Raining in the Mountain

“There is more to this than meets the eye,” observes police officer Lieutenant Chang Cheng (Chen Hui-Lou), one of the slippery protagonists of Kongshan Ling Yu (Raining in the Mountain, King Hu, 1979). He is talking about how characters – such as a landowner’s concubine who is actually thief White Fox (Hsu Feng) – are not always who they profess to be.  

This extends to the morality of an entire ruling class. The first ten minutes of the film follows Esquire Wen (Sun Yueh), White Fox, and their servant Gold Lock (the film’s martial arts choreographer Ng Ming-Choi), trekking through the countryside of southern China to reach a huge Buddhist complex. The solemnity of their movements, the cinematography, the elegiac orchestral music, and the dissolves between the sections of their arduous journey, generate an impression of spiritual purpose, as if the group is on a pilgrimage. Wen is a major donor to the monastery and has been asked to advise on the appointment of a new abbot. Yet it is soon revealed that Wen’s concerns are more worldly. He wants to position his candidate in the role to ensure his own continued influence, and he has hired White Fox and Gold Lock to steal a priceless document from the monastery’s treasure house. Wen is interested in the document as a valuable artefact to be owned and transacted in the world, and not for its spiritual value as a sutra (Buddhist scripture). Wen is not the only member of his hypocritical class scheming in this sacred space; Chang is assisting General Wang (Tien Feng), and several monks are diverted from their religious calling. Conversely, Chiu Ming (Tung Lin), a convict who is humiliated and punished by the respectable class, emerges as the spiritual hero of the film.

One could extend Chang’s comment, however, to the cinema of King Hu. His films have long held a position of prestige not accorded to the ‘chop-socky’ films that achieved international popularity from the early 1970s. Hu’s films have always been seen as ‘more’ than, or transcending the martial arts genre, or as kung-fu films for those who would normally spurn kung-fu films. Several of Hu’s works were selected as Hong Kong’s entry to the Academy Awards or were premiered at prestigious international festivals such as Cannes, where Xia Nu (A Touch of Zen, 1971) was nominated for the Palme d’Or and won the Technical Grand Prize. To the best of my knowledge, Hu was the only martial arts filmmaker to receive a full feature in the British Film Institute’s influential Sight and Sound magazine during the 1970s.¹ In 1995, A Touch of Zen was the only martial arts film included in the series of 100 landmark movies screened by the BBC to celebrate the century of cinema, and it was the only one to appear in the 2022 Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time list (at number 225).

This prestige owes much to what might be called Hu’s ‘museum’ or archaeological aesthetic. His films are often set in precise historical periods outlined by breathless opening narrations. The settings, costumes, and décor of the films carefully reproduce or use historical examples, or recreate motifs familiar from porcelain, textiles, furniture and, especially, painting. The opening sequence of Raining in the Mountain looks like a gallery of exquisite Chinese paintings, with its repertoire of forests, mountains, mists, grasses, lakes and so on. This ‘heritage’ quality, an attempt to recreate the atmosphere and mores of a past epoch through its material culture, aligns Hu’s cinema less with kung-fu than the high literature-based work of his US/Indian contemporaries Merchant-Ivory.

Such high culture gravity is misleading, a surface as deceptive as the identities assumed by the characters in Raining in the Mountain. Or, rather, it is but one vector put into play with others. The film’s narrative and cinematic structures are determined less by elite Chinese art than by comedy and crime serials. The sombre mood of the opening changes once the trio reach the monastery. White Fox and Gold Lock change from respectable whites to black costumes and begin their search for the sutra. The film employs dynamic, plunging perspectival shots against walls or down corridors, as the pair roam the complex. The noble music of the opening gives way to a percussive ‘Mickey Mouse’ score that seems to ape or propel the thieves’ movements. White Fox becomes a version of Irma Vep in Les Vampires (Louis Feuillade, 1915-1916), an almost superhuman arch-criminal, and the film’s subsequent concentration on the mechanics of plotting and counter-plotting – on crime cutting across crime and morality, and on a fixed site as the pliable locus for incessant movement and activity – owes much to the serials of Feuillade, Fritz Lang, and their successors.

Meanwhile, these plot mechanics owe their structure to comedy, especially farce and slapstick. Like farce, the characters are like puppets, their actions circumscribed by function and location. They adopt disguises, enter and leave rooms with split-second timing, and hide in recesses above and below ground when they are being pursued.  Like slapstick, the film focuses on characters’ acrobatic but vulnerable bodies. There is more than one pratfall, while the climactic chase of Wen and White Fox by proliferating groups of women echoes the dream-like finale of Buster Keaton’s Seven Chances (1925).  

Speaking of dreams, the setting of Raining in the Mountain is a ‘dream’ of medieval China, filmed in Korea. So much for the authenticity of prestige. Artists have often used recreations of the past in order to critique the present, especially in totalitarian societies where direct engagement was unsafe. Hu knew something about repressive polities. A leftist born in mainland China; he was stranded in Hong Kong when the borders were closed after the 1949 Communist revolution. Hong Kong itself was under the colonial control of the British Empire, and subject to various suspensions of human rights. Taiwan, where Hu made some of his masterpieces, was ruled by the brutally nationalist and anti-Communist Kuomintang regime.  

Without proposing Raining in the Mountain as a crude allegory of contemporary geopolitics, one can still claim that the film reflects the world in which it was made. After decades of brutal stasis, the late 1970s saw flux, uncertainty, and possible liberalisation in the region, with the death of Mao and Deng Xiaoping’s introduction of radical social and economic reforms in China; Britain’s preparations for the eventual handover of Hong Kong; and civil rights protests that would eventually lead to democracy in Taiwan. Raining in the Mountain catches something of this social and political uncertainty. It presents a world of apparent impregnability and stability that comes under constant attack from within. The ruling classes are exposed as corrupt. If, however, we are under any illusion that Hu proposes the victorious ‘wise’ Buddhists as benevolent, look again at the dispiriting final scene.  

White Fox is the youngest and only woman protagonist in the film. In the public world of men, she must remain silent in her circumscribed role as concubine to a controlling elder male. As White Fox she is in control, a freelancer with agency, one who slips between rigid social hierarchies as easily as she criss-crosses the monumental Buddhist complex by evading or manipulating the panoptic, patriarchal gaze. When she is finally caught, she is bound – the ultimate punishment for someone whose power depends on physical prowess – forced to wear the same uniform as everyone else, and paraded in front of the same monks who earlier letched over young female bathers in a ferocious sequence of religious satire reminiscent of the bishops-on-the-rocks sequence in L’Âge d’Or (Luis Buñuel, 1930). Her hair is shorn by ruling men, like that of alleged female collaborators in post-Liberation France. In Raining in the Mountain, Hu senses change in the air – and the film is an exhilarating manifestation of that air. But he is under no illusion that the more things change, the more they are likely to remain the same.

Kongshan Ling Yu/Raining in the Mountain (1979 Hong Kong/Taiwan 122 min)

Prod: Ling Chung, Kai-Mu Lo, Sau-Yee Wu Dir: King Hu Scr: King Hu Phot: Henry Chang Ed: King Hu Art Dir: King Hu Mus: Tai King Ng

Cast: Feng Hsu, Yueh Sun, Lin Tung, Feng Tien, Hui-Lou Chen, Ming-Tsai Wu

Endnotes