A Touch of Zen

A Touch of Zen was shot in Taiwan by King Hu and was funded by Taiwanese production company Union Film Company.[3][4] In his book on the film, Stephen Teo suggested that the film has roots in Hong Kong cinema, noting the bulk of both Taiwanese and Hong Kong actors and crew members.[3] With Hu's idea of invoking traditional Chinese culture in his films, A Touch of Zen contains Beijing opera scores and references to Chinese poetry like Li Bai's well-known poem "Drinking Alone in the Moonlight".[5]

The bamboo forest sword fight, a ten-minute confrontation, is said to have taken twenty-five days to shoot. It is choreographed by Han Yingjie, a former Beijing opera actor and the action director of A Touch of Zen. Hu explained proudly of the trial and error he went through in the creative process and concluded that he had put together many scenes in less than eight frames challenging the “golden rule” of cinema.[6]

Hu based the screenplay of A Touch of Zen on the ghost story of Xia Nü in Liaozhai Zhiyi, an anthology by Pu Songling.[7] He arranged the credit of Liaozhai Zhiyi as the first title card right after the company logo in the film, even before the film title. In Pu Songling’s original story, the male scholar does not pursue being a knight-errant and the separation between wen and wu. However, the film modifies the character’s attributes and instead leads the scholar to adapt knight-errant and restore the country from the corrupted dominance of the eunuchs.[8][9]

Director Hu adopted the classic techniques of montages, including eye-line matches and shot-reverse-shot. He also used jump cuts to create the speed of motions in action effects and applied blocked shots as his signature on evacuating the space before actions take place.[10] Hu also creates "the glimpsing effect" (also called point-of-view shot) to provide a new perspective to audiences. "The glimpsing effect" allows the audience to see the perspective of Gu.[11]

The function of knight-errantry alludes to civic values (wen) and martial conducts (wu) in the discourse, arising reflections of experiences and justice beyond dichotomies between wen and wu, good and evil.[12] The director Hu develops an individual perspective of what nation is and transcends the limited dialectics of a totalitarian regime versus a more benevolent government.[13]

The theme of Buddhism is in opposition to Confucianism and offers the ideas of transcendence and redemption.[14] Scholar James Steinstrage considers that the unambitious scholar Gu's involvement in Jianghu and the unexplained motivation of Yang Huizhen's sexual intercourse with Gu lead to absurdity and vacuity, which matches the concept of emptiness in Zen Buddhism.[15] Paradoxically, the Zen ideologies are not profound in the film and the translated film title A Touch of Zen can be a marketing strategy to attract Western audiences and recall exoticism.[16] On the other hand, film commentator Tony Rayns, in his commentary in Criterion Collection's home video release, considers the second half of the film involving Zen monks the origin of the title.[17]

The film presents Xia Nü Yang in the paradoxical image of female roles. She delivers a son to continue Gu's family line as a traditional mother and help fulfill Gu's filial piety, revealing the dominance of patriarchy in society. From a feminist perspective, she also has the initiative to end her relationship with Gu and reject the feudalistic values of women's obligation to men.[18]

Based on the fact that Director Hu's interests in a Chinese genre shengguai (which means gods and spirits), the haunted house as the setting and death traps jiguang suggest Gu's encounters and ally with the supernatural ghosts.[19] The film adopts the motifs of "Liaozhai gothic", including the goldenrod and alarm system that alerts the unexpected visitors in the haunted house.[20]

The film depicts the romantic relationships between a scholar, Gu, and a pretty female knight-errant, Yang, referring to the classic theme of scholar and beauty Caizijiaren in Chinese literature.[21]

A Touch of Zen failed at the box-office when it was released in two parts in Taiwan in 1970 and 1971. The film only ran one week in the cinema and failed because of its themes of ambiguous sexuality and feminist sensibility.[22] In 1971, the film again failed to receive recognition with its release in Hong Kong due to the overwhelming success of Bruce Lee's movie The Big Boss.[23] The film grossed HK$678,320.9 in Hong Kong.[24] It was not until the full three-hour version was revived for a screening at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival that A Touch of Zen gained wide attention.[25]

Gina Marchetti considers that the genre of the film as wuxia is a new emergence in the Hong Kong New Wave and writes, "although produced in Taiwan after Hu had left Hong Kong, the international accolades for this film brought the “new” cinema of Hong Kong much greater visibility, while providing an art house alternative to the enormous international popularity of Bruce Lee."[26]

For the Criterion Collection author David Bordwell wrote, "The story is simple, but the treatment is complex. No Shaw film would have delayed the basic exposition so cunningly. And no Shaw film would have presented heroic swordplay through the eyes of a secondary character. Yet by building the plot around Gu, Hu creates a protagonist-as-witness."[25]

Writing for the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, academic Héctor Rodríguez noted of the film, "In that film...the director's use of elliptical cuts, diegetic insert shots, and other strategies of visual fragmentation allows characters to float magically through the air across long distances, to reach impossibly high altitudes in a single superhuman leap, and to change direction miraculously in midair."[6]

In his book, King Hu's A Touch of Zen, academic Stephen Teo wrote that, "this final reduction of the mythical female knight-errant figure into human status is meant to provoke us into a philosophical understanding of ourselves. The subject of Buddhist transcendence is Hu’s way of delivering the ultimate critique of the genre’s raison d’être which is the audience’s wish-fulfilment for heroes to save them from their own vulnerability."[27]

The film was awarded the Technical Grand Prize and nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival.[28] It became the second Chinese-language film to win an award at the Cannes Film Festival and the first wuxia film to win at an international film festival.[3]

At the 24th Hong Kong Film Awards various Asian film critics, filmmakers and actors voted for the top Chinese films from Hong Kong, Taiwan and China.[29] A Touch of Zen was listed at 9th place on the list. In 2011, the Tapei Golden Horse Film Festival had 122 industry professionals take part in the survey.[30] The voters included film scholars, festival programmers, film directors, actors and producers to vote for the 100 Greatest Chinese-Language Films.[30] A Touch of Zen was listed at 15th place on the list.[30]

In 2021, The Daily Star ranked A Touch of Zen 4th on its list of the greatest short story adaptations, writing "Influencing future classics like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and House of Flying Daggers, there is perhaps no greater film as influential and as underappreciated".[31]