In a global film market dominated by Western flicks, how is it that kungfu action films have become the sharpest weapon for Chinese popular films as they advance?
Twenty years after the death of Bruce Lee, it seems like kungfu films are once again enjoying a peak of popularity. This time the leader is Jackie Chan.
There is a big color picture of Chan on the Internet, and movie fans around the world can exchange information about him there. One fan named Gao Wei'en wrote that when he found out Chan was going to go to the US west coast on a promotional tour, he was so excited at the thought of being able to lay eyes on his screen idol that he decided to skip work to go to the airport to greet Chan's arrival. This Chinese immigrant says that he became fascinated with Chan after seeing the film Drunken Master. On his first trip back to Taiwan after that, he immediately went to the video rental shop and took out every Jackie Chan movie; he and his cousin then spent two days, without sleeping, watching them straight through.
Chan's fans are not limited to the Chinese world; he has long been a superstar throughout Asia. And now his appeal has spread from East to West.
Hollywood looks East
His most recent film Rumble in the Bronx arrived in the US in February. It opened in 1500 theaters across the country, becoming part of the film mainstream. Seeing Chan's appeal, American film distributors decided to release two older films, Drunken Master and Police Story.
According to a Newsweek article from February, Hong Kong action films have been something of a panacea for box office blues in the US. On college campuses and in large cities, Hong Kong film festivals attract large audiences. And it has become a major trend to follow such action stars as Chan, Chow Yun-fat, and Jet Li.
Hollywood is by no means lacking in its own action films and stars. So why has it looked East?
The key is that Hong Kong action films have the unique appeal of kungfu. The attraction of such popular films began with Bruce Lee.
Born in the US, Lee returned to Hong Kong with his father and was educated there. In that period he learned basic Chinese martial arts and wingchun kungfu. Later he combined wingchun kungfu with Western boxing and Japanese karate to produce a unique style called jiequandao. With this, Lee opened his own academy and began showing up in films.
Lee made four major films in his life. All of them included his trademark moves--side kicks, spinning kicks, and triple flying kicks. On the screen, his powerful legs were as dexterous as arms, able to strike any point he chose with precision. It is said that his side kick delivered a force of 300 pounds, more powerful than any pugilist champion.
Taking audiences by storm
For Western audiences, displays of such physical skills proved not only stimulating but also novel.
Veteran film critic Huang Jen notes that, in the early 1970s, given the audience appeal of Lee's flicks, countries that had never before shown Chinese films were developing channels to Hong Kong and Taiwan to purchase the rights to kungfu movies. "It is estimated that more than 100 countries and territories worldwide were showing Chinese kungfu movies in those days," says Huang.
One Chinese who had emigrated to New York recalls, "Films had short lives in the theaters on 42nd Street. Only Bruce Lee's films kept going strong, even ten years after his death."
Jackie Chan's martial arts skills are rooted in Peking Opera; he uses "soft" spinning and rolling moves, rather than Lee's aggressive attacking style. Film reviewer Wang Wei avers that the most entertaining part of Chan's films is that "his kungfu moves take into account the position he find himself in, and his skill lies in using what is at hand in the scene." His abilities are given especially full play in films set in early Republican China, when problems were resolved with fists rather than guns. Chan's "unique creativity" as an actor and director is displayed in such setups as the bicycle chase through narrow back alleys in the film Project A and in the fight in the rope factory in Miracle.
In his book Hong Kong Action Cinema, published last year in the UK, Ben Logan writes, "If imitation is truly the sincerest form of flattery, then Sylvester Stallone was one of the first Hollywood film-makers to praise Jackie Chan." Several scenes in the Stallone vehicle Tango and Cash were taken right out of Chan's Police Story.
Many people like to compare Stallone and Chan. The Hong Kong film critic Li Zhuotao argues that with his actual execution of bone-on-bone punches and kicks, Chan portrays violence "realistically" to a certain extent. In Stallone's films, on the other hand, in which one finds an arsenal of machine guns, missiles, and helicopters, and Sly defeats whole armies single-handedly, violence is portrayed as in a cartoon, unrealistically.
And in fact, it is on Bruce Lee's and Chan's physical moves that people East and West have long focused.
Huang Chien-yeh suggests that Lee's films became popular because he represented "another version of exotic Oriental culture. After all, in terms of fighting techniques Eastern martial arts are very exciting, and they also carry an element of philosophy and a certain attitude toward life." When executing kungfu moves, Lee would suck his diaphragm in to form hard horizontal lines; when attacking he would emit wild screams; and he would even lick the blood off his wounds. Such exotic and masochistic images are all part of the mythologized Chinese fighter.
