Hello, my name's Justin the Clue, and I'm here today with Will Sloan, and you're listening to

the Important Cinema Club. And this week, we're talking about the master of martial arts

King Who. That's right. International Month begins with the director who elevated the martial

arts film to an art form. And of course we're talking about this. Hong Kong. Wait, no.

Taiwanese. No, no, no. That's not true. Chinese filmmaker. By the way, I thought you were

going to leap in and say that you hated the framing of a director who elevated the martial arts film to an art

for that condescending framing that you know framing is a hundred percent true and we'll talk about

it especially in his earlier films that he set down a template that people would then build upon

and it basically defines what we know as martial arts cinema today.

I mean, every really ambitious Wusha film, and Wusha means flying swordsmen, and I believe

the direct translation of Wusha is martial heroes.

We associate that with, you know, swordsmen flying around.

Yep.

It all comes from like written text.

There's a lot of famous Wusha authors that kind of defined it like

gulong. Centuries of Chinese literature. Every really ambitious Chinese Wusha film is directly indebted to King Hu's

films from Wancour Wise Ashes of Time to Hoshoshan's The Assassin to Angli's Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, which has a

forest action scene that will be very familiar to anyone who has seen A Touch of Zen, to many

less well-known films. It all basically starts with 1966's Come Drink With Me. A case could be made

for King Who is the single most consequential Chinese film director. And a lot of that is

that he created this style that was both deeply informed by tradition and the whole history of

Chinese art and literature, but also very boldly modern and innovative and mid-1960s. And I want to

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