Legend of the Mountain

Ho is a scholar who has failed the examinations and takes work to get by: he will copy out a sutra written to release the souls of the dead. To do it in quiet he goes to a remote fort. There he is married to one woman, meets another, and who in the fort is human becomes unclear. The text he is copying has a power and everyone is after it. King Hu directs. The source is a ghost story from eleventh century Chinese literature. Legend of the Mountain and Raining in the Mountain were shot in the same period in South Korea with the same crew, and the two are spoken of together. The method is to build fear through rhythm rather than image. Drums are used in the fights and the conflict proceeds like a ritual; the timing King Hu took from Peking opera is at its clearest here. The landscape is inside the narrative. The mist, the mountain, the lake and the empty fort are real locations, and for long stretches the film consists only of walking. It runs close to three hours and the original version was unavailable for a long time; a restored print circulated later. The narrative gives no information. Who is a ghost, who wants what and the order of events are all deliberately left uncertain. Who it is for: viewers who like King Hu and Chinese ghost narratives. Who it is not for: it is very long, the pace is extremely slow, and the plot is hard to follow.