Dragon Inn
A director to rank alongside the greats, Hu’s influence was far-reaching, and he was as in command of the exquisite compositions of his widescreen vistas as the Hawksian group dynamics of his Inn trilogy’s confined spaces.
Yet in keeping with his adoration for the Beijing Opera, Hu’s is a cinema of movement. One could discuss the evolution of the wuxia genre purely in terms of its approach to film editing, and critic David Bordwell has written brilliantly on Hu’s pioneering technique. Unifying the historical, cultural and philosophical preoccupations of wuxia’s literary antecedents with a progressive, slyly allegorical modernism, Hu’s cinema proves that genre and great art needn’t be mutually exclusive.