Wuxia Essays

In cinema today we hear the phrase P.O.V being thrown around quite often. The use of this phrase confuses people who don’t know too much of the technical jargon of film, P.O.V. stands for Point of View and is a camera angle that is used fairly commonly in films both of the past and the present. A P.O.V or a point of view shot in a scene is when the camera’s field of view represents that of the subject or character’s field of vision. In most conventional cinema this shot is usually followed up by

The film is based on the story of Jing Ke's assassination attempt on the King of Qin in 227 BC. I found this film in the genre of tragedy but according to Chinese cinema this movie belongs to ‘Wuxia’. Wuxia is a genre of chine cinema that deals with martial arts, sorcery, and chivalry. The plot of the movie is the sacrifice for the nation. The movie stared with the scene of confrontation between an assassin supposedly named as ‘nameless’ and the king

Initially serving as the slogan of feminist movement, the statement, the personal is political, was later adopted to describe queerness as well, and gradually loses its edginess, receiving challenges and condemnation of “dehumanis[ing] the sense of humanity” (Manning 4), and the dangerous tendency of reducing individual particularities into a homogeneous group, which encourages the personal to depoliticise the queerness so that individual particularities can be given back to the discourse. However

The characters of Jack Burton and Wang Chi in John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China (1986) provide a stark contrast to standardized Hollywood norms, which added a new chapter to the discussion of diversity in film. These characters invert the roles found in many Hollywood films with a white male hero and a dutiful sidekick of some exotic, often foreign, origin. While it can be argued that this inversion is too subtle, due to all of the screen time devoted to Burton, these characters can be

then the famous Hong Kong gangster film: The Killer, is broadcasted in the soundtrack, implying Xiao Wu’s desire and inability to follow the hero model, displayed by Chow Yum-Fat (Lu 175), which coincides with the stylistic imitation of King Hu’s wuxia movies in A Touch of Sin, showing the impact of popular cultural figures on providing an imagined, idealized figures, as way of escaping from the painful reality. However, A Touch of Sin stands out for Jia’s first attempt to include traditional opera

Mountain Side. The dark, eerie silhouette of a figure gradually drifts into view. Swiftly the shadowed figure drops away from sight only to reappear on the ground below. The silhouette on the figure appears and reveals our protagonist, Lei Fang. Moving with elegance, Lei moves from the background into the foreground before unexpectedly being intercepted by another figure, dressed in traditional Chinese warrior garments. As Lei Fang raises his fists to begin the fight, three more figures, dressed

Vicky has recently moved from Keelung to Taipei, where she works doing PR in a nightclub. She has an overly jealous boyfriend, Hao Hao, who tracks her every movement, including her bank accounts, her telephone bills, even her smell. Her days pass by working, taking drugs and constantly fighting with him, at least when they do not have sex. However, she is tired of her situation and finds solace in Jack, a kind-hearted gangster, who also owns a bar. Gradually, she gets more and more comfortable with

Hong Kong cinema has had an international presence since the 80's particularly through the martial arts, wuxia and crime films, while in the 90's art-house films entered the equation. However, another category, less known in its majority, also asserted its own audience, chiefly among the fans of cult and CAT III. This was the horror film, which eventually found its place in Hong Kong and international cinema with a number of masterpieces that became international sensations and in some cases, cult