The Butterfly Murders

Tsui Hark started his film career with a genre flick that challenges the genre and, with it, arguably ushered in the New Wave that transformed the industry of which that genre was a backbone. The Butterfly Murders is an ambitious freshman project that tries to expand the horizons of the wuxia film by debunking its conventions, revealing human dimensions behind superhuman martial arts moves, all the while presenting choreographed actions with kinetic editing to satisfy genre expectations. The film is decorated with cinematic references, from Hitchcock thrillers to Spaghetti Westerns to Japanese crime films, tied together by a dark humour that would become the director's signature and a comic book-like miseen- sc ne of tight close-ups, skewed camera angles and fitful camera movements. And perhaps the ultimate self-conscious, double-edged joke is the employ of a scholar as narrator – a reminder that the men of action in wuxia fiction were created by docile men of words.