ABSTRACT
Chinese martial arts cinema has in the past been compared to other Western popular genres, most notably the Musical and the western. However, there are reasons for thinking that comparison with the epic might be more productive. First, historical spectacle has played an important role in the transnationalization of East Asian cinema, with the Japanese jidaigeki (historical fi lm) and particularly director Kurosawa Akira important antecedents. Second, while it might be hard to establish that it is more than a coincidence, it is interesting that the current cycle of prestigious pan-Chinese wuxia pian (what some critics have termed “martial arthouse”) has roughly paralleled the return of the Hollywood epic (Gladiator [2000], Troy [2004], The Passion of the Christ [2004], Alexander [2004], Kingdom of Heaven [2005], 300 [2006]). The label “martial arthouse” refers most directly to wuxia pian directed by arthouse auteurs: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Hero (2002), House of Flying Daggers (2004), The Promise (2005), The Curse of the Golden Flower (2006) and The Banquet (2006). A slightly earlier fi lm needs to be included here, too. The Emperor and the Assassin (1998) is a historical epic (by a mainland auteur) that has an obvious connection to Hero insofar as they both deal with the attempted assassination of Ying Zheng (Qin Shi Huang) during the Warring States era that preceded the “unifi cation” of China; they offer contrasting versions of the “birth of the nation-civilisation.”4 It shares a common theme with a number of fi lms in the martial arthouse cycle, namely heroic sacrifi ce, and several English-language reviews likened The Emperor and the Assassin to the epic.5 I also want to extend the category of martial arthouse to include similarly large-scale fi lms by more populist Hong Kong directors: Seven Swords (2005), Fearless (2006) and The Warlords (2007).
