A Touch of Zen
A Touch of Zen is a two-part wuxia film written, co-edited and directed by King Hu, originally released in 1970 and 1971. Its screenplay is based on a classic Chinese story "Xianü" in the book Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio by Pu Songling. The film is set in the Ming dynasty under the dominance of eunuchs and explores a variety of themes including the transcendence of dichotomies, Zen Buddhism, feminism, conservative female roles, and the ghost story.
The film was produced in Taiwan and funded by the Union Film Company. Because the director Hu was a filmmaker in the Shaw Brothers Studio before moving to Taiwan, the emergence of the film established the international visibility of the Hong Kong New Wave. At the 1975 Cannes Film Festival, the film was nominated for the Palme d'Or and won the Technical Grand Prize award, the second-ever Chinese-language film to win an award at the festival.
Although filming began in 1968, A Touch of Zen was not fully completed until 1971. The original Taiwanese release was in two parts in 1970 and 1971 with the bamboo forest sequence that concludes Part 1 reprised at the beginning of Part 2; this version has a combined runtime of 200 minutes. In November 1971, both parts of the film were combined into one for the Hong Kong market with a runtime of 187 minutes.
A 4K restoration project was initiated in 2014, hosted by the male lead Shih Chun and funded by the female lead Hsu Feng. The restored version, with a total runtime of 180 minutes, was re-screened in the "Cannes Classics" section at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.
Plot
In a remote mountain village in Ming China, Gu Sheng-zhai is a well-meaning but unambitious scholar and painter, with a tendency towards being clumsy and ineffectual. A stranger, Ouyang Nian, arrives in town and agrees to have his portrait painted by Gu, but his real objective is to bring a female fugitive back to the city for execution on behalf of the East Chamber guards. The fugitive, Yang Hui-zhen, is befriended by Gu, and together they plot against the corrupt Eunuch Wei who wants to eradicate all trace of her family after her father's attempt to warn the Emperor of the Eunuch's corruption. His daughter fled, with generals Shi and Lu. The saintly and powerful Chan Buddhist Abbot Hui Yuan intervenes to protect them, and they spend two years at his monastery where he teaches them self defence.Ouyang, Yang and her friends are all superior warriors. Ouyang has a special flexible sword that bends and that he can wear within his belt, making him seem unarmed.
Gu has sex with Yang. Upon doing so, he is no longer the naïve bumbling innocent, but instead becomes confident and assertive, and when Yang's plight is revealed, he insists on being part of it – and even comes up with a fiendish "Ghost Trap" for the East Chamber guards. Ouyang is killed in a fight in a bamboo forest, and they use his signature seal to lure the East Chamber guards into the trap. This is a plan to use a supposedly haunted site to play tricks on the guards to make them believe they are prey to the undead. General Lu dies in the "Ghost Trap" battle.
In the aftermath, Gu walks through the carnage laughing at the ingenuity of his plan until the true cost of human life dawns upon him. He sees Abbot Hui and his followers arrive to help bury the dead.
After the battle, Gu is unable to find Yang, who he is told has left him and does not want him to follow her. He tracks her down at the monastery of Abbot Hui, where she has given birth to a child by Gu and become a nun. She tells Gu that their destiny together has ended and gives Gu their child. Later, when Gu and the child are tracked down by Xu Xian-Chen, the evil commander of Eunuch Wei's army, Yang and General Shi come to Gu's rescue. Abbot Hui and four of his monks also arrive to fight Xu. After Xu fakes repentance in order to surprise attack Abbot Hui, a battle begins in which Xu is killed and Yang, Shi, and Abbot Hui are all badly injured.
The film ends with the injured Yang staggering toward a silhouetted figure, presumably Abbot Hui, seen meditating with the setting sun forming a halo around his head, an image suggesting the Buddha and enlightenment.
Cast
Notable stunt actors who appeared in the film included Sammo Hung, Jackie Chan, Lam Ching-ying and Chan Wui-ngai.Production
Adaptation
King Hu was heavily inspired by the original story of "Xia Nü"; however, the anthology was written by Pu Songling who was a poor and unaccomplished scholar and his literature frequently depicted his bitterness due to failing imperial examinations. As a result, the screenplay took King Hu six months to write. 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'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-errantry and restore the country from the corrupted dominance of the eunuchs.Development
In his book on the film, Stephen Teo suggests that the film has roots in Hong Kong cinema, noting the number of both Taiwanese and Hong Kong actors and crew members. 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".Filming
A Touch of Zen was shot in Taiwan and was funded by Taiwanese production company Union Film Company. Principal photography took just over three years, due to Hu's perfectionist approach.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 for the film. 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. Hu's commitment to the bamboo forest duel is further reflected in its formal construction, as the bamboo duel has been described as "a phenomenology of Zen Buddhism in cinematic terms," where rapid, disjunctive edits of bamboo, swords, and human forms are intercut with contemplative pauses.
King Hu wanted the film to have entirely authentic sets, props, and costumes, so he could achieve the supernatural theme. He played a large role in set design because the set designers did not completely understand his vision. In addition to this challenge, many scenes were shot out of sequence because the season in the script did not align with the current season when filming. Hu also did not have enough funding to thoroughly execute his vision and was forced by the publishing house to split A Touch of Zen into two parts after incurring high filming costs.
