When it comes to martial arts novels, the first thing that comes to everyone's mind must be Jin Yong and Mr. Gu Long, who represent the peak of Chinese martial arts novels.
After that, martial arts novels began to gradually decline, and were replaced by the blossoming of various novel settings in the online literature industry.
After the founding of the People's Republic of China, the development of martial arts films basically followed this path.
The director Zhang Che we are going to talk about today is one of the members of the glorious era of martial arts films (also known as kung fu films).
What does his story look like?
Zhang Che's directorial sensibilities are inseparable from the background of the times, and he was born in 1924 just in time for the turmoil in China.
His father was a warlord in Zhejiang, and his wealth was powerful.
The family's huge advantage in power and money gave Zhang Che more perspectives to understand what was really going on in China at that time.
Zhang Che served as a member of the school's cultural movement committee during his time in school, and he himself studied politics as a major.
As soon as he graduated from the National Central University in Chongqing, he was favored by the Kuomintang and became a cultural official.
In fact, there is an inevitability in the occurrence of this incident.
Zhang Che himself was a representative of the Zhejiang warlords and studied in Chongqing, the capital of the Kuomintang.
Its own excellent cultural mobilization ability is exactly what the Kuomintang itself needs.
During the anti-Japanese period, Zhang Che has been active on the battlefield of resistance against Japan as a cultural official.
He was selected by Zhang Daofan to do Shanghai drama culture management in Shanghai.
At that time, our party's revolutionary policy was "encircling the cities from the countryside and seizing power by armed force."
The countryside was our home turf, and the KMT's rule in economically developed cities such as Shanghai was more solid.
During his political career in Shanghai, Zhang Che taught himself theater acting and had a lot of exposure to film art, laying a solid foundation for his lifelong career in film shooting.
When the Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan, Zhang Che also went to Taiwan with him.
In 1947, Zhang Che became friends with Chiang Ching-kuo and rose all the way to the position of colonel.
Encouraged by Chiang Ching-kuo, he began to immerse himself in writing and writing scripts.
In 1949, Zhang Che's first film "Alishan Fengyun" was officially launched, and the script, arrangement, shooting, and director were all completed by Zhang Che.
The release of this movie is cleverly timed, and the story content is very profound.
It tells that during the Manchu War, the imperial court adopted a lot of radical measures in order to divide the Han and Fanbang.
An official named Wu Shen has been making local reconciliation and working behind the back of the imperial court.
At that time, the contradictions between the Han and the Fan were very deep and completely broken.
A young couple happened to belong to two different families, and everyone around them used this person to force them to separate with morality, and the two parted ways.
One of them, revisiting his hometown, had infinite emotions in his heart, recalled the bits and pieces of those years, and decided to go against the teachings of his ancestors, find love, and reunite with his lover.
After the release of this film, it achieved a good box office and officially opened the prelude to the Taiwan film industry.
So why is Zhang Che classified as the first generation of Hong Kong directors? From Taiwan to Hong Kong, what is going on?
At that time, Hong Kong's cultural industry was very developed, Taiwan itself was relatively backward, and many advanced shooting technologies were mastered by Hong Kong, trapped in a corner and unable to progress.
In 1957, Zhang Che gave up everything he had worked hard in Taiwan and went to Hong Kong, starting from the most basic screenwriter and began to re-learn film technology and script writing.
If movies and scripts can be popular, they must meet the real psychological needs of the audience and know what the audience wants to watch?
For the past few hundred years, under the leadership of the Qing Dynasty, we have been called the sick man of East Asia by other powers that have wantonly invaded us.
Looking at the Chinese celebrities who were relatively popular at that time, except for the "pen stick" intellectuals who learned Western technology and culture to make a fortune, they were the most beloved martial artists in our country.
For example, Ip Man, Huang Feihong, etc., people hope to break the humiliating title of the sick man of East Asia, and these martial artists with kung fu have become the best objects of pinnacle.
On this psychological basis, the stories serialized in Hong Kong newspapers at that time were all based on martial arts stories, and most of the protagonists had complex blood hatred and patriotic hatred.
The filming is based on the story, Zhang Che buried himself in writing and wrote for a full 9 years before he began to know the movie "Three Heroes of the Border City", which opened the prelude to Hong Kong kung fu films.
Later Chinese kung fu film directors were deeply influenced by him, and they all had his shooting style.
Some people describe Zhang Che's kung fu movies as very different from other kung fu movies.
He pays great attention to the character's own personality charm, plays chic and free, and shows the masculine charm and style.
