Sek Kei (Wong Chi-Keung) | 死結 (Dead Knot) / 1969

new growth

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Woo and Sek Kei (screenplay), Sek Kei (Wong Chi-Keung) (director) 死結 (Dead Knot) / 1969

 

In 1969, Hong Kong student John Woo and Wong Chi-keung, Wong being one of Hong Kong’s most well known and experienced film critics writing under the pseudonym of Sek Kei, wrote the screenplay to and directed an experimental film, Dead Knot. Although Woo came to be known for his generally all male martial arts and “bullet ballet” action films, in this early work we see him questioning and exploring sexual and gender differences in a manner that is clearly related to the US and other western European versions of the first coming out films (which I describe as version A) as represented by the early works of Kenneth Anger, Cutis Harrington, Gregory J. Markopoulos, Jacques Demy, and A. J. Rose, Jr., the latter of whose Penis (1965), almost a summary of the early “coming out” film tropes, is chronologically closest to Woo’s and Sek Kei’s film.*

    The 18-minute film, divided into eight short chapters—“the beginning,” “the place,” “the forbidden fruit,” “run away,” “the living,” “rainy season,” “lost,” and “dead knot”—recounts the experience of a young boy (John Woo) who is at first in thrall of a gay S&M lover (Chan Kai-Yat) before he escapes and attempts to enter in what he believes is a “normal” relationship with a woman (Cho Chung-Lang). That relationship, however, soon disintegrates into a daily fragmentation of their lives—expressed quite brilliant in their repetitive daily acts and the insistent cinematic break-up of the images with white fragments and cuts in continuity in “the living”— before things truly break down in “rainy season,” where the male actively attempts to escape the relationship, before their final breakdown in “lost,” symbolized by their placement of blindfolds over their eyes as they desperately attempt to find a way in darkness back to one another.

     In despair, the boy returns to the forbidden allure of his former male lover who now puts him into a “dead knot,” as he types out what is apparently the history of the story we are encountering—or, perhaps, another possibility for their future, since the “dead knot” can mean either the new growth from a tree that is only loosely connected to the original branch or a tied at the end of a rope to prevent it from passing through a hole or another knot used most commonly to join ropes in climbing. The dead knot, is short does not represent death or strangulation but ideas centered around climbing new roots.

     This short film, obviously influenced by the western filmmakers I mention above, begins with a male-on-male relationship, representing the suffering and torturing the confused gay-leaning individual must undergo through the S&M torture. Although there is clearly a long tradition of S&M behavior in Asian literature and filmmaking, it here my be simply symbolic as the narrow bed on which the individuals must suffer through their nights of doubt in the US versions of the coming out films.

    Later incidents in Dead Knot clearly parallel the US films about the same subject, including the demands of the woman as she is either carried up or runs up a long set of steps which the male attempts with an almost Herculean effort to follow her, a scene in this film that seems right out of Harrington’s short work Picnic. And other moments, such as the male’s awe of and attempt to comprehend the female body through a sculptural work, reminds one immediately of the male admiration the sculpted male body of Adam in Rose’s Penis.

    In short, this 1969 work almost seems to be the last example, as well as a nice summary of the gay coming out movies before young people discovered that you could actually come out to more than simply oneself and a delimited cinematic audience—but to family, friends, and society in general.

    As critic Tony Rayns described this short work in Time Out:

 

“Rescued by the Hong Kong Film Archive, this is the earliest surviving trace of John Woo's beginnings as an indie film-maker. A psycho-drama in the vein of Anger's Fireworks, it's divided into eight short chapters. A young man (Woo) tries to escape from a gay sado-masochist relationship into a 'normal' relationship - with a girl! - but ends up back where he started, unable to buck his deepest desires. Whatever light this may shed on Woo's later work, it's fascinating for teasing out the subtext from the perverse swordplay bloodbaths which Chang Cheh was making at the time (Golden Swallow, etc).”

 

    For a more detailed description of the music and sound production of this film, interested readers should read Li Cheuk-to’s essay “The Past and Present of Dead Knot, published in 2025 and available online on the internet.

      

*Although Woo heterosexually married in 1969 and has three children, it is nonetheless interesting that his major cinematic influences are films that are concerned with male bonding and homosocial if not always homosexual works. His favorite films, so he has reported, are David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï—films with implicit homosexual and strong male bonding, along with other named favorites such as Michael Cocoyannis’ Zorba the Greek and Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Most of these works are discussed in the pages of My Queer Cinema.

 

Los Angeles, January 30, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).