{"id":23760,"date":"2013-07-02T09:16:44","date_gmt":"2013-07-02T14:16:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=23760"},"modified":"2020-12-18T14:11:46","modified_gmt":"2020-12-18T20:11:46","slug":"lion-dancing-lau-kar-leung","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/2013\/07\/02\/lion-dancing-lau-kar-leung\/","title":{"rendered":"Lion, dancing: Lau Kar-leung"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Martial Club<\/strong> (1981, Lau Kar-leung).<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s too late. We don\u2019t need stuntmen any more. We have computers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lau Kar-leung<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

DB here:<\/p>\n

Lau Kar-leung<\/a> (in Mandarin: Liu Chia-liang), who died last week<\/a>, was one of the best filmmakers of the 1970s and 1980s. Yet he remains largely unknown in the west.<\/p>\n

Why? He made Hong Kong martial-arts movies, a genre long despised by upscale cinephiles. His career took off after the kung-fu boom in America and Europe had ended, so his films didn\u2019t get wide circulation abroad. Worse, he worked for Shaw Bros., the studio decried as a soulless movie factory. (Oddly, his best films coincided with the decline of the studio\u2019s output, as Run Run Shaw turned his attention more to television.) In Asia Lau\u2019s films had to compete with the rising popularity of Golden Harvest\u2019s fast, slick new films starring the Hui brothers, Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao, and Jackie Chan. And he largely missed the shift to the modern urban action picture that helped Hong Kong films into world markets in the late 1980s. Even though he made the remarkable cop movie Tiger on the Beat<\/em> (1988), he never fully embraced the bloody-brotherhood ethos epitomized in the work of John Woo.<\/p>\n

Before he became a director, Lau was a martial-arts choreographer. Credits list him on over 125 films, though he claimed to have worked on more than two hundred. He came into his own as an action choreographer in 1962, when he was about twenty-five. He worked for companies turning out both Cantonese and Mandarin martial-arts films. The film that brought him to attention was The Jade Bow<\/em> (1966), made for the Great Wall company.\u00a0This rattling effort, choreographed by Lau and his frequent collaborator Tong Kai, made ingenious use of wirework and reverse-motion effects.<\/p>\n

The Jade Bow<\/em>, hard and spare in its style,\u00a0was strikingly similar to the new wave of martial arts films announced with great fanfare by the Shaws studios in the same year. Soon Lau became a major Shaws choreographer. Usually paired with Tong, he collaborated on many of Chang Cheh\u2019s flamboyant, aggressive action pictures, including The Assassin<\/em> (1967), One-Armed Swordsman<\/em> (1967), Golden Swallow<\/em> (1968), New One-Armed Swordsman<\/em> (1970), Blood Brothers<\/em> (1973), and Disciples of Shaolin<\/em> (1975). Lau might stage fights for sixteen different releases in a single year.<\/p>\n

Lau and Tong complemented one another. Lau grew up in a martial-arts household and learned classic technique from his father. Tong came from Cantonese opera, eventually working as a stage stuntman. To his film work Tong brought acrobatic styles and a deep knowledge of weaponry that helped him design eye-catching swords and spears. The two worked out fights together, one playing the protagonist, the other the antagonist. In 1975, Lau became a director while Tong continued to choreograph other projects.<\/p>\n

Lau began directing just as the kung-fu boom needed something to spice it up. Bruce Lee had introduced serious, even melodramatic combat. Chang Cheh had continued in this vein while emphasizing agonizing violence, homorerotic tensions, and plots based on Shaolin temple legends. Soon Chang would innovate along a different dimension by presenting circus-like, almost camp extravaganzas centered on the Five Deadly Venoms team.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A dash, or more, of laughs<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Lau\u2019s directorial debut, The Spiritual Boxer<\/em>\u00a0(1975), is often considered the first kung-fu comedy, and many of his films include mugging, goofy dialogue, and physical gags. He went beyond one-off humor by finding ways to make combat itself funny. In Dirty Ho<\/em> (1979) two masters maintain teatime manners while trying to thrust goblets, fans, and fingers into each other’s face (above). My Young Auntie<\/em> (1981) features a demure heroine who is, to everyone\u2019s surprise, an adept at kung-fu. Heroes of the East<\/em> (1978; my preferred title: Shaolin vs. Ninja<\/em>) rests entirely on a comic premise. A Chinese man marries a Japanese woman, but soon they quarrel about which nation has the stronger warrior tradition. Broken furniture follows. Even Legendary Weapons of China<\/em> (1982), an attempt to present the Boxer Rebellion, can\u2019t avoid spectacular gag scenes in which a magic doll is twisted \u00a0to manipulate a fighter into grotesque positions.<\/p>\n