Or, put another way, "in a paternalistic society, [the attention devoted to] his fighting techniques, actions, and wild screams brought worship of the strength and beauty of the male body to its peak."
Taking on the impossible
Jackie Chan's physical prowess is to an even greater extent a focus of attention. When filming The Armour of God in Yugoslavia in 1986, he was nearly killed when he hit his head directly against a rock after he missed catching a branch in a scene where he jumped from a high wall down into a tree.
In an article on Chan in Time last year, the most incredible and fascinating section to the international film community was that listing Chan's injuries from making movies. The article said, "Some movie stars measure their worth by how many millions of dollars they make. Jackie Chan measures it by how many of his bones he has fractured." It then proceeded to list his scars from head to foot: skull, eyes, nose, jaw, shoulder, chest, midsection, knee, angle, fingers, and toes. The article emphasized that he never uses stuntmen even for the most dangerous of moves, and continues to insist on doing everything himself despite the fact that no insurance company will agree to cover him.
Chan's "flirtations with death" began with 1984's Project A. In one scene he jumped from a high tower, with only a canvass awning to slow him down before hitting the ground.
In My Lucky Star, Chan was sometimes on roller skates, sometimes weaving in and out of traffic. In The Protector he crashed into a wooden house and into a sampan while in a speedboat chase. In Police Story, he jumped from a building into a swimming pool, slid down a very tall light pole (covered with lights) in a department store, and crashed through glass; there was a dangerous or highly difficult scene every few minutes.
Since Police Story in 1986, Chan's films have all had trailers showing things that went wrong, injuries, and other outtakes from the filming, so that the audience is left convinced that Chan had risked his own flesh and bone to actually perform the exciting scenes they saw on-screen.
Giving action films back to the actors
The result of "putting his life on the line" is that his films have a different character from Hollywood action flicks.
Says Time, "In Hollywood terms, Chan is a bit of Clint Eastwood, a dash of Gene Kelly, a splash of Jim Carrey, and a lot of the silent-movie clowns: Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and especially Buster Keaton." The magazine praised him by noting, "In Hollywood special visual effects define the action film. In Hong Kong, [it is] stunts--the human body spinning and bending without a computer's help. . . he returned the action movie to the actors."
New York Magazine, meanwhile, declared, "Much of the fun of watching a Hollywood action film is scrutinizing the special effects, then evaluating the movie by how well the audience was fooled into believing that Arnold/Keanu was really in danger. Watch a Jackie Chan movie, on the other hand, and you'll know he's in danger."
Besides Lee and Chan, there are other kungfu movie stars who are real life martial arts masters. Jet Li, a film star from mainland China, was the national martial arts champion there.
But "kungfu" movies are not limited to films with traditional martial arts in them
Hong Kong director John Wu created the character Brother Mark, played by Chow Yun-fat. Brother Mark is a violent gangster who wears a long topcoat and a white scarf, and has a toothpick hanging out of his mouth. What does this obvious gunsel, featured in the A Better Tomorrow films, have to do with kungfu?
On the surface, Wu's A Better Tomorrow series depicts criminal gangs, seemingly in the US cops-and-gangsters tradition. But critic Peggy Chiao believes that the film-maker's ideology is much closer to that of the kungfu film. She points to clear marks of the kungfu tradition in this series: "Male bonding, extreme violence based on non-middle class thinking, a spirit of honor-bound self-sacrifice for friendship, and unrepentant revenge."
Reviewer Huang Chien-yeh adds that "the main point of Chinese gun-fighting films is never in the weaponry or skill, but on the kungfu-style poses that the actors cop." Wu's unique film style, such as slow motion when the hero appears and close-ups when bullets are fired, "leaves room for romanticism amidst the fighting."
Carrying on a line
A few years ago Wu was recruited to Hollywood to make films, and what Hollywood saw in him was his ability to handle action films. Concluded Time, he "infused amazing camera dexterity into Hong Kong martial arts movies."
No matter how these films are categorized, in Chinese movie history the kungfu film is "the type that is most highly developed and has the most national character to it," says Huang Chien-yeh. This tradition carries on directly from literature of the past, which can be traced all the way back to the Warring States Period, with Chuangzi's "On Swordsmanship" chapter and the "Roving Chivalrous Heroes" section of Records of the Grand Historian. It also includes the legends of the Tang dynasty, the orally transmitted stories of the Song, and the crime stories of the Qing. Naturally it also covers the martial arts novels and stories penned in modern times.
These literary materials have provided fruitful room for imagination for martial arts films, especially in terms of mythologizing the extraordinary skills of the fighting masters. In stories of this type, the hero is typically an expert swordsman who fights honorably for some worthy cause. And the many mystical techniques which, according to the martial arts tradition, these heroes possessed--from jumping on roofs and walking on walls to flying through the air, from using every type of weapon to creating gusts of wind that could blow opponents off their feet--come alive in the movies.
