Kung Fu movies or martial arts films are a type of action film in which highly choreographed fight scenes are the central attraction. Stories are in the heroic line, with the lead character usually overcoming insurmountable odds through superior fighting skills. This genre sometimes incorporates humor, often of the slapstick variety.
The use of martial arts skills is central to the genre. As is common in other movies centered on the development and exercise of physical skills, training montages are often included. Stunt work in these usually low budget movies was traditionally done by the actors themselves. This began to change in the Nineties.
Two developments, wire work and digital film making, have fundamentally changed the martial arts movie over the past fifteen years. In wire work, a harness is hidden under an actors costume. Thin, strong wires run from the harness to a pulley system overhead. Wire work fight sequences create the spectacular illusion of fighters unencumbered by gravity. Typically these feats are attributed to the fighting skills of the characters rather than to super powers.
Adding digital film making technology allows filmmakers to digitally erase all trace of the riggings. Wire work was appropriate by Hollywood toward the end of the decade. In the west, the mass market received its first exposure to the wonders of wire work combined with digital technology in 1999s The Matrix. Hong Kong martial arts choreographer Yuen Woo-ping was the genius behind the movies wire sequences.
The earliest known example of the martial arts movie was the 1928 Chinese silent film, The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple. Twenty-seven hours in length, it is said to be the longest movie ever released. The film was cut into 18 segments and released as a serial between 1928 until 1931.
The loss of the edge that traditional martial arts movies have because the audience knows a real person is truly risking their life is lost in the digital age. We can expect to see more attention paid to what was nominally expendable up to now. These would be things like character development and plot development. We saw the start of this with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in 2000. Tarantino further degraded the genre with his largely failed attempts to create Kung-Fu kitsch in his Kill Bill films.
The late Bruce Lee was the foremost practitioner of Kung Fu in martial arts films. Kung Fu is Chinese in origin. Kung Fu combines a number of different fighting styles. This makes it an ideal subject for story purposes because it allows the lead character to fight in any number of styles.
Western audiences, exposed to special effects on a continuous basis since the days of King Kong and The Wizard of OZ, there is little visceral attachment to stunt work. For their original audiences in the Far East, however, the knowledge that the actors were actually performing the dangerous scenes on screen, was deeply affecting. While new Kung Fu Movies may be of higher quality than their predecessors, something vital has been lost.
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