wuxia

Wuxia means martial heroes, and the stories predate cinema by centuries: serialized novels about swordsmen who live outside the law and answer to a private code, adapted for the screen for the first time in 1928. Chinese governments have tried to stop it more than once: Beijing banned martial arts novels as vulgar reading in 1949, and Taiwan banned wuxia works again in 1959. Each time the form carried on somewhere the ban did not reach, entering a golden age in Hong Kong through the 1960s and 1980s. Tsui Hark rebuilt it again in the 1980s and 1990s with cameras rigged to wires, sending fighters across rooftops in a single unbroken shot: Wong Fei-hung stands against English, French and American forces plundering Canton in Once Upon a Time in China, and a swordsmith's adopted son loses an arm hunting his father's killer and comes back to finish it in The Blade. Ang Lee carried the form worldwide in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, where two warriors chasing a stolen sword find a nobleman's teenage daughter waiting at the other end of it. The fighting is choreography, and the pleasure is watching people move as though weight were optional, in whichever decade and country happens to be making it this time.

Distinguish from Hong Kong New Wave is a broader movement that includes wuxia (especially Tsui Hark's work) but extends into crime, romance, comedy, and social drama. Not all Hong Kong action cinema is wuxia — John Woo's modern-set gun films are heroic bloodshed, not wuxia.