commentary 3

Chapter Title: Aesthetics in Action: Kungfu, Gunplay, and Cinematic Expressivity

Chapter Author(s): David Bordwell Book Title: At Full Speed

Book Subtitle: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World

Book Editor(s): Esther C. M. Yau

Published by: University of Minnesota Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttv5g1.7

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Part II

In Action

and Entertainment,Aesthetics,

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C H A P T E R T H R E E

Aesthetics in Action: Kungfu, Gunplay, and Cinematic Expressivity

David Bordwell

In 1996 a major American publisher issued Sex and Zen and a Bullet in the Head, a guide to what the authors consider the most headbanging, let-'er-rip filmmaking on the planet. "Gone are the flying pigtails and contrived fist-

thuds of your father's favorite chopsockies," the blurb on the back tells us. Sex and Zen and a Bullet in the Head is a hilarious read, and the peppy plot syn- opses play up the films as seedy, sexy, bloody, and nutty. But the authors' in-

troduction warns that "film school polemics," dosed with "pointy-headed,

white-wine-and-baked-brie philosophizing," cannot adequately describe the

"scalding propulsion" of these movies.1

These barbs strike me like a flurry of ninja throwing stars. I am old enough

to be the father of the young fans, and my love for martial arts films goes back

to the 1974 double bill of Fist of Fury [Jingwu Men] and Five Fingers of Death (also known as King Boxer [Tianxia Diyi Quan]) in the Majestic Theatre in Madison, Wisconsin. Even worse, I am a film studies professor. I do not drink

white wine or eat baked brie, but I do spend time trying to figure out what

makes movies work. I find myself asking questions. How, for instance, is it

possible for Hong Kong action movies to trigger such unbridled passions?

How are they put together? How do they exploit the film medium? What is

the craft behind them? After you walk out of the best Hong Kong action

movies you are charged up, you feel that you can do anything. How can mere

movies create such feelings?

This pointy-headed essay explores some answers to these questions. The

itinerary will take us through contemporary Hollywood, with side trips to

some technicalities of film style and some detours into the writings of that

older fan of Asian action, Sergei Eisenstein. I will also try to show that if we

want to understand these movies as well as enjoy them, it turns out that film-

school polemics can actually help.

During the 19805 the action picture — the cop movie, the crime thriller,

the adventure film, the space opera, the movie of chase and combat— 73

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74 I DAVID B O R D W E L L

became one of the dominant Hollywood genres. Often such films won places

on the top ten box office grossers list, while the home video boom assured an

almost endless stream of less prestigious product. The genre extended stylis-

tic strategies that had been evident in films such as Goldfinger (1964), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Bullitt (1968), The Wild Bunch (1969), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), and The French Connection (1971). By the time the action revival emerged in Road Warrior (1981), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), 48 Hours (1982), and other films, directors could draw upon a range of con- ventional techniques.

Consider a sequence in Richard Donner's Lethal Weapon (1987). In the climactic chase, Mel Gibson has escaped from Gary Busey's torture cham-

ber and now pursues him through the night streets of Los Angeles. Busey

seizes a passing car, and Gibson sprints through traffic after him. From an

overpass, Gibson fires at Busey's car. The engine bursts into flames and Busey

smashes into a telephone pole. As Gibson approaches, Busey commandeers

another car just as Gibson is struck by a passing cab.

Donner handles this situation in ways typical of Hollywood action se-

quences. The cutting is rapid, creating an average shot length of two and a half seconds. No one will make an action picture in long takes, of course, but

Donner, like most of his Hollywood peers, creates a fairly jerky rhythm by cutting after a movement has begun and before it is completed, even when

the second shot shows an entirely different action. For instance, when Gib-

son leaves Danny Glover behind at a lamppost, Glover starts to leave the

shot. But Donner does not give him what editors call a "clean" exit; the next

shot interrupts Glover in the middle of his movement. "The axiom of action

cutting," claims the film editor Richard Marks, "is, never complete an ac-

tion. Always leave it incomplete so it keeps the forward momentum of the

sequence."2 Moreover, two-thirds of Donner's shots contain some camera

movement (panning, reframing, tracking, craning down, and the like). And

Gibson is virtually never in repose. Except when he stops to fire at Busey's

getaway car, he races down streets across lanes of traffic, even leaping up onto

cars parked by the curb.