Lau\u2019s emblematic actor, as central to him as John Wayne was to Ford or James Stewart was to Anthony Mann, was Lau Kar-fai (Liu Chia-hui), familiarly known in Western circles as Gordon Liu. Sometimes bald, sometimes bearded or mustached, Liu can play hayseed, shirker, reluctant hero, con man, or elder sage. His breakout role came in one of Kar-leung\u2019s most famous films, 36 Chambers of Shaolin<\/em> (1978), which was given a comic sequel as Return to the 36th<\/sup> Chamber<\/em> (1980). But there\u2019s nothing funny about the ferocity of The 8-Diagram Pole Fighter<\/em> (1984), which begins with a theatrically abstract representation of a battle and ends with Gordon Liu rescued by monks who bash in the teeth of their adversaries.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Lau brought to the action genre a fierce athleticism, a tireless energy\u2014some of his films contain a dozen combats, big and small\u2014and a thorough acquaintance with many martial-arts schools. A film might showcase one fighting style or several. At the climax of\u00a0Legendary Weapons<\/em>\u00a0Lau himself steps in to perform virtuoso moves with a variety of spears, chain whips, daggers, swords, and staffs. Heroes of the East<\/em> sets seven Japanese masters, each with a martial specialty, against our young Chinese husband, and the film provides virtually a compare-contrast essay in Asian combat tactics. Sometimes one thinks that Lau was aiming at nothing less than a filmic encyclopedia of classic martial arts, a sort of audiovisual database of the entire Chinese wuxia<\/em> tradition.<\/p>\n

This shouldn\u2019t be taken to mean that his filming was straightforward. Lau had tremendous cinematic gifts. Staccato figure movement, often integrated with punchy zooms, give his scenes a racy, infectious pulse. Although he usually stays far enough back to capture the entire action, he cuts very fast, averaging four to five seconds, but his careful ‘Scope compositions and smooth match cuts keep the action intelligible. The frame teems with movement. A pole may jab into the foreground, and his fighters may pop up from the bottom or sides of the frame. Starting from a detail, a zoom-back can create a whooshing burst in the manner of a comic-strip splash panel. These conventions of local cinema were made especially gripping by their integration with the distinctive maneuvers of each fighting mode.<\/p>\n

The Hong Kong tradition relies on rhythmic staging and cutting, but Lau took things further than most. Even in scenes not centered on combats, he found ways to make movements counter each other, cut for cut, or to flow from one figure to another across the scene. Motion often becomes contagious, with one man\u2019s gesture followed by another man\u2019s rhyming head turn or sudden twist of a torso. Fighters prowling in a darkened attic in Legendary Weapons<\/em> are intercut with their target in the floor below; his abrupt gestures and pauses are echoed by theirs.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Once Lau found his stride, he seemed to make every film an experiment in rendering kung-fu\u2019s most esoteric traditions through the resources of purely cinematic rhythm.<\/p>\n

His most sustained output ran from 1975 to 1985, although he directed sporadically thereafter. His last directed film, Drunken Monkey<\/em> (2003), failed to attract attention, but he remained the honored elder consulted by younger directors. Jackie Chan engaged him for his Drunken Master<\/em> II<\/em> (1994) and Tsui Hark hired him for Seven Swords<\/em> (2005).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Let\u2019s get unreal<\/strong><\/p>\n

Almost always, I tend to think, the quest for realism in cinema is misguided. Realism is often just an alibi for the brand of artifice we prefer. The great \u201crealist\u201d movements in cinema did access certain aspects of the world that were overlooked by other trends, but they treated those aspects through new conventions. From Soviet Socialist Realism through postwar American \u201csemidocumentary\u201d shooting and Method acting to Neorealism and onward, fresh forms replaced, or reworked exisiting ones. Reality is multifaceted, and any style can be said to be faithful to some facets of it.<\/p>\n

It might be nice if our filmmakers working outside the realm of comedy acknowledged artifice more frankly. Today, watching the \u201crealistic\u201d action scenes of World War Z<\/em>\u00a0and others like it, with their choppy cutting, murky staging, and grab-and-go framing, I\u2019m reminded not of their excuse (to render “the way characters feel”) but of their overarching purpose: to obtain a PG-13 rating. The new conventions aim to hide the action rather than display it.<\/p>\n

That demand keeps many of today\u2019s action films from being precisely and percussively arousing. We\u2019re supposed to be satisfied with a vague excitement. Our films project a manic, diffuse busyness, an effort to suggest lots going on without ever specifying exactly what it feels like to run, to fall, to hit a wall, to feel a blow\u2014in short, to face the stubborn physicality of the world. Those effects can, paradoxically enough, often be best activated by highly stylized cinema.<\/p>\n

Consider the chainsaw climax of Lau\u2019s Tiger on the Beat<\/em>, which I\u2019ve analyzed in an earlier entry<\/a>. Even in this YouTube video, it retains a lot of its impact.<\/p>\n