The 36th Chamber of Shaolin · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man climbs a flight of stone steps carrying two full jars of water, one in each hand, arms held out level from his sides. Under each arm, blade up, a knife. Drop an elbow and it cuts you. Nobody explains this. Nobody comments on it. He climbs, he fails, he climbs again.

That is the middle hour of The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, and it is also, though Lau Kar-leung had no reason to put it that way, a piece of film theory acted out with props.

Deleuze opens his two books on cinema with Bergson, and with a complaint. Bergson said film cheats: it chops movement into equidistant, interchangeable snapshots, any old instant rather than the significant one, then runs them past a lamp and calls the result life. Deleuze names that the any-instant-whatever and turns the complaint into the compliment. Older arts worked with privileged instants, the pose, the tableau, the shape a body makes at the peak of an action. Cinema gave that up. It samples motion mechanically, at the level of the ordinary instant, and so it delivers movement itself instead of a reconstruction of it.

Now watch what the chambers do. Weighted arms rung against a bell. A corridor of swinging sandbags. Floating logs. Jars and knives. Candle flames used to train the eye. Each apparatus pulls one component out of a whole gesture and makes it repeatable, equidistant and dumb. A drill has no climax. It has instants, and they are all the same instant. Then the film puts the pieces back, and Lau's camera backs off, squares up, holds the full figure with the feet in frame, and stays there through six or eight exchanges. What you are looking at now is a form: stances, completed shapes, the privileged instant restored on the far side of its own decomposition. The plot of this film is that passage. Sampling into pose. It is not a metaphor for how cinema works. It is the same operation, run by a body instead of a projector.

Bergson's other idea is the one Deleuze builds the whole movement-image on. A living thing is a centre of indetermination, a gap between the movement it receives and the movement it gives back. Perception is what fills the gap, and the wider the gap the more responses become available. Deleuze splits that interval into three images: perception, affection, action. San Te's curriculum walks through them in order. Candles isolate the eye. The arms and the knives train what a body can hold without spending it, which is precisely the affection-image, a force registered and not yet discharged. The logs and the sandbags train the response. The chambers are not building strength. They are widening an interval.

There is a trap here worth naming, because it catches people who have read a little Deleuze. Half this film is training. The plot stops for an hour. That smells like the time-image: the character who can only watch, action gone slack, time exposed because nothing can be done with it. It is the opposite. In the postwar cinema Deleuze calls the time-image, the sensory-motor link snaps and time is what is left lying around. Here nothing is left over. The middle hour is that link being built in front of you, weld by weld. I would argue this is the most thorough movement-image ever filmed. Other films use the circuit. This one manufactures it while you watch.

Around the middle, the frame stays entirely classical. Deleuze's large form of the action-image: a global situation bears down on a man until an act transforms it. The Qing occupation is the encompasser, and Lau keeps it legible in colour, hard blues and blacks for the Manchu court, dust and earth for Guangdong, saffron against grey stone for the temple. Lo Lieh's General Tien Ta supplies the binomial, force against force, played with a still bureaucratic malice that keeps the antagonism structural rather than personal. And the training is the imprint, Deleuze's word for the bond in which a milieu and a character stamp each other. The man has to be remade by the temple before he can touch the world. Most revenge films assert that. This one itemizes it.

Deleuze reserves his cinema of the body for a much slower, later cinema, but the description fits: the body as what carries duration, attitudes and postures rather than deeds. Gordon Liu begins loose, quick and sloppy and ends compact. The acting is in the carriage. That carriage is social, which is Deleuze's gest, the posture that exposes a relation. You can read a man's rank in this film from his walk before he opens his mouth.

Bazin argued that when two things have to be true in the same space, cutting between them is a cheat. Lau accepts that contract without arguing about it. Chest-height camera, middle distance, feet in frame, an anamorphic 2.35 wide enough to hold two whole bodies and their weapons at once. The claim being made is that this is actually being done, and only the unbroken wide take can make it. It also needs the studio look Lau inherited: Nishimoto Tadashi's hard-keyed frontal light on painted flats, codified at Shaw on The Magnificent Concubine (1962), which is why the training halls read as legible stages rather than dramatic spaces. You can see the machinery. That is the point.

He grew up inside the convention. His father performed in the Cantonese Wong Fei-hung serials from 1949, where the rule was already fixed: shoot a real Hung Gar set wide and whole and let the correctness of the form carry the scene. The One-Armed Swordsman (1967) gave him the spine, an atrocity, a withdrawal, solitary reconstruction from a fragmentary manual, a deferred return. The Chinese Boxer (1970) invented the conditioning montage as a narrative unit, hands driven into hot sand and iron filings. Five Shaolin Masters (1974), which Lau choreographed himself, broke preparation into one skill per disciple. Shaolin Temple (1976) rendered the monastery as a floor plan, one drill and one instructor per room. Lau's own invention was to number it. The floor plan becomes a counting system, the montage becomes the architecture, and the sequence that used to skip the boring part becomes the film. The cut between chambers does the work of months, and only a selection of the thirty-five is shown, the pattern trusted to imply the rest. That is organic montage in Deleuze's sense, growth by accumulation, each unit a small qualitative jump on the one before.

1978 was the year Golden Harvest sent out Snake in the Eagle's Shadow and Drunken Master and swung the genre toward comedy. Shaw's answer, through Lau, was rigor, and the structural consequence outlived the rivalry. After this film, skill is no longer the ellipsis between the loss and the payback. Skill is the subject and the payback is an epilogue. The finale here is quick, almost brusque. The real climax is an argument about admissions: San Te pressing to open the temple's teaching to laymen, founding the thirty-sixth chamber, the one that is not inside the building.

He takes the last fight with a three-section staff improvised on screen, which happens to be Lau Kar-leung's own signature southern weapon. Authorship handed to the character. It carries the film's whole argument in one object, a curriculum whose product is invention rather than repetition.

Deleuze says modern political cinema begins when a people is missing and has to be invented. This film sits on the other side of that line, and the contrast is clarifying. Made in a factory at Clearwater Bay, dubbed into Mandarin for audiences across Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia, it assumes its people and proposes to train them. The chambers are dialogue-free, self-explaining, kinetic. They teach the audience exactly as they teach San Te.

Watch it again and watch the camera's manners. It never comes closer than it has to. It gives you the whole body because the whole body is the evidence, and it lets you count. The question the film builds an hour of screen time to ask is what it actually costs to earn a body that can do something. Then it asks the harder one. Once you have it, who do you give it to?