On Thu, 1 Mar 2001, gioja wrote:
>
> Saw the film by the way, thought the matte painting of Late Qing "Peking" in
> the beginning was amazing. The costumes and architecture were very
> realistic, for what I can tell. What disappointed some Chinese friends were,
> interestingly, the fight scenes (too many people dangling from strings, and
> little display of *real* martial arts).
>
>
> Carlo
That's the only thing I would liked to have been different. On the other
hand, there's an interesting prejudice at work here: we want Asian
fantasy kung-fu to look "realistic," but we won't complain if Gandalf or
Harry Potter use highly unrealistic means to to defeat their fantasy foes
when *those* movies come out. CTHD seems to my eyes to represent a genre
of "martial arts as wizardry" that harkens to a time which might
correspond with that time in the West when definitions of sorcerors,
philsophers, and physicians tended to overlap as "people with esoteric
knowledge." In the traditions of fantasy, esoteric wisdom includes
supernatural power, displayed as either magic or as aerial wushu,
depending on which culture you might be in.
So CTHD isn't just about martial artists, it is about "people with
great wisdom and knowledge" in general, and about the tragedies that come
from "people with great knowledge but not enough wisdom." Which
are overlapping categories, depending upon context.
Marvin Long
Austin, Texas