This scene seems to me characteristic of the Hollywood approach in try-

ing to produce an overwhelming but loose and sketchy impression of physi- cal activity. There is, for instance, no effort to dramatize the fact that Gibson's

run through traffic is dangerous. Although he runs through traffic, he never

comes close to any moving vehicle. Donner's long lenses, in lessening ap-

parent distances between Gibson and the background traffic, merely suggest

that he might eventually be in danger. There is a moment early on when it

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A E S T H E T I C S IN A C T I O N | 75

seems that a car might strike him from behind, but Donner cuts away to

Busey, and when we return to Gibson later, the car has disappeared. True, at

the scenes climax Gibson is hit by a car, but now Donner has recourse to the

well-established device of what V. I. Pudovkin called "constructive editing."3

No overall view establishes that Gibson is at risk. Instead we get ten quick

shots of slowing taxicab wheels, the drivers startled face, and then shots of

Gibson (actually a stunt man) already rolling around on the hood of the car

he is flung off. The crucial action of the car hitting the Gibson character is

completely omitted.

Hong Kong fans rightly object to such bogus action, but we can general-

ize from their annoyance. The sequence gives us the idea: we understand

that the car strikes Gibson, but the collision is not directly delineated, and

thus the scene has no wallop. In substituting an editing ellipsis for a more di-

rect presentation, this passage exemplifies a broader strategy. Put generally,

the actors performance is minimized and other cinematic techniques com-

pensate for it. The rapid cutting, constant camera movement, and dramatic

music and sound effects must labor to generate an excitement that is not

primed by the concrete event taking place before the lens.

Stunts and special effects likewise deemphasize the actors performance.

Donner gives pride of place to the sparks struck by bullets and above all to a

series of auto stunts. Busey skids around corners, drives the wrong way on a

one-way street, and steers a flaming car into a telephone pole, actions that are

dwelt upon in extreme long shots. In fact, Donner favors medium long shots,

long shots, and even extreme long shots throughout the sequence. He thus

assures himself that the action is broadly covered; but it sets the action, how-

ever spectacular, at a considerable distance. Donner offers us few close-ups

of characters, giving Busey and Gibson one quick reaction shot apiece; most

of the close-ups show parts of the pockmarked car. Moreover, the line of

movement is constantly broken by impediments (parked cars that Gibson

must hop over) and countermovements (traffic passing to and fro), so the

shots register as fairly cluttered.

The sequence is, then, physically unspecific in two respects. First, the

concreteness of the individual actions is sacrificed to a broad sense that some-

thing dynamic is going on. Second, instead of conveying a specific expressiv

quality — Gibson's risky but tenacious pursuit, Busey's desperation in the face

of impending capture — t h e nervous busyness of the style creates a relatively

undifferentiated visceral arousal. We understand that Gibson is in danger,

but we do not have any reason to sense it. The result is a diffuse feeling of

general excitement.

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76 | DAVID B O R D W E L L

Admittedly, this nervous style can be considered somewhat realistic, in that

such a chase in real-life traffic would create graceless, helter-skelter move-

ment. And even the interruptive cutting and occasional jerky camera move-

ment can be justified as plausibly reflecting the messiness of extreme action

in the world we know. But there is a cost as well. Michael Bay, director of

The Rock, explains how he shot inserts for the chase through San Francisco:

I film actors driving in these scenes from a dolly a few feet in front of

a stationary car. I do whip pans and whip zooms and violently shake

the camera, trying to make the whole screen rumble. Used in

snippets, it looks as if the actors are driving ferociously.4

The director seeks to suggest the ferocity of the action solely through camera-

work. But when only the screen rumbles, we carry away just an impression of

a violent chase. And the actor has almost nothing to do, since the cinema-

tography is carrying the emotional jolt of the movements.

During the 19805 there emerged two broad approaches to creating this

rough sense of incessant movement. The busy, sketchy approach typified

by Lethal Weapon can be found as well in the Beverly Hills Cop series, Die Hard 2 (1990), and Heat (1995). The jerkiness of this style reaches a kind of apogee in The Rock's Humvee chase, with its i.2-second average shot length and the spasmodic camerawork of which Bay is so proud. Here the

aim is to create the impression that everything is in frantic motion. People

lurch about, vehicles smash up, the handheld camera wobbles, and cuts frac-

ture every instant of action into a barrage of brief, sometimes barely legible

images.

Admittedly, a more poised and clean-line approach also emerged during

the 19805. It relies on wide-angle compositions, more complex staging, and

somewhat more legible shot design. This style is in evidence in the Indiana

Jones series, as well as in Aliens (1986), the original Die Hard (1988), The Fugitive (1993), and Speed (1994). Still, these films remain committed to the belief that an action scene must move, and move incessantly. All other things

being equal, the goal is constant and continual activity.

