Born in Vietnam in 1951 Tsui Hark After moved to Hong Kong in 1977 after spending a number of years in Canada and the USA. Two years later his debut film The Butterfly Murders (1979) launching a career that would see him labelled as the 'Hong Kong Spielberg'. He innovated a new style for a new decade. He brought rhythmic, fast editing and special effects to rival Hollywood, revived the flagging traditional swordplay genre and produced behind some of the most notable and influential films from the eighties to the present, notably the genre shaping A Better Tomorrow (1986) as producer and, as director the seminal Zu: Warriors From The Magic Mountain (1983) and Once Upon A Time In China.
His film company Film Workshop gives him a tight reign on his productions, which, like Spielberg evoke an other worldliness and a sense of a romanticised past, a yearning for simpler days and classic Hollywood mould anti-heroes. He also exhibits Spielberg’s sadism and love of the loner. Hark is constantly creating, his career has shown more ups and downs than virtually any other film maker something reflected in the sheer bulk and diversity of the films that bare his name as director or producer, a name that can sell a film as strongly as any actor.
The Story of The Butterfly Murders
Tsui Harks debut The Butterfly Murders is a fast paced murder-thriller-swordplay-whodunnit set in the Martial World and partly narrated by diarist and poet Fong Hongye. Following thirty years of the Quiet Era our hero, free of the need to be adept in the martial arts, is a chronologist of some renown. A motley band of disparate factions are summoned to Castle Shen to investigate mysterious goings on and the disappearance of it's populous, events that may be connected to the murder of a local printer and the eight missing pages of Fong’s diaries, pages that may or may not be genuine. Events appear to be connected to the brutal murder by butterflies of the previous Lord Shen ten years previously. On arrival at Castle Shen they find the place deserted, all bar the body of their scout, a renowned martial artist, savaged by butterflies. And then things get really confusing…
Examining The Butterfly Murders
The Butterfly Murders introduces many themes and plot devices that recur later in Tsui Harks career. The use of editing is at once disorientating and breathtaking, he chooses to cut swiftly from extreme low angles to high and then to close-ups, constantly keeping the viewer off-guard in a style reminiscent of early Goddard. The 360 degree rule is violated to maintain unease, while the ferocity and pace of the action is maintained by impressionistic slight of hand. The convoluted story line is remarkably straight forward in it's drive but it is woven together via a labyrinth of cross plots, mysteries, historic events and mythologizing as well as a bewildering number of tribes, clans and armies all fighting one another.
Myth and Reality in The Butterfly Murders
The Butterfly Murders explains the inexplicable in a preposterous and yet wholly believable manner, the only time we view diegetically impossible events is in explanatory scenes embellished by the teller. Myth it seems, is a hairs breadth from reality.
At times exasperating, at times breathtaking The Butterfly Murders is a fascinating debut from one of Hong Kong’s most revered and prolific directors.
