The 36th Chamber of Shaolin

A martial arts film set in the Qing period. Liu Yude is a student. His teacher is secretly helping the resistance and the students carry messages. The raid comes. The school is stormed, the teacher and Yude's father are killed, and Yude escapes wounded. He reaches the Shaolin monastery. He is kept waiting at the gate for months and is finally let in. There are thirty-five chambers in the monastery. Each is a separate training and you cannot move up without passing them all. From there the film is almost entirely training. Carrying water, holding the arms fixed, following with the eyes, balance, the strength of the wrist, and an incense stick. What the narrative is interested in is not fighting but method: the film shows what each chamber teaches, one at a time, and that section became the most imitated structure in the genre. Yude passes the chambers at an unusual speed. At the end the abbot offers him a reward and asks which chamber he wants to head. His answer is to found a thirty-sixth. He wants to teach people outside the monastery, and that is against the rules. The three-section staff is used at this scale for the first time here and is presented as the character's own invention. The production belongs to the Shaw Brothers studio and is one of its best known works. Gordon Liu takes the lead; the choreography and the direction are by Lau Kar-leung, who is himself a martial artist. Who it is for: anyone who likes classical Hong Kong fighting cinema and training narratives. Who it is not for: anyone expecting fast action; the middle is entirely repetition and the fights are gathered at the end.