Films of this type had a "golden age" of sorts back in the late 1930s. Shanghai film companies made some 400 films between 1928 and 1931, of which martial arts themes accounted for 60%.
In 1949, many mainland film-makers moved to Hong Kong. Not only did they bring with them the swordsmen legends, even more importantly, they tapped into the pool of southern martial arts heroes in Cantonese-language films, such as the Guangdong folk hero Huang Feihong. Thus, in addition to the mysterious world of the high-flying swordsmen, hand-to-hand kungfu fighters began to be portrayed in films in the late 1950s.
The legends of the Southern Shaolin kungfu heroes, especially popular in the late Qing and early Republican periods, not only added down-to-earth input to the period films, "even more important," avers Huang Chien-yeh, "was the way they stirred up martial arts nationalism." In comparison with the films of miracle-working swordsmen, kungfu movies not only depicted fighting more realistically, they also showed different social strata.
Southern Shaolin conquers all
The martial arts tradition of the 1950s has since been carried forward, first in the Shaolin series of director Chang Cheh, and then in the Bruce Lee fad and the Southern kungfu films of Lau Kar Leung in the 1970s, and most recently in the kungfu comedies of Samo Hung and Jackie Chan.
But why has this tradition been carried on in Hong Kong but not in Taiwan?
Huang Chien-yeh suggests that "formula films are especially dependent on a film industry and division of labor," which Taiwan has lacked. Another factor is difference in social backgrounds. Hong Kong people, caught between the Crown Colony and the mother country, are heavily influenced both by traditional values and by the West. Traditional martial arts films are all about duty and honor, and their anti-Qing dynasty themes could have an underlying "anti-British" mood, strengthening traditions of filial piety and righteous behavior.
In the 1990s, when Hong Kong director Tsui Hark reconstructed the nationalist hero Huang Feihong, long an important part of childhood memories for people in Hong Kong, this was the equivalent of kungfu films completely entering the mainstream.
Kungfu films have had a stable audience in both Hong Kong and Taiwan for many years now. The films have always kept up with the times. They are both popular with viewers and also provide film scholars with an insight into overall social ideology in a given period.
Ma Jiawei, a Hong Kong writer, noted in an article that if one compares the films of the 1960s (like One-Armed Swordsman), the Bruce Lee trend in the 1970s, and the "hero films" of the 1980s, it can be seen that these three categories all subtly conform to the social development of Hong Kong in those decades.
He wrote, "In the 1960s, Hong Kong people wanted to be 'one-armed swordsmen,' working hard to make it in the world. In the 1970s, everybody in Hong Kong wanted to be a Bruce Lee, defeating the foreign devils and telling the world 'I am not what I used to be.' In the 1980s, people wanted to be Brother Mark, struggling to take back the wealth and social position that someone at their side had stolen from them."
Enter the dragons
Film ideology is something that the creators reveal unwittingly. It seems that the reliance on kungfu movies for Chinese film to enter the international market was also unintentional.
It was in 1971 that Bruce Lee returned to Hong Kong and became famous with The Big Boss. Strictly speaking, none of the four films he made in the next three years had great artistic merit. Instead, his film legend was built on a conjunction between his personal charisma and the era.
He was the first Chinese star to break the "no Chinese or dogs allowed" barrier. Scenes in his films showed him kicking such a sign (said to adorn Western parks in pre-revolutionary Shanghai) to bits, and smashing a Japanese villain with a placard reading "sick man of East Asia." All are images the long-oppressed Chinese deeply remember.
The early 1970s were marked by the expulsion of Taiwan from the UN, the oil crisis, the Japanese occupation of the Taioyutai Islands, and the spread of international appeasement. The mood of disappointment felt by people was vented through Bruce Lee.
By the 1990s, the kungfu films of Jackie Chan carried a very different meaning than Lee's pictures.
Although Chan got his foothold in cinema as the "heir to Bruce Lee," he successfully developed a unique style of his own. By becoming a martial arts hero with a comic bent, he definitively moved out of Lee's shadow. Bruce Lee was a nationalist hero who vented Chinese people's frustrations; Chan has been a happy-go-lucky common man who takes what fate delivers.
With regard to this point, Chan says, "Every martial artist wanted to become famous by beating Bruce Lee, but nobody is interested in beating me. Children like me, and girls love me, while mothers look at me like a son." He adds, "Lee's kicks were directed upward, mine are directed down. He was serious, I am light-hearted."
Twenty years ago Bruce Lee used body language to smash the sign "sick man of East Asia" with his own hands. Today, 20 years later, Jackie Chan also hopes to respond to the Western world as an Asian hero.