Cinematography and editing
King Hu adopted the classic techniques of montage, including eye-line matches and shot-reverse-shot. He also used jump cuts to create speed of motion in the action effects and applied blocked shots as his signature on evacuating the space before actions take place. Hu also used the "glimpsing effect" to provide a new perspective for audiences. The "glimpsing effect" allows the audience to see the perspective of Gu.Music and sound design
The film's soundscape, crafted by Wu Da‑jiang and Lo Ming‑tao, integrates traditional Beijing–opera percussion with ambient silence, enhancing the spiritual mood and dramatic tension. In his essay, Brian Eggert emphasizes that "percussive rhythms give dancelike physicality to swordfights, while deep reverberating strings accompany the Zen monk characters," creating a musical structure that parallels Hu's cinematic editing rhythms. Eggert notes this alignment of sound and movement reflects Hu's ambition to "utilize film language" by treating combat as visual music.Themes
Transcendence of dichotomies
The function of knight-errantry alludes to civic values and martial conducts in the discourse, arising reflections of experiences and justice beyond dichotomies between wen and wu, good and evil. Hu develops an individual perspective of what nation is and transcends the limited dialectics of a totalitarian regime versus a more benevolent government.Zen Buddhism
The theme of Buddhism is in opposition to Confucianism and offers the ideas of transcendence and redemption. 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. 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.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. In Rayns' final analysis, "A Touch of Zen is a sentient art object that comes from the singular mind of King Hu. As an audience, we appreciate the film because we engage with it as an object rather than emptying our minds of the object for Zen contemplation or meditation. A Touch of Zen is a masterful work and as such, it is unforgettable. Indeed, if Zen is to be understood as an experience that is both conscious and unconscious, the enigma inherent in A Touch of Zen can only be resolved by exposing oneself to the film more than once, followed perhaps by increased meditation. Such is the artistic irony of the work that, when we come out of the cinema, its final images of abstract conceits of truth and existence, reality and illusion, mind and matter, remain etched in the mind — and at the moment that we watched these images, they gave us the possibility of a Zen transcendental experience through cinema."
Hu himself was not Buddhist, writing in screening notes for the film "I don’t have the least intention of being didactic or evangelical in my approach to this matter. All I am interested in is presenting the flavor of a particular experience."
Feminism and conservative womanhood
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. This concept of feminism involves a split, between biological and psychic drives on the one hand and the law of the patriarchy on the other. Though Yang's actions are dependent on the law and invariably submit to it, her actions are also a sign of her discipline and courage in the execution of her feminist ideals.The ghost story
King Hu's interests in a Chinese genre shengguai, the haunted house as the setting, and death traps suggest Gu's allies are supernatural ghosts. The film adopts the motifs of "Liaozhai gothic", including the goldenrod alarm system that alerts the unexpected visitors in the haunted house.Scholarship and beauty
The romantic relationships between the scholar, Gu, and the pretty female knight-errant, Yang, refer to the classic theme in Chinese literature of scholar and beauty Caizijiaren.Reception
Box office
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. 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. The film grossed HK$678,320.9 in Hong Kong. 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.Review and criticism
Gina Marchetti considers that the film's wuxia genre 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."For the Criterion Collection author David Bordwell writes, "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."
Writing for the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Héctor Rodríguez notes, "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."
In his book, King Hu's A Touch of Zen, Stephen Teo writes 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."
In another journal, Teo builds upon this interpretation, arguing that the film's stylized violence is not designed for spectacle, but instead acts as a "mythical expression through which the legitimacy of power and authority is questioned". Specifically, he interprets Hui Yuan's final gesture, defeating Xu with a touch before transforming into Buddha, as "an exhortation to transcend history of violence", thus offering a philosophical and spiritual critique of mortal conflict.
In recent decades, A Touch of Zen has received renewed scholarly attention from East Asia. David Bordwell has praised its synthesis of opera choreography with cinematic form, stating that "no filmmaker has been more distinctive and exhilarating than King Hu" in adapting stylized movement into film form. Furthermore, the film is discussed as a landmark in Taiwan's art‑cinema movement, embodying national identity, classical aesthetics, and political resonance within the Mandarin‑language film industry.
Accolades
The film was awarded the Technical Grand Prize and nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival. 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.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. 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. The voters included film scholars, festival programmers, film directors, actors and producers to vote for the 100 Greatest Chinese-Language Films. A Touch of Zen was listed at 15th place on the list.
In 2021, The Daily Star ranked A Touch of Zen at 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".
Home media
A Touch of Zen was released on DVD for the North American market on 10 December 2002, by Tai Seng Entertainment, with only King Hu's biography and filmography as extras. The film was also released on PAL DVD for the British market on 28 July 2003, by Optimum Releasing, as well as for the German market on 10 April 2008, by KSM GmbH as part of their "King Hu Collection". The film was released on PAL DVD in France on 1 September 2004, as simply Touch of Zen by Films sans Frontières, which has both French and English subtitles.After the film's 4K restoration in 2015, the film's first Blu-ray release was by Eureka Entertainment for the Masters of Cinema series, released on 25 January 2016, for the British market, which also includes a DVD edition of the film. Both editions include a select scene commentary by critic Tony Rayns, the film's theatrical trailer, and newly translated English subtitles, as well as a 36-page booklet which features director King Hu's statement from the 1975 Cannes Film Festival, a 1975 interview with the director by Rayns, the short story the film was based on, eight characteristics of "the swordswoman" in King Hu's films, and archival images. A limited-edition version of the Blu-ray and DVD adds a 2012 documentary about King Hu and a new essay by filmmaker David Cairns.
On 19 July 2016, American home video company The Criterion Collection released the film on Blu-ray and DVD using the same 4K restoration also used by the Masters of Cinema release. Both the Blu-ray and DVD include the 2012 documentary about King Hu, new interviews with the actors Hsu Feng and Shih Chun, filmmaker Ang Lee, and film scholar Tony Rayns, the theatrical 4K re-release trailer, and newly translated English subtitles, as well as a leaflet containing a new essay by film critic and theorist David Bordwell and King Hu's notes from the 1975 Cannes Film Festival. The new Blu-ray and DVD cover and interior poster was illustrated by Greg Ruth and designed by Eric Skillman.