Chinese Martial Arts Films

This article argues that the concept of wuyi (‘martial ideation’) forms the aesthetic core of kung fu cinema. Rather than focusing on the expressive amplification of emotion, martial ideation negotiates action and stasis through stabilization and eventually reaches a state of tranquillity. In The Grandmaster (Wong, 2013), such an ideational experience is sketched through the Buddhist notion of guan (‘perspicaciousness’). Perspicaciousness is embodied by three ways of ‘seeing’ in the mise-en-scène, including ‘listening bridge’ in martial arts performance, ‘looking back’ in narrative structure and ‘visioning’ in theme. In this light, Wong’s kung fu debut treats the southern hand-to-hand combat tradition not as a spectacle, but as an embodied knowledge that links kung fu practice with Chinese aesthetics and philosophy.

In this chapter, we intend to investigate why and how Zhang Yimou’s Hero has rewritten the Chinese martial arts film genre. We believe that the development of Zhang’s cinematic career led the director along a particular path when he embarked on the project of Hero. This helps to explain why Hero takes on the format of the martial arts film instead of any other genre. We then trace the history of the traditional martial arts film genre in order to summarize its key characteristics. This allows us to compare the differences in traditional Chinese martial arts films and Hero. We also try to identify possible motivations for why Zhang Yimou rewrites the genre in Hero.

In the decade after Bruce Lee's death in 1973, film-makers from around the world produced numerous films starring imitation Bruce Lees with names like Bruce Li, Bruce Le and Dragon Lee. This article suggests that any understanding of the discourse of Bruce Lee as a star is incomplete without consideration of the ways in which the ‘Bruceploitation’ industry appropriated the star image of Bruce Lee and repackaged it for a transnational audience in the waning years of ‘kung fu fever’. By analysing the films’ narratives and marketing, the article argues that these films are not mere ‘clones’ of the ‘real’ thing, but rather imitations with a self-conscious difference. These films present ‘conjectural Bruce Lees’ that expand the familiar Bruce Lee image in order to maintain fan interest. As a result, ‘Bruce Lee’ as a discourse became increasingly flexible and sticky, hybridizing across cultures and genres. This view of ‘Bruce Lee’ beyond Bruce Lee asks that scholars approach stars not simply as discrete actors, but also as disembodied star-functions that transform across time and space.

Wong Fei-hung was a Cantonese martial arts master from southern China who became associated with a melody called ‘General’s Ode’. Since the 1950s, over 100 Hong Kong movies and television shows have forged the link by using this melody as Master Wong’s theme. During fieldwork in a Chinese Canadian kung fu club, I observed several consultants claiming this piece as a Cantonese national anthem—a hymn for a nation without a sovereign state. Virtual ethnography conducted online showed that this opinion is held more widely, but that the piece also inspires broader Chinese nationalist sentiment. My analysis of speech-tone relationships to melodic contour in Cantonese and Mandarin versions of the song, however, has revealed a tight integration with the former that the latter lacked. By sharpening Anderson’s concept of unisonance, I explore how this song has become an unofficial transnational anthem for Cantonese people, arguing that Master Wong’s theme auralises an abstract sense of imagined community.

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The Oriental Obscene is a sophisticated analysis of Americans’ reactions to visual representations of the Vietnam War, such as the photograph of the “napalm girl,” news footage of the Tet Offensive, and feature films from The Deer Hunter to Rambo: First Blood Part II. Sylvia Shin Huey Chong combines psychoanalytic and film theories with U.S. cultural history to explain what she terms the oriental obscene: racialized fantasies that Americans derived largely from images of Asians as the perpetrators or victims of extreme violence. Chong contends that these fantasies helped Americans to process the trauma of the Vietnam War, as well as the growth of the Asian American population after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and the postwar immigration of Southeast Asian refugees. The oriental obscene animated a wide range of political narratives, not only the movements for and against the war, but causes as diverse as the Black Power movement, law-and-order conservatism, second-wave feminism, and the nascent Asian American movement. During the Vietnam era, pictures of Asian bodies were used to make sense of race, violence, and America’s identity at home and abroad.