This overall strategy and the specific stylistic devices that fulfill it have

been enormously influential on action pictures around the world. But there

are significant differences, and these are, I submit, one source of the intuitive

sense that something original is going on in the Hong Kong action cinema.

In Law Man's cop thriller Hearty Response [Yi Gai Yun Tian] (1986), a po- lice officer (Chow Yun-fat) breaks into a tattoo parlor. There he finds that a

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A E S T H E T I C S IN A C T I O N | 77

young woman (Joey Wong) has been tattooed and raped by her former boy-

friend. The tattooist leaps out the window and Chow gives chase, followed

quickly by Joey, who has grabbed a gun. As Chow searches the streets, the tat-

tooist tries to run him down by smashing a car through a fence. But Joey

catches up with him and fires, wounding him just before she is struck by a

car. Still, she runs on, chasing the rapist into a nightclub. When Chow dis-

covers the two, a gunfight ensues. Chow blocks a bullet meant for Joey; she

then advances on the tattooist and, sobbing with nervous rage, fires bullet

after bullet into his body.

This climactic sequence is virtually identical in length to the Lethal Weapon chase, but it offers instructive stylistic contrasts.5 A serious Hong Kong fan will note immediately Law Man's much more vivid handling of the

car accident. After wounding her rapist with her first bullet, Joey starts to run

across the street toward him. Cut to a shot taken from the front seat of a car

bearing down on her. The image creates an immediate and concrete sense

of danger that mere glimpses of tires and a drivers expression cannot sum-

mon up: the shot shows the car about to hit her. Cut to a reverse angle, with

the car approaching the camera and going into a skid as she continues across

the street. The car sideswipes her and knocks her out of the frame. In a still

closer view, she hits the sidewalk and rolls bumpily across the pavement to

the right. Cut to a tight, brief shot of the skidding car smashing into another

car. The last shot shows her still rolling, now to the left, before she slaps down

her hands to stop herself. She pauses briefly to gather strength before rising

to pursue her quarry.

Of course, the Hearty Response action was faked in the sense that a stunt man (in wig and miniskirt) took the impact and the fall. Nonetheless, the ki-

netic impact of the action is much stronger than in Lethal Weapon. This is because we register in a straightforward way the impending collision and the

sickening thud of the car against body. The controlled execution of the act

was put at the center of the mise-en-scene, and other film techniques were

devoted to presenting it vividly. Each shot has the schematic clarity of a car-

toon panel, and the lighting renders everything in bold relief. No telephoto

lens creates a safe illusion of risk; no elliptical editing gets by with fragments

of action. The final crash of the car into another vehicle is extremely modest

by Hollywood standards, and it is given only one shot, as if we needed only

to see where it ended up and to feel again the vehicles deadly momentum.

In five shots adding up to six seconds, a range of film techniques has been

used to put the emphasis squarely on the sheer physical and emotional force

of the action.

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78 | DAVID B O R D W E L L

Naturally, we must remember that U.S. studio executives were probably

more squeamish about showing a body ricocheting off a car than the Hong

Kong censor was. And certainly the low budget of Hearty Response forces Law Man to create his thrills cheaply. But these factors reveal only that Law

Man, like other directors, has turned the opportunities and constraints of his

filmmaking situation to artistic advantage. Moreover, we might expect a low-

budget production to have plenty of recourse to shortcuts like Pudovkin's

constructive editing. Here the big-budget picture, eager to protect its star and

its audiences sensibilities, embraces the cheaper and more roundabout so-

lution, while the exploitation picture gives us the event more vividly.

Much the same could be said of the tattooist's attack on Chow Yun-fat,

a nine-second barrage of trim medium long shots and close-ups in which

Chow dodges a car and then saves a boy from being run down. As in the col-

lision with Joey Wong, Chow's split-second avoidance of the car relies on

artifice, but not the sort that, as Andre Bazin puts it, turns an actual event into

something imaginary. Someone, if not Chow, very nearly gets smashed.

