Immortal Combat: How the Chinese martial-arts epic triumphed over the musical

A visual medium, film is bound to the notion of spectacle. Which is to say: we want our movies to look, not just good, but magnificent. The bigger and more dazzling, the better.

For a long time, the film musical satisfied this desire. With their huge sets, their big show-stopping numbers, their casts of attractive men and women singing and dancing in unison, these candy-flavoured concoctions kept the fundamental promise of the movies - to transport us from everyday reality - while giving us enough in the way of simple craftsmanship to make the journey worthwhile. There was a simple, mesmerising joy in watching Gene Kelly perform "I Got Rhythm" to a group of French schoolchildren in Vincente Minnelli's An American in Paris (1951), or seeing Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers attempt to rouse the spirits of Depression-era America in 1936's Swing Time. Or simply to see Kelly, again, singing in the rain...

But recent decades have seen a shift in the tastes of audiences, and as the musical has declined, and audiences have drifted away, its role has been usurped (at least in part) by a most unlikely candidate: the Chinese martial-arts epic. Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) alerted Western viewers to the attractions of the form: its extravagant visuals, intense melodramatics and carefully choreographed set-pieces, thrilled audiences

In this sense, mainland China director Zhang Yimou might almost be considered the new Minnelli: a consummate showman, dedicated to enchantment. After finding early success with arthouse films such as Ju Dou (1990) and Raise the Red Lantern (1991), exquisite displays of gilded Orientalism, Zhang experimented with a variety of genres and styles, before returning to international prominence with a pair of extravagant historical epics, 2002's Hero and House of Flying Daggers (2004).

The latest installment of this loose historical cycle, Curse of the Golden Flower, reunites him with his original muse and former lover, Gong Li, for the first time since 1995's Shanghai Triad. It's a strange, haunting film - a blend of Jacobean court intrigue, hothouse melodrama and video game. But it looks extraordinary, and in the final consideration, that might be what matters most.

American critic Andrew Sarris once wrote of Minnelli that he "believed more in beauty than in art" - meaning that he subordinated reality, the unvarnished depiction of things, to his fascination with aesthetics. In many of Minnelli's films - The Cobweb (1955), Father's Little Dividend (1951), Undercurrent (1946) - supposedly middle-class characters lived in spacious, absurdly well-appointed homes and lived apparently indolent, if somewhat unsatisfied lives.

Part of it might have been due to a certain lack of worldliness on the part of the film-maker. ("[He] really thought everybody dined with candles and a crystal chandelier," noted Keogh Gleason, Minnelli's frequent set decorator.) But much of it was intentional, and specific. This was Hollywood at its most nakedly aspirational: the Dream Factory in full effect. And a very similar charge might be levelled at Zhang. His historical films positively revel in their own artifice, flaunt their massive budgets. Here, the surface is everything: the lavishly detailed interiors, the sumptuous costumes - as splendid as anything in An American in Paris, or Designing Woman (1957) - and above all, their rich palettes, from the predictable chinoiserie hues (burnished golds, regal, meditative reds) to deep, startling swathes of emerald. These films aim to ravish the eye, and they do.

Hero, his Oscar-nominated 2002 blockbuster starring Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, took this fetish to a new extreme, with each section of the film, each chapter of its narrative, coded to a particular colour: one particular "fight" - between Cheung and Zhang Ziyi, in a storm of autumn leaves - ranks as one of the most beautiful dances in modern cinema, a pas de deux to rival Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse in Silk Stockings (1957).

Indeed, what really links Zhang to his Hollywood forebears are these virtuosic set-pieces, the balletic action sequences that take the place, here, of musical numbers. Thus, instead of songs, we have elaborate displays of physical prowess - soaring effortlessly through the air, running lightly among the boughs of trees; in place of dance numbers, meticulously choreographed battles. The gestures may be different, but the effect is the same: for a moment, the narrative stops (these scenes rarely advance the plot in any meaningful sense), all pretence at reality is suspended, and the audience is invited to marvel, open-mouthed, at the sheer kinetic brilliance on display.

