Exploring the film’s construction of jianghu, aesthetics of violence and dialogue with key wuxia themes…
Xia (侠) is a concept that developed in the philosophies of the Warring States period. According to the court historian Sima Qian, who recorded the lives of real youxia (wandering errant swordsmen) and assassins, they were commoners and untenured warriors available for hire, who upheld a professional code of conduct based on the major philosophical schools of their time, “righteousness (yi), trust (xin), meritorious service (gong), tidiness (jie), tolerance (rang)”. Among these, yi and xin have become the defining qualities of Xia in literature and cinema.
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The concept found literary expression during the Tang Dynasty, eventually developing into a genre and absorbing influences from various popular literary forms through the centuries. Since the 1920s, when the Shanghai film industry began adapting Xia novels, the wuxia pian has evolved through multiple different phases, though most works in the tradition feature a historical or historicist setting. This is not always necessary. In his book Chinese Martial Arts Cinema (2009), Professor Stephen Teo observes that “the genre is unified by its cultural history and its historicism but at the same time is ruptured and torn apart from its historical continuity by history itself”.
Over the last few decades, numerous works have engaged with wuxia in a modern diegetic space, such as David Lai, Jeffrey Lau and Corey Yuen’s Saviour of the Soul, which retells Jin Yong’s novel The Return of the Condor Heroes as an artistic future fantasy; Johnnie To’s The Heroic Trio, known for its gimmicky martial arts presentation; Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle, which parodies the tradition. One of the few directors that have achieved this modern transposition most thoroughly and profoundly, is John Woo. His engagement with the wuxia tradition have been widely acknowledged by scholarship and by Woo himself, in an interview with Marcin Krasnowolski for Five Flavours Film Festival in 2015, he states, “in my films, the sword is really just being replaced by a gun. In some sense, I’m shooting a modern wuxia film”. Yet there seems to be few explorations of precisely how he has done this. I will examine his work in this essay, in terms of its construction of the jianghu space, transposition of the aesthetics of violence and dialogue with key wuxia themes. Among Woo’s films, The Killer (1989) seems to me the best representation of this transposition.
One of the key aspects of the wuxia narrative is the construction of jianghu, the abstract space in which the xia enact their code of conduct. The creation of such a diegetic space in The Killer can be seen in John Woo’s highly stylised mise-en-scene. The opening scenes at the church and the bar that set the tone for the film provide great examples. The dramatic use of weather in the nocturnal outside shots, the soft lighting, the stylised decor, the bold use of palettes, combine to convey a dream-like ambiance and enhance the sense of temporal ambiguity suggested already by the distant shots of the citiscape, creating a fantasy urban space, distanced from 1980s Hong Kong, in which a lone, weary assassin internally struggles between his immoral profession and his conscience. With the exception of some neon-filled backdrops, there are few shots of populated public areas that can be associated with reality. Even during Inspector Lee (Danny Lee)’s pursuit of the drug dealer Wong, the streets and passengers on the bus are given a restricted depth of field with the sharp focus on the two characters. This serves to keep the storytelling within controlled, closed spaces and socially indeterminate open spheres, thus maintaining the sense of a fictional jianghu.
As the cinema scholar and expert Jia Leilei argues in his book The Mythology of Martial Dance (2014), the combat and violence in a wuxiapian is always aestheticised and stylised, and “must be ‘embedded in’ with the plot, the characters and the themes, within a unique space, in order to demonstrate various kinds of martial dance and the spirit behind it”. Rhythm and movement are an inherent part of John Woo’s filmmaking, he has spoken about his appreciation of musical dance films in his Master Class lectures.
One major aspect of this stylised dance of violence is the demonstration of the skill and grace of the xia. In traditional wuxia pian, this is usually shown by characters leaping, flying and performing superhuman feats. In The Killer, the protagonist Ah Jong (Chow Yun-Fat) performs similar dances of prowess and finesse, leaping through the air, wielding a pistol in each hand, dispatching gangsters as he flies. In the beach sequence, with a series of leaps, rolls and bounds, he dodges sniper fire and takes out surrounding hitmen one by one. Woo employs slow motion in these moments to amplify the impact of the ‘dance’, as he does in Last Hurrah for Chivalry (1979), the most acclaimed of his few traditional wuxiapian. Comparing Chang Saam (Pai Wei)’s fight with Pray (Fung Hak-On) in Hurrah and the final battle in The Killer, a similar choreographic rhythm is apparent, what Professor David Bordwell identifies in his book Aesthetics in Action (2001) as the “pause-burst-pause pattern”. In Hurrah, the combat is punctuated by the refreshing or brief holding of battle stances. Woo adapts these punctuations in swordplay rhythm into more ballet variations of tempo in gunplay where with slow motion is applied to people falling, acrobatics, objects exploding in between the kinetic action.