This paper sets out to explore the possibility as well as the impossibility of representing a seemingly untranslatable term: jianghu (江湖), which literally means “rivers and lakes” in Sinitic languages. The paper discusses how the term evolves almost like an organic entity of its own, stretching from Chinese literature, cinema to the everyday use of the term as slangs and idioms. By looking at how the term is translated from one language to another, from an ancient context to a (post)modern context, and further away from one generation to another, this paper attempts to study the process of adaptation and translation beyond a linguistic scope, but towards a broader field of literary, cultural and film studies. The paper also examines how the process of translating, adapting and imagining jianghu can be deemed a manifestation of the Derridian concept of “supplementarity”.

Upon its premiere in 1992, Midway’s Mortal Kombat spawned an enormously influential series of fighting games, notorious for their violent “fatality” moves performed by photorealistically rendered characters. Targeted by lawmakers and moral reformers, the series directly inspired the creation of an industrywide rating system for video games and became a referendum on the wide popularity of 16-bit home consoles. Along the way, it became one of the world’s most iconic fighting games, and a transmedia franchise that continues to this day.

This book traces Mortal Kombat’s history as an American product inspired by both Japanese video games and Chinese martial-arts cinema, its successes and struggles in adapting to new market trends, and the ongoing influence of its secret-strewn narrative world. After outlining the specific elements of gameplay that differentiated Mortal Kombat from its competitors in the coin-op market, David Church examines the various martial-arts films that inspired its Orientalist imagery, helping explain its stereotypical uses of race and gender. He also posits the games as a cultural landmark from a moment when public policy attempted to intervene in both the remediation of cinematic aesthetics within interactive digital games and in the transition of public gaming spaces into the domestic sphere. Finally, the book explores how the franchise attempted to conquer other forms of media in the 1990s, lost ground to a new generation of 3D games in the 2000s, and has successfully rebooted itself in the 2010s to reclaim its legacy.

Essay in volume commemorating tenth annual Five Flavours Film Festival (Warsow, Poland).  Discusses current resurgence in traditional period-dress martial arts films, particularly in relation to the festival's screening of _The Assassin_ as well as other films by King Hu.

A book series that publishes research monographs in the fields of Martial Arts Studies.

http://www.rowmaninternational.com/series/martial-arts-studies

Series Editor: Paul Bowman (Cardiff University). Author of Martial Arts Studies: Disrupting Disciplinary Boundaries (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015), Director of the Martial Arts Studies Research Network, and co-editor of the open-access journal Martial Arts Studies (Cardiff University Press).

The Martial Arts Studies book series aims to foster cross-disciplinary dialogue and generate new knowledge in the interdisciplinary fields of martial arts studies. The series welcomes proposals that explore martial arts studies in terms of such key questions as identity, gender, ethnicity, film, creativity, (digital) culture, media (and social media), drama, diaspora, performance, dance, memory, movement, pedagogy, institution, violence, the state, (post) colonialism, experience, ritual, training, fitness, incarceration, heritage, belief, and so on.

The series also seeks to explore such questions as the purpose(s) of martial arts studies; what martial arts ‘achieve’; why people (still) practice martial arts; why there has been a huge global upsurge in some martial arts – such as the staged actual violence of mixed martial arts (which is now bigger than boxing and wrestling combined) – and the ways in which these issues relate to such themes as contemporary capitalism, globalization, the current era of internet connectivity, and so on; as well as studies of the ways martial arts changed in recent years, the future directions of martial arts, and the future directions of martial arts studies.

Editorial Review Board:
Alex Channon (University of Brighton)
DS Farrer (University of Guam)
TJ Hinrichs (Cornell University)
Benjamin N. Judkins (chinesemartialstudies.com)
Gina Marchetti (Hong Kong University)
Michael A. Molasky (Waseda University)
Meaghan Morris (University of Sydney)
Benjamin Spatz (Huddersfield University)
Sixt Wetzler (German Blade Museum, Solingen)
Luke White (Middlesex University)
Douglas Wile (CUNY)
Gehao Zhang (Macau University of Science and Technology)