"I remember saying to [Zhang], should we really paint the trees blue?" Christopher Doyle, Hero's cinematographer, later recalled. "I mean, what's the purpose? What's it doing for the story? But he insisted it would make sense, and watching it, I guess you'd have to agree."

Doyle's successor, Zhao Xiaoding, is more extravagant still - in Curse of the Golden Flower, super-saturated colours flood the screen to almost synaesthetic effect, jostling for space amid a dizzying profusion of CGI effects. It's telling, too, that the film's credits elevate its makeup artists and hair stylists (three are listed) to sit alongside the editors and production designers. Not since the heyday of Edith Head and Sydney Guilaroff, have actors had such loving attention paid to their appearance.

Variety critic and Asian specialist Derek Elley has followed Zhang's career closely for over two decades. A longtime Sinophile, conversant in Mandarin and Cantonese, Elley also happens to be an ardent fan of the classic Hollywood musicals, and discerns some distinct lines of influence of the latter upon the former.

"Certainly," he says, "that sense of showmanship, that fusion of music and image, has been there from the very beginning. Zhang's first feature, Red Sorghum, actually starts with a rough kind of musical sequence: this processional cortege travelling along, complete with traditional music and dancing.

"It's also worth noting," he adds, "that around the same period as those early films, he made this very popular ad for Marlboro cigarettes in China, set on the Great Wall, with a huge team of traditional drummers, all decked out in traditional costumes. It was like this huge Busby Berkeley routine - and seems very prescient of the direction his own film-making was going to take."

As Zhang's reputation has grown - and despite occasional clashes with the Chinese authorities, he remains the most critically-acclaimed mainland director of his generation - he has turned his hand to a number of other, extra-curricular ventures: stage productions, forays into opera (he directed a critically-acclaimed Turandot in Beijing, which subsequently toured throughout Europe) - even a ballet version of Raise the Red Lantern (1991).

"He's recently staged a number of outdoor musical entertainments in China," Elley explains. "In Yunnan, for example, he put on a famous traditional tale, 'Third Sister Liu', by a lake, with fireworks, teams of dancers, an amplified soundtrack ... it was a real spectacle. And a year ago he did a second one. They're practically a new entertainment genre, these things, incorporating the landscape alongside various elements of performance - almost like a son et lumière. They're like nothing else around."

There were, historically speaking, a number of reasons why the musical fell into disfavour. Most notably, the studio system collapsed, denying directors access to the big budgets and vast production resources that had characterised its golden age. But this collapse was due, at least in part, to the decline that befell traditional favourites (such as the musical) during the 1960s, resulting in costly misfires such as Paint Your Wagon (1969) and Doctor Dolittle (1967).

And the genre declined because there simply weren't the songs to sustain it. Popular music had changed, and as pop bands superceded solo performers, writing their own material instead of interpreting others', the notion of Broadway-style musicals began to seem distinctly old-fashioned.

Inarticulate, defiantly juvenile, this new style of popular song couldn't accommodate the narrative demands of the musical. These three-minute symphonies weren't about telling stories - on the contrary: they were ephemeral and proud of it, dedicated to capturing the energy and rapture of a single moment or emotion.

Nor could the new breed of stars adapt to the rigours of the form. If Peter Bogdanovich's At Long Last Love (1975) proved anything, it was that, even with the music of Cole Porter to fall back on, Burt Reynolds was no Gene Kelly. Likewise Frederic Forrest in Francis Coppola's One from the Heart (1983).

"When you look at it closely," says Elley, "the 'classic' movie musical - at least, in the refined, lyric tradition sense - had a very short-life span, from the early 1940s to the mid-1960s. It was Rodgers & Hammerstein, with Oklahoma in 1943, who developed that structure whereby the musical numbers grew out of the narrative.

"And then, in the late 1960s, as popular music changed, the genre grabbed a lifeline with the arrival of Steven Sondheim - but in a much more rarefied, less mainstream way than the traditional crowd-pleasing musicals of Rodgers & Hammerstein or Lerner & Lowe. The form survived, but one part - a smaller one - went off in one direction, following Sondheim's lead, while the other, much larger, flocked to Andrew Lloyd Webber."