Fate of the hero
Chan's movies are light and fun, and are full of stimulating high-risk action scenes. He only has to put out a new film and it goes right to the top of the charts for the summer holiday or Chinese New Year.
But his kind of "high-risk" film has also aroused some discussion.
One critic says, "To put it harshly, he is exploiting himself to make a movie." If now he jumps down from three stories up, the next time it will be from ten stories. Each stunt must be more daring, more exciting than the last, each scene most be bigger and more elaborate, and each budget larger; only then will the audience keep yelling for more.
"The technological face of modern urban life means that Chan faces more enemies than just drug dealers and gang bosses, but also skyscrapers, shopping malls, and traffic. Chan has always challenged his environment, leaping barrier after barrier, overcoming speed and height with disregard for his life," says Peggy Chiao.
She stresses that the Bruce Lee-type kungfu myths marked a sharp break from the intellectual ideology of previous films. Lee's characters had low social status, and he had to use his only asset--his body--to take on the foreigners.
The result of Jackie Chan's comedies may be the undermining of the kungfu myth. Yet, through the plausibility of his amazing action scenes, he also reaffirms the existence of the myth. The outtakes at the end of the film are even more so a romanticiza-tion of the process of manufacturing this myth.
But is it Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan who make the martial arts myth, or the martial arts myth that makes Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan? If the latter, then Chinese kungfu action films will continue to draw in audiences around the world, whatever the name of the hero.
p.29Rumble in the Bronx (courtesy of Golden Harvest Films)
p.30(above)Drunken Master (1978). In this comedy Jackie Chan plays a mischievous acolyte who, in time-honored fashion, wishes to avenge his martial arts master. Chan's kungfu skills plus his humorously constructed fight scenes combined to pioneer the genre of "action comedies." (photo courtesy of Huang Jen)
(down)Crime Story (1993), the story of the kidnapping of a wealthy Hong Kong businessman's son. To save him, modern cop Jackie Chan had to put aside his funny side for a while and act out a street gun battle. (courtesy of Golden Harvest Films)
p.32The main characters in Taiwan's movies in the 1960s could be summed up as "a lot of lovers, a lot of warriors, and a few ghosts." The two main types were kungfu films, emphasizing male friendship, and love stories. Many stars made their names in the martial arts films--Wang Yu, Chiang Ta-wei, and Ti Lung. (photo courtesy of Huang Jen)
p.33(left)Dragon Gate Inn (1967). It tells the story of a loyal and incorruptible martial arts hero who fights a battle against the forces of evil to protect the future generations of good and loyal families. (photo courtesy of Huang Jen)
(right)The Cantonese folk hero Huang Fei-hung is an important part of the memories of middle-aged people in Hong Kong. The legend was reinterpreted in the 1990s by director Tsui Hark, with Jet Li becoming a populist hero of the new generation. (photo courtesy of Long Shong Pictures)
p.34Jackie Chan's death-defying acting has become a focus of international attention. From time to time he is injured, but so long as fans love to watch his movies he will go to ever greater heights. (courtesy of Golden Harvest Films)
p.35Bruce Lee's real-life kungfu skills reached such a point that he seemed able to do anything at will. His kicks appeared to go around 180 degrees. (Sinorama file photo)
Crime Story （1993）, the story of the kidnapping of a wealthy Hong Kong businessman's son. To save him, modern cop Jackie Chan had to put aside his funny side for a while and act out a street gun battle. （courtesy of Golden Harvest Films）
The main characters in Taiwan's movies in the 1960s could be summed up as "a lot of lovers, a lot of warriors, and a few ghosts." The two main types were kungfu films, emphasizing male friendship, and love stories. Many stars made their names in the martial arts films-Wang Yu, Chiang Ta-wei, and Ti Lung. （photo courtesy of Huang Jen）
Dragon Gate Inn （1967）. It tells the story of a loyal and incorruptible martial arts hero who fights a battle against the forces of evil to protect the future generations of good and loyal families. （photo courtesy of Huang Jen）
The Cantonese folk hero Huang Fei-hung is an important part of the memories of middle-aged people in Hong Kong. The legend was reinterpreted in the 1990s by director Tsui Hark, with Jet Li becoming a populist hero of the new generation. （photo courtesy of Long Shong Pictures）
Jackie Chan's death-defying acting has become a focus of international attention. From time to time he is injured, but so long as fans love to watch his movies he will go to e ver greater heights. （courtesy of Golden Harvest Films）
Bruce Lee's real-life kungfu skills reached such a point that he seemed able to do anything at will. His kicks appeared to go around 180 degrees. （Sinorama file photo）
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