THE BLADE (1995) features one of my favourite fight sequences. Through cinematic devices, Tsui Hark takes apart and reconfigures the wuxia pian. He creates a hybrid form of action/'cinéma vérité' where the camera has a hard time keeping up with the fighters. That's because...
...the world he creates in still in its primal years. It's a wuxia pian without jiang hu, or at least without the fully formed, heroic jiang hu that defines the genre. There is no honour, no bravery, no chivalry. That is, until this moment, the final fight, when Ding On becomes..
...the archetypal xia through his slaying of Fei Lung. It's a cosmogonic moment, the moment when the jiang hu is born and characters can start acting like they usually do in the genre. Even the musical progression of the scene conveys the same idea. It starts off with a barrage..
..of sounds (steel clashing, bamboo breaking, the air bending under the blades), that progressively give space to percussive, and then orchestral music. The score is fighting to pierce through the chaotic soundscape, and will have to wait for Ding On's victory to really shine.
Tsui's use of music in THE BLADE is fascinating, because he avoids using themes. ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINA has a very well-known theme repeated dozens of times. THE BLADE has none, only musical evolution that translates the journey from chaotic balance to controlled imbalance.
The film constantly reshapes cinematic codes to break down audience's expectations. The first fight with the monk at the marketplace? Yeah, doesn't end the way you'd imagine. The scene introduces Tsui's directorial project brilliantly. No music, no honour, no jiang hu. Just chaos
It also aims at normalising (making into the norm) a concept of asymmetry that goes against Chinese beliefs of balance as the source of strength. Ding On becomes the one-armed swordsman by discovering that the rules he thought applied to the world can be bent, even ignored.
He becomes the maker of the world, of the genre itself. His enemy Fei Lung artificially inhabits the jiang hu. People think he can fly, but he just uses ropes to enhance his jumps. Ding On overcomes an identity crisis and a physical amputation by circumventing the diegetic norms.
Fei Lung entices his opponents to move faster, but Ding On actually does, so much so that the camera (the world through which he exists) has to adapt to the new reality he is birthing. It's really a remarkable film that constantly invites the audience to participate in Tsui's...
...deconstruction of the wuxia pian. To this day, it remains my favourite film in this genre. But what's fascinating is that its brilliance only exists in light of the other swordplay films Tsui moves away from. None of it would matter if the film existed in a vacuum. It's its...
..belonging to the wuxia pian genre that makes THE BLADE a masterpiece of formal experimentation, of substantial redefinition. Kind of like an ultimate reflection on the genre, its most brutal, metadiscursive and cinematically involving one.
I truly think THE BLADE works best as a conclusion to the genre. If I had seen it before any of the other wuxia pian, it would have made a lot less sense. But ultimately, what makes it so great is Tsui's ability to fuck with visual action tropes without ever losing the viewer.
