Film Descriptions
Intimate Confession of a Chinese Courtesan
Hong Kong (1972), 35mm, 90 minutes, Mandarin with English subtitles
Director: Chu Yuan (Chor Yuen)
Cast: He Lili (Lily Ho), Yue Hua, Bei Di, Dong Lin, Wang Zhongshan
Producer: Runme Shaw
Martial Arts Director: Xu Erniu
Showtime: 4/17 at 7pm at Metro State Auditorium
Chu Yuan (Chor Yuen) is often credited with injecting surrealism and mystery into the Mandarin martial arts film of the 1970s; he had excelled in melodramas, comedies and spy thriller spoofs in his prior career in the Cantonese cinema of the 1960s. Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan casts in bold relief Chu's perceptive grasp of generic conventions. This remarkable, scabrous film holds up the "perverse" to such notional martial arts chestnuts as loyalty, sacrifice, revenge, the relationship between master and disciple, and the exaltation of physicality (awe-inspiring feats of bodily agility and exertion). It's an audacious and inspired flip, one that gives Confessions its narrative jolt and emotional potency, and propels the film into harder-boiled territory than the mere trafficking in gauzy, soft-core titillation (which the film does too).
 Imagine relocating the martial arts school-site of many a scene of tortuous training of would-be warriors-to a brothel, and transposing the martial arts master to the brothel's madam and the martial arts disciple to a prostitute (who must be forcibly drilled in the sexual arts of servicing men). Imagine also that the madam is a lesbian who abducts virgins to work in her brothel; that she both exploits and is genuinely in love with her protegée; and that the protegee only fakes subservience while secretly seeking bloody revenge against all who have wronged her, no matter the cost. The ambience is baroque atmospherics spiced with a whiff of terror. The frame is that of a murder mystery, with the requisite police investigation. The slain and dismembered are almost all men. Who wins or loses in love and the martial arts is sealed with a dying kiss.
-Cheng-Sim Lim
Chu Yuan (Chor Yuen)
Chu Yuan started in the mid-1950s as a writer of romantic melodramas before establishing himself in the 1960s as a major director in the Cantonese film industry. Versatile and keen to experiment, Chu moved easily between traditional melodramas (Remorse, 1965), thriller-parodies (The Black Rose, 1965) and juvenile dramas (The Joys and Sorrows of Youth, 1969). He gained a reputation for highly stylized compositions and radical editing techniques. In the 1970s, he directed three of the most innovative Mandarin martial arts films of the time: Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan (1972), The Magic Blade (1976) and Killer Clans (1976). The latter two films are among the highlights of the 21 adaptations Chu has made of Gu Long's martial arts fiction. At the same time, he initiated a revival of Cantonese cinema with the smash hit, The House of 72 Tenants (1973), a film that significantly influenced the Hong Kong New Wave directors who emerged at the end of the decade.
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