Its popularity in the Western market suggests that Ang Lee’s CTHD is not a purely traditional Chinese martial arts film, such as Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of Time (1994), Gordon Chan’s Fist of Legend (1994), and Tsui Hark’s Once Upon a Time in China (1991), 2 rather it is a new cultural product that fuses Eastern marital arts (also wuxia) tradition with Western cultural ideologies. The success of CTHD can be attributed to “its stylish fighting sequences, romantic love stories, complex entanglements of old grudges between generations, elaborate costuming and picturesque settings” ( K. It is also the only Chinese-language martial arts film that successfully entered the American commercial film market dominated by Hollywood ( Zhu 151). In short, the romantic imagination of “Cultural China” shaped by Ang Lee presents a multicultural embracement of Chinese and Western cultures, but it objectively reinforces the stereotype of China as an “other” to the Western world.Ĭrouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) (henceforth CTHD), directed by Ang Lee, is enshrined as one of the most successful Chinese-language martial arts films 1 in the global film circle. English subtitle translation plays a role in bridging the gap between Chinese culture and Western audiences, facilitating the dialog between East and West. He skillfully tells a Chinese romantic wuxia story that represents the conflicts and negotiations between Chinese classic culture and Western ideological values (e.g., feminism). The findings reveal that Ang Lee’s CTHD is featured by a diasporic/intercultural Chinese identity that is rooted in his cultural cognition of an imaginatively traditional China. Within this framework, the three defined notions are used to guide the analysis of CTHD.
It constructs an analytical framework that consists of three notions, namely cultural cognition, cultural translation and cultural reconfiguration.
This article takes Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (CTHD in abbreviation) as an audiovisual translation discourse to explore its cognition, translation and reconfiguration of culture.