Yet today, even adaptations of successful stage productions are by no means safe bets - consider the long-gestating Evita (1996). In modern-day Hollywood, conventional wisdom has it that no one wants to go to the cinema any more to watch a musical; they belong in the West End, or on Broadway, as live events. Even Dreamgirls, the most critically-acclaimed musical for a generation (and in many ways, the most traditional), under-performed slightly at the box office.

But nature abhors a vacuum, and so when a film such as Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark arrives, it's hailed as something audacious and grand, an attempt to resurrect the glories of days past - when in fact its maker, while undoubtedly talented in other respects, shows about little understanding of, and feel for, the tone and texture of the classic MGM/Warner Bros musicals. The look of the film is wrong, ugly and unchoreographed; worst of all, there's not a single memorable tune in it. By contrast, Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge cheerfully rejected tradition altogether, borrowing the rapid-edit aesthetic of MTV.

For Elley, the Eastern connection with movie musicals goes far deeper: "To simplify it radically, there's a whole Asian musical tradition that has to do with the idea of using mass numbers. In a Bollywood movie, for example, you'll see 30 or 40 dancers, all perfectly choreographed, all doing precisely the same movements. And the spectacle comes not only from the scale of it, but from the unified movement of many people.

"Now I'd relate that, in turn, to the kinds of mass games you see in North Korea and mainland China. Here in the West, we tend to view that kind of thing very simplistically, in totalitarian terms, but it absolutely doesn't play like that to Asian eyes. It's not simply propaganda by a dictatorship: it's actually a whole mass-entertainment tradition that's particular to and celebrated by Asian cultures. But that incomprehension feeds into the perennial East-West dialectic: the collective versus the individual, the 'We' versus the 'I'."

Today, Zhang Yimou finds himself in an odd, though not wholly uncomfortable position. A Fifth Generation director, part of the loose group that came to prominence in the mid-1980s, alongside the likes of Chen Kaige (for whom he originally worked as a cinematographer) and Tian Zhuangzhuang, he is both an international arthouse star - along with Hong Kong's Wong Kar-wai, perhaps the most famous Chinese film-maker in the world - and, in his homeland, a commercially successful, mainstream film-maker.

But times are changing. Known for the pictorial elegance of their film-making, their refined compositions and slightly hermetic air, these Fifth Generation directors have since been supplanted by the so-called "Sixth Generation", whose far rougher aesthetic (hand-held cameras, ambient sound and lighting, actual locations) signifies their independent origins; operating outside traditional funding bodies, their work must perforce be made more cheaply and quickly. In tone, too, they differ sharply from their predecessors - their films concerned more with the state of present-day China, with the legacies of urbanisation and the Cultural Revolution, and the still largely unexplored topic of sexual politics.

To his credit, Zhang has not only remained in his homeland, resisting the temptation to work in the US (unlike Chen Kaige, whose sole foray into English-language film-making, 2002's Killing Me Softly, was a conspicuous disaster), but has pushed himself to remain relevant - even to the point of adopting some Sixth Generation strategies. Thus, for every big-budget epic he's delivered, he's produced a small, intimate film, often shot on digital video, sometimes with non-professional actors.

There's nothing remarkable about such eclecticism: the Vincente Minnelli who made Gigi, after all, was also the same film-maker who made Home From the Hill. But in today's marketplace, where film-makers are obliged to become dependable "brands", such diversity can be a disadvantage. Zhang's previous feature, Riding Alone For Thousands of Miles, a low-budget drama about a father journeying to fulfil the final wish of his dead son, was denied the Official Selection berth in Cannes that had greeted both Hero and House of Flying Daggers - reportedly because it wasn't considered "a Zhang Yimou film" in what has become the accepted sense. No sword fights, no wire-work...

As the Confucian philosopher Xun Zi once observed, sardonically, the person attempting to travel two roads at once will get nowhere.

'Curse of the Golden Flower' is out on Friday