The Blade

QUAD is screening The Blade on Friday 13 November, as part of Satori Screen, their monthly night devoted to East Asian cinema. It's a 1995 Hong Kong kung-fu film directed by Tsui Hark, running 105 minutes in Cantonese with English subtitles. Before the film starts, QUAD's Film & Marketing Officer Peter Munford will introduce it.

The Blade follows Ding On, a young sword-maker who loses an arm in an ambush and transforms himself into a furious avenger. It's counted among the boldest achievements of Hong Kong cinema's golden age, and it's a reimagining of the one-armed swordsman, an icon first introduced by the Shaw Brothers studio in 1967. Hark doesn't play it straight: the film is built on intentionally disorienting stylisation, immersive close-ups and fractured editing. It was a rare commercial disappointment for him at the time, but it's since been reclaimed as one of his most radical visions — a tour de force of action expressionism and a scathing reappraisal of the wuxia genre's code of masculinity.

It's a film that wears its influences on its sleeve, taking a classic character and twisting the whole thing into something far more aggressive and fractured than the wuxia that came before it. If you're into the high-energy, highly stylised side of Hong Kong action, this is one of the more uncompromising examples from that era. The screening is part of Satori Screen, which brings East Asian cinema to the venue once a month, and Munford's introduction will set the scene before the film kicks in.

Tickets are £10.50 standard and £8.50 concession, and it starts at 20:30 on Friday 13 November at QUAD.