Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in the land of the Cartesians: From comparative reception to cultural comparison

Abstract

This analysis deals mainly with the reception of the film within and beyond the culture within which it originated, along the lines of Hans Robert Jauss's ‘Aesthetics of Reception.’ On the one hand, this ‘Wu-xia’ genre film, which is very popular in Chinese culture, set off a national and nationalistic fever in Taiwan, all the while stirring up controversies in the Chinese-speaking world. On the other hand, this same film that was quite foreign to Western culture nonetheless had a commercial success without precedent in France, all the while also inciting equally vehement contradictory reactions, for reasons totally alien to movie audiences from Chinese culture. Our analysis, which is centered on what in Chinese is called ‘qing-gong’ or, in a more or less scientific language, ‘the art of weightlessness,’ will attempt to get to the crux of these two systems of reference on which Chinese and French viewers depend. An examination and comparison of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Matrix will lead us to the problem of the fabrication of the image of the perfect, supreme or even divine Superior Being, in both the Chinese and Western cultures.