A Touch of Zen

There is no anniversary worth forcing onto 12 November. What there is: the start of winter just passed (7 November 2026 in the Chinese calendar), short days and long nights, which suits a long film willing to slow down. A Touch of Zen fills a conspicuous hole in the archive. Of the 88 films already here there are samurai, westerns, film noir, musicals, but no wuxia at all, and wuxia is the most distinctive contribution Chinese-language cinema has made to world genre film. It also stretches the 1970s from eleven entries, and it brings a rhythm found nowhere else in the collection: King Hu refuses to hurry, spending a full hour letting a scholar grow suspicious inside a ruined country manor.

明朝，宦官魏忠贤把持朝政。偏僻山村的一座废宅里，穷书生顾省斋靠卖画糊口，母亲日日催他赴考，他却只肯在镇上闲晃。某日，一个自称欧阳年的外乡人上门求画，出手阔绰，问东问西；紧接着，一位老妇带着女儿搬进隔壁，那女儿沉默寡言，夜里却有陌生人翻墙进出。顾省斋以为自己撞上了鬼。他猜的方向大体不错，只是猜错了鬼是谁。

In 1975 it won the Technical Grand Prize at the 28th Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Palme d'Or, making it the second Chinese-language film ever to win at Cannes and the first wuxia film to win at a major international festival. Adapted from Pu Songling's short tale of the same name in Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, it expands a story of barely a thousand characters into a three-hour epic: the first half is suspicion and character, the second is pursuit and combat. The Hong Kong Film Awards Association placed it ninth on its list of the 100 best Chinese-language films, and the 2011 Golden Horse exhibition of the 100 greatest Chinese-language films put it fifteenth. Writing for Criterion, David Bordwell noted that the story is simple but the treatment complex, that no Shaw Brothers film would delay basic exposition so cunningly or stage a hero's swordfight from a minor character's point of view; Tony Rayns called it a sentient work of art from King Hu's singular mind.