the same. It raises the problem of just what is or is not significant change as opposed to superficial change – especially when we consider the problem of cause and effect. Johnston notes that some changes may seem trivial but have far-reaching effects, whilst others may seem to shake things up to the core but actually rapidly land us back where we started. What, then, if such distinction (between cataclysmic change and the small change, between revolution and reform and between revolution and rebellion) does not hold?

This dilemma poses a core problem for Badiou's work (as I've managed to decipher it at least) and as a body of writing which sets out to privilege revolution over reform it returns repeatedly to ways of upholding this distinction. Badiou's response to what amounts to a profound dilemma for the radical left is to set out an ontology – based in set theory – that seems to categorise different kinds of change, thus providing a theoretical grounding for judgments between significant and insignificant. At different moments in his career, Badiou seems to have formulated these differently. What is interesting in Johnston's account of these changes is that it highlights the fact that Badiou seems increasingly to be discovering shades of grey between the radical 'event' of revolutionary change and the mere novelty that leaves everything the same.

As described by Johnston (8), In "Beyond Formalization" (2002), Badiou categorised four kinds of change:-

1. modifications (which are consistent with the current 'transcendent regime')

2. weak singularities (novelties with 'no strong existential consequences')

3. strong singularities (important existential change, but still measurable)

4. events proper (whose consequences are 'virtually infinite')

What still seems a problem to me here, is that though it might be possible to uphold a theoretical or mathematical difference in set theory between measurable and immeasurable change (which is where it would seem Badiou would want to locate the difference between the start of a revolution which changes everything and a campaign for higher wages or more holiday or some such thing ), in the case of our messy, complexly interconnected social/political/cultural world, the distinction may never be so clear. After all, does an achieved demand for more wages end with those increased wages?Or are there other implications – a shift of power between workers and bosses, altered legislation, changing consumption patterns of working people, the encouragement of others to strike, the growth in solidarity of those that struck for that aim, altered subjectivities...? How would we possibly 'measure' all of this?

In Logiques du mondes Badiou went even further in laying out the grey area between the event and the novelty. In this work, change, or 'becoming' is first split into the distinction between 'modification' (which as before is some kind of change which has no real content or consequence) and 'site', a place with the potential to give rise to real change. Such a 'site' could, in turn involve either the 'occurrence' which lacks a 'maximal degree of intensity' or the 'singularity' which has this. The singularity in its turn can be either 'strong' or 'weak'. The consequences of the weak singularity are not 'maximal' whilst those of the strong are. (See Johnston, 8.)

It seems to me, however, (and I'd be glad to be corrected by a Badiou scholar!) that whilst Badiou does establish a kind of a framework within which there are ontological distinctions between kinds of change, and though these have a form of logical coherence, such a framework would be only a necessary precondition of the ability to distinguish between the revolutionary and the merely rebellious or reformist in practice, rather than that which is sufficient in order to do so. As I hope my example above of the demand for more pay suggests (even if it's not the most perfect one!), in practice the social world we live in is far too complex and interconnected to posit any human action as having merely finite or measurable consequence. It seems to me that most human endeavour would seem to be positioned not either on the polar opposites of pure event or pure (and mere) modification, but in the grey zone Badiou's theory has found itself increasingly having to admit. And in this grey zone – neither mere rebellion nor pure revolution, we would probably have to locate most political struggle (that of peasants and workers for better conditions or less tyrranical rulers, trades union activity, perhaps even most of the activism of people in revolutionary parties today) and perhaps most (popular) cultural production, with its working over of social contradictions that it can never ideologically contain and which it aways places back in motion. (Perhaps part of the great value of Cultural Studies has been to suggest, precisely, that the cultural 'novelties' of consumption are far less finite in their outcomes than they seem at first glance, whatever their powerful producers would want of them.)

Johnston's book begins to make this problem in Zizek and Badiou clear – and in fact very perceptively argues that the kind of focus on the grand transformation which Badiou and Zizek foreground (seemingly coming from nowhere, unexpectedly and beyond analysis or pre-calculation), eschewing the smaller and more piecework struggles of everyday activism, may well 'risk discouraging in advance precisely the sorts of efforts of transforming the world of today that they so ardently desire' (xxviii).