Glimpses of Grace: A Dialogue on King Hu’s Dragon Inn

The following article is structured as a dialogue between its authors. One of the main ways that the two of us engage with film is through conversations with each other, and see this dialogue as a means to reflect and celebrate the discussions that Dragon Inn, in particular, inspired.

Austin: Like many cinephiles of our generation, you and I first encountered King Hu’s Long Men Ke Zhan (Dragon Inn, 1967) by proxy, through Tsai Ming-liang’s 2003 film Bu san (Goodbye, Dragon Inn). In Tsai’s film, we glimpse the ghostly presence of Dragon Inn as it plays at the dilapidated Fu-Ho Grand Theatre on its final night of operations, its soundtrack echoing throughout the building’s bowels. It’s the disappearance of a certain kind of communal cinema-going experience that Goodbye Dragon Inn eulogises, with Dragon Inn representing its splendoured pinnacle. Maybe in this conversation we can talk about the qualities in Dragon Inn we find to be so special. To start with, I’m curious about your thoughts on the connection between it and Tsai’s film?

Alex: One resonance I find is in its engagement with shared spaces. Hu’s watershed wuxia pian (swordplay film) and Tsai’s quintessential slice of new millennium slow cinema share a concern with the contingencies of public space, its potential dangers and affordances. In the Fu-Ho Grand’s auditorium, a Japanese tourist tries his luck at cruising, a dolled-up woman snacks alone on peanuts, and the actor Shih Chun watches his younger self on screen through eyes glistening with tears. Meanwhile in Dragon Inn, the action is of a decidedly grander variety: henchmen of the power-hungry eunuch Cao Shao-qin (Bai Ying) lodge in Dragon Gate Inn, poised to intercept and eradicate the children of his rival General Yu, from whom he fears retribution for executing their father. The modest inn and the antiquated theatre are both places of convergence, where people of disparate identities and backgrounds are pushed and pulled into proximity with one another, leading to failed partnerships, sparks of conflict and chance connections.

Hu described inns as “the most dramatic of locations”.¹ In the three feature films he made that centre around them – the Shaw Brothers production Da Zui Xia (Come Drink With Me, 1966), Dragon Inn and Yingchun ge zhi fengbo (The Fate of Lee Khan, 1973) – he utilised the setting as a multilayered space both narratively and formally. Inside its transient walls, identities become unstable: an experienced martial artist can masquerade as a commoner (as wandering swordsman Xiao Shao-zi [Shih Chun] does upon his arrival at Dragon Gate Inn), a henchman can hide beneath the guise of a hot-tempered guest, and a woman inhabits masculine drag. Hu also mines the visual potential of the multilevel inn – which was built with great attention to detail from materials authentic to the film’s Ming Dynasty setting – through dynamic widescreen compositions.

Austin: Yes, Hu’s ability to skillfully wield widescreen to his advantage places him in a special category of filmmakers. He makes full use of the frame’s extra width, filling it with incident and depth, and at times, is confident enough to place important focal points near its edge. One striking example is the extreme long shot that marks the end of the fight scene where the hot-headed Chu Chi (Han Hsieh) protects the general’s family from attackers. Chu stands in the very bottom-right of the frame, surrounded by his three adversaries as they collapse to the ground, defeated; meanwhile, way up in the top-left of the screen, the family can be seen scurrying off to safety.

There’s a thrilling tension in those escalating masquerades that you mention. Xiao keeps his cool as antagonists try to goad him into anger, in a grave underestimation; a perfectly thrown bowl of mutton noodles hints at hidden reserves of power and cunning, deliciously teasing the action thrills to come. Poisoned wine, surprise ambushes, and false gestures of hospitality are all folded into the deadly games. The inn’s translucent rice-paper windows are used to great effect: through them, projectile attacks can be made, and holes can be poked through for peeping. In one lightning moment, an arrow fired through the window is caught and deflected straight back into it; the archer’s silhouette collapses with a gasp, a red blood splotch splattering onto its surface.

Alex: That’s a stunning moment! It’s “lightning” indeed – the action takes place over six shots, amounting to just 20 seconds of screen time into which is built mounting tension and a crescendo. Hu’s compositional talent in widescreen extends into outdoor scenes, too: as Cao’s men travel to Dragon Gate Inn early in the film, their party is shot from an extreme distance, reduced to an ant-like chain as they climb a high path above a flowing stream. This stream will eventually lead them to their destination, but for now they are diminished by the majesty of their surroundings. 

