Hi everyone, and welcome to the screening of Dragon Inn. Before the film starts, we’d like to give a quick introduction about the film, the filmmaker, and why we chose this film.

Because contrary to the other films we’re screening this weekend, this is not a New Wave film. The Taiwan New Wave started around 1982, and this is a film from 1967.But to have a better understanding of just how innovative and rebellious the New Wave was, it might be interesting to look at what they were rebelling against.

Dragon Inn, the film of today, is an ambiguous choice in that respect. Dragon Inn is part of the genre that the New Wave was rebelling against, but on the other hand, this movie rises above that, and would prove very influential even to the makers of the New Wave.In the seventies, the decade before the New Wave, the cinematic landscape in Taiwan was twofold. On the one hand, you had ‘healthy realism’ movies, which were basically propaganda films by the government, sweet innocent tales about rural families working hard and being thankful to the government. On the other hand you had the immensly popular romantic and action films coming from Hong Kong. They had huge budgets and big stars. They were spoken in Mandarin, the language that the government tried to enforce an Taiwanese citizens, so they were tolerated by the government.

The director of today's film, King Hu, was such a big star Hong Kong director. King Hu, Chinese name Hu Jinquan, was born in 1932 in China, but moved to Hong Kong when he was 17. There he moved his way up in the filmbusiness, and established a new genre: wuxia films. ‘Wuxia’ literally means “martial arts and chivalry”, and was already a genre in literary fiction, but Hu brought it into the cinematic realm. He achieved this by blending Japanese Samurai traditions with Western editing techniques and Chinese philosophy and music. He made his films in the studios of the Shaw Brothers is Hong Kong, but in the sixties he decided to move to Taiwan, hoping he would enjoy more creative freedom, away from the studios. In 1966, he started filming Dragon Inn in Taiwan. Just for the fighting scenes alone, they trained for two and a half months. King Hu meticulously researched the Ming period, where the movie is set, and had control over every detail, from choreography to costume, to the design of the sets and editing.

When Dragon Inn was released 1967, it broke box office records and became an instant cult classic. There is a fantastic news reel clip on Criterion which shows the opining night of Dragon Inn in Taipei. There are literally thousands of people lining up, waiting for hours in the rain. In just 10 days, 100 000 fan letters were mailed to the production company. This for a variety of reasons.

First of all, the fighting scenes. The action scenes were, in that time, really state of the art. Apart from the incredible choreography of the actors, the editing follows the acting very smoothly. He also used some new techniques like trampolines for the very high jumps. In 1967, special effects were obviously not what they are today. But Hu uses a very interesting editing technique that doesn’t require special effects, but still makes you believe these fighters as faster than lightning. He uses empty, or half empty frames, when fighters jump and land. This has the effect that the camera, and thus the eye of the viewer, is too slow to register how fast these fighters are. You see them start to jump, and before you know it, they are already landed. The framing fails to keep up with him, implying that he’s just too elusive

As you will see, Hu keeps the story very simple. This allows him to focus not only on the action, but also on the nuances of mood and atmosphere - contrasts of interior and exterior, silence and sound.

The film was remade in 1992, as New Dragon Gate Inn, and again in 2011 as Flying Swords of Dragon Gate. But more importantly: it would be a huge inspiration for House of the Flying Daggers by Zhang Yimou. And it would prove a huge inspiration to two of the most important filmmakers from the later Taiwan New Wave: Tsai Ming-liang and Ang Lee. Tsai Ming- liang, whose rebels of the neon god you will see tonight, used the film as the decor for his Goodbye Dragon Inn, about the last day at a cinema that went bankrupt, and where Dragon Inn is screened as the very last picture, symbolizing a lost past, a Taiwan that is almost unrecognisable in today’s world. And Ang Lee, who also began his career in Taiwan, of course made his incredibly popular Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon as a hommage to this film, and the next film Hu would make, A Touch of Zen.

The narrative is explained very fast and chaotic in the beginning, as if they wanted to go to the action scenes as fast as they could. A voice-over in the prologue plunges us into a political backstory that’s almost too much to take in in a single viewing. So don’t worry if you don’t understand what’s going on, it will be clear somewhat later, and even then, the plot is not really the focus of the story so just lean back and enjoy these gorgeous action scenes.