My key point is not that Hong Kong films employ death-defying stunts;

that is not news. What is important is that the stunts are staged, shot, and cut

for readability. In the auto's lunges at Chow, the rapidity of our uptake starts

from the smoothness and cogency of the physical action that is shown. The

entire Hearty Response sequence is even more quickly cut than the passage from Lethal Weapon, with an average shot length of about one and a half sec- onds; but it does not look as skittish. This is because the shots tend to be read-

able at a glance — fairly close, simply composed, and displaying only one or

two trajectories of movement. And, significantly, Law Man uses half as many

moving camera shots as Donner does, thereby making it all the more impor-

tant for the action in front of the lens to engage our attention.

The lesson of this comparison is quite general. If Hollywood movies

sketch a pervasive but often inexact sense of physical action, the Hong Kong

norm aims to maximize the actions legibility. From the 19605 swordplay film

and 19705 kungfu movies to the cop movies and revived wuxia pian of the 19805 and 19905, this filmmaking tradition has put the graceful body at the

center of its mise-en-scene. In order to follow the plot, one must be con-

stantly apprised of the actors behavior, down to minute changes of posture,

stance, or regard. Like Soviet films of the 19205, which took their inspiration

from the precise gymnastics of popular theater, Hong Kong cinema has em-

phasized the concreteness and clarity of each gesture. Doubtless, traditions

of martial arts and Peking opera — cultural factors quite different from those

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A E S T H E T I C S IN A C T I O N | 79

governing Hollywood style —have been central to this aesthetic, but I am not

competent to trace out lines of influence here. I want to concentrate on some

principles of film style governing action sequences.

How to achieve such gestural clarity on film? Several important tactics are

on view in your fathers prototypical kungfu film of the igyos or early igSos.6

Most obviously, the director must provide an unobstructed view of the ac-

tion. The bare stretch of earth that provides the arena for so many kungfu duels, though often the sign of a skimpy budget, has the virtue of making sa-

lient every instant of the fight. By contrast to Bay's efforts to make his screen

rumble, Hong Kong cinematography seeks not to hide the action. The base-

line is the long shot or medium long shot, with closer views serving to enlarge

details or offer breathing space between stretches of combat.

At times, of course, difficult or impossible physical feats may be faked by

means of the "Kuleshov effect," as when cutaways cover tremendous leaps or

dexterous juggling. But again, the presentation of these feats will be dia-

grammatically clear. To take a typical instance: In Chu Yuan's 1972 film The Killer (also known as Sacred Knives of Vengeance [Da Sha Shou]), some thugs invade the hero's room. He is concealed in the rafters watching them.

A low-angle shot shows him leaping down, and as he passes out of the lower

frame edge he comes down into a long shot of the group of men. Some

space has been reserved in the center of the frame for him, and as soon as he

hits the floor he springs up (thanks, presumably, to a mini-trampoline) and

plunges head first through a window, already visible in the rear of the set.

Cut to a new angle of him diving through the window, somersaulting over

the porch, and landing in the courtyard, ready to face more gang members,

all conveniently spread out to create a vacant spot for him to occupy. The

staging cooperates with the cutting to make each leap and landing maxi-

mally evident. Similarly, key factors of manual combat — the demeanor of each fighter,

and especially the exact distance between them — must be depicted unam-

biguously. Cinematography enters not as a substitute for the physical feat but

as an enhancer of it, as when zooms show a detail of the fight or when slow

motion allows us to examine an action that would otherwise pass too quickly.

Within the martial artist's performance, clarity can be achieved not only

through the precision of the movement but also by an effort to focus the en-

tire body's energy in each gesture. Eisenstein can help us understand the lat-

ter tactic a bit better. He believed that every movement activates the entire

body, and so in theater and film one must "sell" each action by exaggerating

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80 I DAVID B O R D W E L L

the body's role in forming it. Eisenstein imagines how one might inject ki-

netic expressivity into a line of dialogue like "But there are two," with the

actor showing two upraised fingers on the final word.

How much the persuasiveness of the phrase itself will be strengthened,

the expressiveness of the intonation, if on the first words, you make

a recoil movement with the body while raising the elbow, and then

with an energetic movement you throw the torso and the hand with

the extended fingers forward. Furthermore, the braking of the

wrist will be so strongly directed that the wrist will vibrate (like a

metronome).7

This sort of stylized clarity, verging on cartoon movement, is quite differ-

ent from the more subdued performance style characteristic of contempo-

rary Hollywood acting, which tends to emphasize the face rather than the

entire body. When called upon to create gestures, todays American actor pro-

duces something approximate, perhaps more realistic but also less sharply

defined than the Eisenstein ideal. At the end of our Lethal Weapon scene, when Gibson gets up after the taxicab accident, he starts to spar with the

driver before dropping his guard and half-sweeping his hands up and down

in a mixture of dismissiveness and apology. The gestures are tentative and in-

complete, insufficiently articulated.