The other key aspect of wuxiapian’s stylised violence is the externalization of the inner core of the character in moments of conflict. How Ah Jong is presented in combat shows his valour and morality. He uses mostly pistols with precision, avoiding bystanders, and besting the gangsters shooting machine guns into crowds. Woo further encapsulates his uprightness via the tension created by staging stand-offs in places of shelter and healing, such as Jennie (Sally Yeh)’s flat and the hospital and showing how Ah Jong protects the innocent. Woo also transposes the ‘fight in white’ wuxiapian archetype, created by his teacher at Shaw Brothers Studios, Chang Cheh (One-Armed Swordsman), a major voice in 1970s Hong Kong Wuxia cinema, dressing Ah Jong in a full white suit during the last two fights, symbolising his newly gained spiritual purity.
John Woo engage with the wuxia tradition beyond style and technique, exploring different themes related to the Xia spirit. The Killer focuses on marginalised characters and create a morally ambiguous world around them. Ah Jong falls in the category of the nomadic xia in Sima Qian’s records, although he is an assassin, he keeps his word and steps into danger to help others. Betrayal and the upholding of honour, loss of humanity and redemption, all common wuxia themes, run through The Killer. One distinct aspect of the xia essence that preoccupies Woo is the close homosocial bond between male characters, unique to the xia mindset, and a clear influence from Chang Cheh’s wuxia works. Ah Jong, Fung Sei (Kong Chu) and Lee Ying are alienated from established society by authorities more concerned with power than keeping order on the one hand, and on the other by underground triads that no longer honour the jianghu code. Transnational cinema scholarship has generally attributed this sense of social alienation and unease as symptomatic of the postcolonial distrust of the British as well as Chinese systems of government and pre-1997 anxiety.
Both Fung and Lee are united to Ah Jong by their individual friendships. As Kin-Yan Szeto notes in their book The Martial Arts Cinema of the Chinese Diaspora (2001), “the homosocial bonding, rooted in the traditional code of Chinese xia heroism, unites the male characters who are outsiders to the civilized repression of law and society”. Woo expresses this bond not only through plot and dialogue, but through music, editing, close-up shots showing emotional expressions, parallel framing, mirrored and overlapped framing of Ah Jong and Lee. Their mutual plight and bond is elucidated by Lee’s conversation with Ah Jong, “I believe in justice, but no one believes in me.”
Chang Saam and Tsing Yi in Last Hurrah for Chivalry
Ah Jong and Inspector Lee in The Killer
The image of the pair of blood splattered heroes in their final battle, standing back-to-back and facing off against an overwhelming opposition, epitomises Woo’s cinematic transposition of the kind of male xia bond between Chang Saam San and Tsing Yi (Damian Lau) in Hurrah to a modern urban setting.
Although there is considerable violence in his modern transpositions of wuxia, John Woo by no means represents it in a gratuitous way. While diegetic music might be used to bring out the passion and longing in the characters, there is no music during the actual acts of violence. Boris Trbic writes in his paper “The Emerging Dragon: John Woo” (2023), that Woo grew up in the slums of Hong Kong, witnessed gang brutality first hand. Nevertheless, it’s clear from Woo’s lectures that he maintains an optimistic worldview. As an auteur, he sought to examine the phenomenon of real-life violence through his modern renditions of wuxia.
This exploration of The Killer has shown that John Woo creates the jianghu diegetic space with stylised mise-en-scene throughout the film, transposing the aesthetics, energy and rhythms of cinematic swordplay into gunplay, demonstrating the spirit of his characters in moments of conflict, as per the traditional wuxiapian. Themes of redemption and the safeguarding of dignity run through the film, as do homosocial bonds and individual friendships. In its earlier development, xia narratives have been contemporary forms of storytelling, only during the twentieth century did they become historicised, so the transposition of its characteristics into contemporary storytelling and social discourses seems like a natural and enriching course for the genre.
The Killer is available now on limited edition 4K UHD and Blu-ray from Arrow Video, and available as a limited edition hardbox 4K UHD + Blu-ray SteelBook with hardcover booklet from Imprint Films on 29 April.
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