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Admittedly, the statement might sound Luddite-ish in rubrics of HDTV, Blu-Ray, and Dolby 23:1 surround sound systems, but there is something about watching a movie where you can see the impact of time on each frame that is exceptionally refreshing. A movie that has not been remastered, double-dipped, or has received any significant amount of studio spit and polish.
There are many unreleased films that didn’t get such a treatment and they deserve much better. But some films may actually benefit from being seen in such a tattered, worn down state.
While my wife had gone to a performance of Cats with the girls, I thought I would spend the evening watching an old kung fu movie, ‘The Secret Rivals,’ which I had not seen in years. It certainly is a film that is quite similar to all of the other kung fu films from this era. All the shrieks and plot cliches – every argument, no matter how trivial, is resolved with a duel of honor (which is best done in the nearest temple). The extent of villainy can be instantly identified by the whiteness and length of a person’s facial hair.
The film is utterly and unbearably terrible with acting that is lacking in almost every manner imaginable and camerawork that makes any family Christmas videos appear as fine as Kurosawa. The editing of this movie seems to have been done with a pair of garden shears and the soundtrack cannot decide if it is meant for an epic martial arts movie, a patriotic salute or the evening news.
Let’s not even get into the subtitles, that are set too far up on the Mei Ah release, meaning you miss around a quarter of the dialog, which makes piecing together the plot – thin as it is – a tad bit more difficult.
Even the martial arts is rather underwhelming, considering the numerous top league martial artists, among them notable, Jang Lee Hwang as the villain Silver Fox (who is incidentally the most hirsute, and also the whitest.) You would not know that both Cory Yuen (who has been involved in many of Jet Li’s best films) and Yuen Biao (who is, uh, Yuen Biao) were assistant action choreographers.
There are a few interesting moments – the last duel between the two titular rivals and the evil Silver Fox certainly has some acrobatic fancy (and enormous kicking), as do some of the obligatory training session montage bits. But there is just a bit too much obvious homage to Bruce Lee (any combat with nunchaku, various character stances, and controlled facial tics).
(I suppose that doesn’t all that surprising. The Secret Rivals is published in 1976 just a few years after Lee exploded on the scene with movies like Enter The Dragon and The Chinese Connection, and after that, he cast a long shadow on the whole martial arts film industry.)
But as I watched the movie for the second time in years, I puzzled less over the film’s obvious shortcomings, and enchanted more by the film’s aesthetic. And when I say “look,” I do not mean the filming or the filming execution and the landscaping (which were simply massacred in the cropped frames) or the film’s mise en scene (was there any?).
What I mean is the physical ‘look’ of the movie; the blatant wear and tear of the film stock, all its imperfections captured in magnifiscent detail by the DVD; the way the color levels of the film flutter up and down (a scene may be drunk in red or blue and the next is sober); the ridiculous cropping and framing; and and so forth.
Be it tape hiss for sound, or the visual counterpart of video hiss, the effect is identical. The irritating screeching sound made by blank tapes, which makes them unlistenable, can nevertheless be incorporated into otherworldly music with the right skill set. This seamlessly transfers us to the level above reality, granting the music a hyper-reality in turn. This makes it feel as if the listener is directly tuned into the part of a dream where all art emerges from. Not only does the song becomes increasingly intense, it becomes intense, emotional, nostalgic and more fragmented at the surface level.
This heavily takes place in movies as well where the desire to alienate art and characters in a way leads directors to utilize saturation, distortion and other effects until the film stock blurs the line between beauty and chaos. For instance, an appealing chaos can be created by subjecting the film through a chemical treatment that makes the film stock colors pop while washing them out at the same time.
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