ABSTRACT
King Hu Jinquan is arguably the least appreciated “great director” in world film history. He should be better known as the most significant innovator of wuxia pian, especially the cape and sword genre, and was its greatest practitioner.1 Also, he needs to be recognized as one of the most truly original filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s, alongside figures such as Miklós Jancsó (Hungary), Glauber Rocha (Brazil), Santiago Alvarez (Cuba), Andrei Tarkovsky (Russia), and, even Jean-Luc Godard (France/Switzerland), all of whose artistry has less to do with narrative and more with other aspects of film form or style. Unfortunately, experimental or avant-garde filmmaking has traditionally had few admirers or practitioners in the Chinese-speaking world, and in North America and Europe, King Hu’s esthetic intentions have not been fully understood. The dance and musical-like nature of Hu’s work, which is more painterly and poetic than novelistic or dramatic, is now appreciated intrinsically and for its relevance to Chinese opera, painting, and literature in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan, at least, but has not been championed on the world, film-historical stage.2 As an expatriate filmmaker who worked in the commercial film industries of Taiwan and Hong Kong, he remains virtually ignored in Mainland China, but, in Taiwan, where he made, arguably, the best films of his early career, and where he was given the opportunity to make films late in his career, after a major retrospective in 1980, his films were preserved at the Taipei Film Archive and shown periodically enough to ensure his reputation as a film artist.3
