Non-action in action: martial arts, landscape and religious concepts in Chinese film
Prof. Joachim Gentz, University of Edinburgh
Arts and religious concepts have often been associated in Chinese tradition. In the realm of martial arts Buddhists often play a double role. On the one hand they appear as experts who, through special spiritual exercises, develop extraordinary worldly fighting techniques and skills, which are far superior to those of average fighters. On the other hand they are depicted as mysterious personalities who, through their way of life, have no definite identities; they live and practice in remote places and in landscapes in which superhuman forces dwell. Because they do not participate in social life, live outside the social order and follow own precepts and laws they are often associated with subversive realms. Through recourse to the history of Buddhism, its role in Chinese society, its conflict with Confucian and Daoist values and the pointing out of filmic uses of a specific Buddhist aesthetics the talk will explain how the traditional role of the Buddhist came to fit in the role of the literary archetype of the xia-fighter in the 20th century. Connected to the figure of the Buddhist fighter is the specific jianghu (lakes and rivers)-landscape which was invented in the 1920s and represents, like the Buddhist, an other-worldly and self-referential in-between realm, which provides a perfect aesthetic frame for the depiction of the abstract fight between good and evil.