Having left Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers Studio right after completing Come Drink With Me and joining the Taiwan-based Union Film Company in search of more artistic freedom, Dragon Inn marks the beginning of Hu’s pursuit of more experimental approaches to action. David Bordwell wrote that Hu’s action scenes operate around a series of “glimpses”: they’re shot and cut so that our impression of what’s going on remains principally rhythmic and impressionistic.² Something I love about this style of editing is that it allows the bodies onscreen to transcend their physical limits, imbuing them with a magical degree of speed and weightlessness. In the most extreme of these moments, Cao, cornered by our band of heroes in the film’s final minutes, beams vertically to a high treetop in the blink of an eye. The camera whirls anticlockwise, catching only his arrival atop one canopy before appearing with teleportation-speed in another. Advancing at a rhythm which outpaces the eye – exacerbated by cutting mid movement, before an activity is even complete – we are left with “only a trace” of the action transpired.³ Hu plays with our desire for unfettered access to these amazing feats, extracting pleasure from a withholding of visibility in a style which teases and tantalises.⁴

What I think makes Dragon Inn’s action scenes – choreographed by Han Ying-chieh (who also plays Cao’s second-in command, Mao Zong-xian) – so distinctive is their tempering of the spectacle of elegance and motion with a grounded materiality. In the famous fight outside the inn between Miss Zhu (Shangkuan Ling-fung) and Mao, the choreography incorporates hidden trampolines – which allowed actors to make high, ovate leaps – but there is also an abundance of missed strikes, fumbles, dodges, and pauses to take stock of injuries. In fact, I would say that these elements, which foreground bodily placement and movement around the environment, comprise the majority of their confrontation. Unlike the martial arts films of his contemporaries Chang Cheh and Lau Kar-leung, which centred around hard, taut physiques, the spectacle of the body in Hu’s cinema derives less from musculature and more from movement and mobility. When the adversaries’ swords do make contact, their metal-on-metal clink pierces the soundscape which – along with the whoosh of arrows and the patter of hurried footsteps – is elevated by an extraordinary soundtrack blending elements from Beijing opera (formerly known as Peking opera), Western orchestral and – as you discovered during our research for this annotation – magnetic tape. As the musician between us, I’m curious how you see the music functioning in Dragon Inn?

Austin: There is a claim of Hu’s that I found quite interesting: that for him, Western art tends to be torn between imitation and expressivity, while Chinese art offers both simultaneously.⁵ I think the film’s soundtrack, like the choreography you’ve mentioned, is an element where this mixture might be at play. The Beijing opera percussion lends an elegant, semi-natural quality to the fights’ sound, quite a contrast to the crashing, realistic foley typical of Hollywood swordplay. The most prominent instrument is the paiban (wooden clapper), whose speed oscillates in response to the movement of the action. Sometimes it matches a character’s footsteps, but more often it’s non-diegetic, accentuating the tension of the situation. There are other wonderfully unnatural touches, such as a palm strike signalled by a high-pitched cymbal.

It’s also quite a surprise to hear an orchestrated version of Debussy’s “La cathédrale engloutie” at the film’s halfway point, but the choice nonetheless works magic; its serene grandeur envelopes the characters like dawning light, our heroes finally united, preparing themselves for a fierce fight ahead. In “La cathédrale engloutie” there can be heard harmonic patterns Debussy drew from Eastern musical sources such as Javanese gamelan. Such East-West cross-pollinations have long been important to action cinema too: the Jidaigeki films of Akira Kurosawa for example – influential to Hu – were part of a sustained two-way dialogue between Japanese productions and the Hollywood Westerns. In Dragon Inn’s climactic battle, German electronic pioneer Oskar Sala’s “Improvisation on Magnetic Tape, No. 3” underscores Cao’s disorientation due to asthma, pushing the mood into something like psychedelia.

Alex: I can only assume this spirit of experimentation – and the other aspects of Dragon Inn we’ve celebrated here – resonated just as much with its first audiences. The second highest grossing film of that year in Taiwan, it reaped huge profits throughout Southeast Asia and lodged in the memories of a generation. Black-and-white newsreel footage shot in Taipei in 1967 shows swathes of umbrella-holding filmgoers, children and adults alike, congregating in pouring rain outside theatres playing Dragon Inn. This moment in time is memorialised in the prologue of Goodbye, Dragon Inn, where we glimpse, at first through a sliver between flowing curtains, the Fu-Ho Grand in its prime as the opening scene and credits sequence of Dragon Inn plays in its entirety to a silently captivated audience. As we gather in the cinema once more to watch Dragon Inn, it seems that this collective experience may continue in new forms, not yet entirely disappeared.

Long Men Ke Zhan/Dragon Inn (1967 Taiwan 111 mins)

Prod Co: Union Film Company Prod: LS Chang Dir, Scr: King Hu Phot: Hui-Ying Hua Ed: Hung-min Chen Mus: Lan-Ping Chow

Cast: Shih Chun, Shangkuan Ling-fung, Bai Ying, Miao Tien, Han Ying-chieh, Hsieh Han, Tsao Chien

Endnotes