Discovering Wuxia
Unveiling Virtue: Exploring the Moral Compass of Wuxia Pian Cinema
The cinematic tradition of Wuxia Pian, a genre of Chinese fiction centered on martial codes of retributive justice and righteousness, began in the silent era of the 1920s as adaptations of existing Chinese literature. Wuxia Pian is rooted in Chinese mythology that glamorizes the figure of the roaming knight-errant obligated to rectify corruption and enact retribution in the face of injustice, thematically congruent to the folkloric stories of American cowboys on the frontier or Japanese ronin in jidaigeki films. Like Western and Samurai cinema, Wuxia Pian can be understood as a set of aesthetic and structural elements that are capable of being deconstructed and reassembled to accommodate an ever-shifting cultural landscape and new ideologies within the collective consciousness.
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