While Yinniang’s dilemma of “to kill or not to kill” has been interpreted as a narrative conundrum, we argue that it is best understood as a “hearing problem”: Yinniang’s extraordinary sensitivity to sound and storytelling—sanctioned by her family name Nie 聶, a pictograph consisting of three ears—stands in sharp contrast to the shallow focus of her vision and leads eventually to ethical responsibility. Yinniang is not so much an assassin as an acoustically sensitive character steeped in the enhanced natural soundscape and entangled in relational storytelling. This chapter makes sense of the soundscape of The Assassin (2015) with its felt presence of natural sounds, especially of birdsongs and insect noises, deploying the mutually implicating Daoist concept of dayin xisheng (the virtual sound is indistinct) and Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becoming-bird. The several instances of becoming-bird—of Hou Hsiao-hsien, of Dongdong in A Summer of Grandpa’s (1984), and of Nie Yinniang and Princess Jiacheng in The Assassin—are analyzed to convey the idea of a nonanthropocentric listening to zones of indiscernibility and the indistinct virtual sound of cinema.

By turning the noun “world/ welt” into a verb, Martin Heidegger uses “worlding” to suggest a shift from the passiveness or taken-for-granted nature of our situatedness in the World to an active participation in the world-in-making.  Meanwhile, the Sinitic term "jianghu" (literally meaning, rivers and lakes) inscribes a myriad of different worlds such as the fantastical world of Chinese martial arts, the criminal realm of the triad societies, an anarchic condition beyond the reach of government and a mythical world “out there”. In this light, the travelling of jianghu through the representation of the material and the immaterial and the imagination of the real and unreal can help to illustrate how “worlding” is realized and its implications behind the politics of representation.

Editor: Roger Garcia; Co-Editor: George Chun Han Wang; Associate Editor: Chanel Kong; Consultant Editor: Law Kar. The book is published on the occasion of the 15th Edition – Udine Far East Film Festival 15 (April 19th – 27th, 2013) Teatro Nuovo Giovanni da Udine/Visionario, Italy. Publisher: Centro Espressioni Cinematografiche.

This article studies 6 films with Bruce Lee as the principal actor and Santo's 53 films. The first part of this study comes from individual and separate analysis of the films. After getting the characteristics of Bruce Lee's films and Santo's films, the second part of this analysis is the comparison of both films in order to find the similarities and differences and finally draws the conclusion of what is positive and what is negative. The purpose is to understand what historical factors take Mexican filmography into the Mexi-wrestler style films which includes Santo's films. The first chapter, through the introduction of the chronological order of development of Mexican cinema, makes the

... Next, Bruce dressed as Kato from The Green Hornet takes on The Man with No Name, as aMorricone-esque spaghetti-western theme ... Brittan, Francesca (2006), 'Women Who “Do Elvis”: Authenticity, Masculinity, and Masquerade', Journal of Popular Music Studies, 18: 2, pp. ...

Chinese cinematic rewritings transform Ophelia from “a document of madness” (4.5.178) to symbols of purity and female agency and an icon of true love. While her songs still occupy the center of attention, Ophelia does not tend to stand in for lost girlhood or female madness in the Chinese context. Instead, the strands of girl power and fragile girlhood coexist as Chinese Ophelias lay claim to their moral agency. The figure of Ophelia is sometimes pitched as a cross between a conscientious and filial Cordelia, an innocent Desdemona, a loyal subject, and a fearless and dedicated lover.

As for Hamlet, he is a figure of thought. He is a vehicle for political commentary and transhistorical interpretations of ideas and genres that otherwise have no connections. Chinese writers, directors, and actors have used the play to create a more equitable globalization based on mutual respect of cultural values and to enrich Asian performance styles through cultural exchange.

Written comment of Abhijit Roy following the lecture titled Aesthetics and Governmentality, or, ‘What is the Use of Kung Fu? by Meaghan Morris. This lecture by Prof. Morris was part of the series 'Luminous Celluloid: Shared Reflections of the Cinematic Legacy', organized by the Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University, to mark the centenary of Indian cinema. March 24, 2014, Vivekananda Hall, Jadavpur University main campus, Calcutta, India.

Prof. Morris didn't mail us her paper in advance. Instead she sent a "background paper", one that was already published, to give us an idea of the major points of concern in her presentation. This was 'Transnational imagination in action cinema: Hong Kong and the making of a global popular culture' in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 5, Number 2, 2004. So my comment was largely based on this essay though, you will discover, the comment is not entirely misplaced. The paper that came out of her presentation has been published in our journal: http://www.jmionline.org/articles/2014/a_question_of_legacy_what_is_the_use_of_kung_fu.pdf