In the praise of everyone, Zhang Che did not flutter, but chose to continue to dig into his shooting content.
Pioneered multiple genres of kung fu films.
In the stage of rapid economic development in Hong Kong, the local ecological environment is mixed, and all kinds of people gather in Hong Kong.
Among them, there are many attractive characters who are active on various stages.
Zhang Che himself has a very rich life experience and is able to better understand the psychological feelings behind these characters.
He himself was a warlord and was accustomed to all kinds of conflicts of interest and death.
During his tenure in the Kuomintang, he was close to the center of power, served as a big official, fell to the bottom, and experienced defeats.
He has long practiced his mentality very maturely.
When the laws of a place are not standardized, all kinds of capable people will appear with powerful force to occupy their own world.
Zhang Che found that the focus of everyone's conversation after tea and dinner was the power struggle in the underworld.
So he directed the filming of "Thirteen Taibao".
When filming in a village in Hong Kong, the filming was too bloody and violent, causing a collective boycott from the local villagers.
It is believed that this kind of filming content has seriously damaged the reputation and image of the village.
There was nothing wrong with the filming being a little hindered, and as soon as "Thirteen Taibao" was released, it became a topic of conversation on the streets and alleys at that time.
This is Zhang Che's revenge on the protagonist of a single kung fu movie in the past.
The transformation of the character Guang Zhengwei transforms the perspective of kung fu movies from normal people to normal resistance.
The shooting perspective of "Thirteen Taibao" transfers the scenes of violence in previous films, allowing the characters to live in a more realistic environment.
Revenge and hatred stories are not very accessible to ordinary people in real life, and ordinary people basically have no chance to contact the protagonist if he wants to get the opportunity to learn kung fu.
Unlike the above story entry point, the protagonists of the movie focus on the bad guys, who wander around the corners of ordinary people's daily lives.
Ordinary people's perceptions and impressions of their violent behavior are certainly better understood than pie-in-the-sky chance.
In any movie, as long as someone eats crabs first and creates new themes and ways of expression, it is equivalent to untying a shackle in people's minds.
Zhang Che represents such an image in the Hong Kong film industry.
Whether it is the moral insistence in traditional martial arts films, or the happiness and enmity in kung fu films, they have become the objects of people's observation and expression.
In addition to these two classic characters, Zhang Che also made great contributions to the liberation of female characters in Hong Kong films.
In 1968, Zhang Che filmed the movie "Golden Swallow", which told the story of the heroine Golden Swallow.
The golden swallow in the story is not an innocent little sister who worships the martial arts world, but a dashing and confident heroine with strong martial arts.
The two male protagonists in the play admire Jin Yanzi very much and are attracted by her wit and bravery.
The little junior brother is a typical villain, he has a deep blood feud, kills people everywhere, and frames the identity of the murderer to his senior sister Jin Yanzi, forcing the senior sister to show up.
The prototype of the big heroine in Hong Kong movies is embodied from the golden swallow.
In various later movies and TV series, the image of women has always appeared as atmospheric, ambitious, and intelligent.
This emancipation of women's consciousness was achieved by Zhang Che 56 years ago.
Today, many years later, the image of women in the mainland has completely regressed, and the heroine has become an empty word shouted in the slogan.
The directors want to rub the traffic of the big heroine, but they can't recognize the true characteristics of the big heroine.
Blindly stuff all kinds of gold fingers and men to the heroine, and help the heroine solve various dilemmas in life.
In recent years, there is an out-of-the-circle line in Hong Kong TV dramas: "Go home and have children, the workplace is not for you." "The value of women's work is most profoundly demonstrated.
If you can't gain a firm foothold in the workplace, you can only take a back seat and go back to be a person who revolves around your husband and children, and the reaction behind it is disdain for your wife.
Zhang Che's advanced filmmaking art also has times when he can't keep up with the times.
In the early 60s, Jin Yong's martial arts novels were born, squeezing out the market share of past martial arts novel authors.
The beautiful fantasy and various magical martial arts cheats have become the focus of public discussion.
Zhang Che's kung fu films are a thing of the past, and he is no longer as energetic as he used to be, but he is still trying to reform.
He bought the copyright of Jin Yong's martial arts novels and filmed several movies, but unfortunately the market response was not good.
Zhang Che's failed experience in filming Jin Yong's martial arts gave later generations of adaptation directors a failed attempt, and other directors began to develop their own special advantages after learning Zhang Che's lesson.
Zhang Che's era has passed, and he is going to decline at the same time.
His disciples inherited his film spirit and shooting experience, and cultivated the next generation of new forces for the development of Chinese films.