He goes from moving like a hapless idiot, to confidently and acrobatically swinging from scaffolds with ease, all the while incorporating the movements of the monks training below into his seemingly mundane labor.Ĭlassics such as the mentioned Shaw Bros. The film chronicles his change in character by transcribing it onto his movements and kinetics. Gordon Liu as Chu Jen-chieh goes from a small time conman to full fledged hero by indirectly learning kung fu at Shaolin where he is forced to scaffold the temple in renovation. Past works such as Return to the 36th Chamber contain seamless parallels between the protagonist’s movement and their developing characterization. The fight scenes between Benny “The Jet” and Jackie Chan at the end of Wheels On Meals, or Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris in Return of the Dragon are great examples of this.Įven scenes of particularly little action outside the genre such as the trio sequence at the finale of The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly communicates a great deal of information between the three gunslingers, as it does to the viewer, all with no dialogue and just the facial twitches and subtleties in extreme close-ups, all before guns are ever drawn.īut somewhere down the line, martial art films sort of lost their edge and became more about selling the spectacle, then actually presenting a harmonized interplay between the action and the narrative of the film. These sequences at least in regard to the camera work have more shared DNA with the opening shots of Touch of Evil or The Player, then they do to their more recent genre descendants.įurthermore these sequences of action often transcend merely being fights, but actually accomplish to unravel and tell their own narratives through the usage of the kinesthetics of the actors, and the way in which the choreography unfolds. In conjunction with the elaborate choreography and complex interchanges, the logistical nightmare of the whole affair is more like watching a dance or staged performance, then an actual exchange of violence or hostility.

In films like 36th Chamber of Shaolin, the camera often follows the action at a staggering speed, never cutting away but also simultaneously doing so at a close-up. Martial arts films have always fascinated me particularly because of how they have managed to capture complex kinetic human action, and the methods employed in doing so.

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