By contrast, in the Hong Kong action sequence actors leap, twist, and

scramble with an energetic explicitness that reveals a dynamic of forces at

work on the entire body. No one just falls down. In Hearty Response Joey Wong hits the ground sideways in a vigorous roll that testifies to the pitch and

impetus of the launching force. Or the actor may land with a splat, arms and

legs splayed wide, or on his neck or spine, creating the very picture of an awk-

ward, painful fall. By exploiting all the actors limbs, the Hong Kong action

film can present the specifics of each action with diagrammatic clarity.

This tendency is aided by the actor's ability to build the performance out

of fast, crisp gestures. The Hong Kong performer has recourse to something

like Eisenstein's idea of recoil. For the actors key movements are often sepa- rated by noticeable points of stasis. We might describe this as the pause-burst- pause pattern. A punch lands, and there is a pause; it misses, and the ex-

tended arm is held poised, if only for a fraction of a second. The hero leaps

and lands, resting in place briefly. The tattooist in Hearty Response glances back to see Joey gaining on him; instead of glancing over his shoulder, as he

might in a Hollywood film, he runs frantically, stops, swivels his head, regis-

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A E S T H E T I C S IN A C T I O N | 81

ters Joey's pursuit, swivels his head again, and then pounds downstairs into

the nightclub. A pause often enframes each instant of action, giving it a dis-

crete, vivid identity. The result is a kind of physics of combat and pursuit: out

of quiescence rises a short, sharp action, which ceases as energy is switched

off and stored for the next action. A parallel strategy rules the overall scene of

fight or pursuit: moments of near-absolute stillness alternate with bursts of

smooth, rapid-fire activity.

Somewhat like meter in music, the pause-burst-pause pattern creates a regular and recognizable pulse. Any one piece of combat can realize this ac-

centual pattern in different rhythms and tempos. Some action choreographers

sustain the pauses by dwelling on blocks and parries, achieving remarkable

comic effects in such films as Yuen Wo-ping's Snake in the Eagle's Shadow [Shexing Diaoshou] (1978) and Dance of the Drunken Mantis [Nan Bei Jui Quan] (1979). Sammo Hung and Jackie Chan seek a faster pace, so they allow only a split second of pause between the lightning punches and kicks.

Both artists enhance this presto tempo with fast-motion cinematography.

A beautiful example of a more measured rhythm occurs early in Lau Kar-

leong's Legendary Weapons of China [Shibaban Wuyi] (1982). In an inn, two guests, each bent on assassinating a swordsman, unknowingly converge in a

storeroom above his room. Their attempts to stab through the floorboards to

his bed are played out in rhyming thrusts and dodges, each conveyed in a

shot with its own pause-burst-pause rhythm. When the swordsman eludes

them, the two assassins begin to fight each other. In one shot the young man

flings a dart at the woman; in the reverse shot she dodges away and the dart

plinks into a grain sack beside her. (Beat.) A closer view of her shows her star-

ing at the dart. (Beat.) Then she flings a claw-headed weapon. Reverse angle:

he ducks and it clatters against a rake. A new angle shows the rake in the fore-

ground, out of focus. (Beat.) Then the rake falls abruptly backward as she

yanks on the cable attached to the weapon. In the next shot, the rake con-

tinues to fall and strikes the young man. (Beat.) Now the young man lies in

the foreground under the rake while the young woman crouches in the

background. (Beat.) She glances down through the floorboards to see if any-

one below has heard. (Beat.) Throughout, the scene manifests a perceptible

pulse in the pause-burst-pause pattern.

For a parallel instance from a recent policier we need look no further than John Woo's The Killer [Diexue Shuangxiong] (1989). The famous gun-to-gun confrontation between Chow Yun-fat and Danny Lee depends on briskly al-

ternating the swift movements of each one's pistol hand with long periods of

immobility (Figure i). Less obvious is the way in which the final shootout

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82 | D A V I D B O R D W E L L

of Bodyguard from Beijing [Zhongnanhai Baobiao] (1994) employs the crisp rhythm laid down at the very start of the film. Jet Li is being addressed by his

superior officer. In one shot Li is sitting calmly (pause; Figure 2), but at the cut his head is already popping up across the lower frame edge (burst; Figure 3) to stop smartly before his superior (pause; Figure 4).

A director can squeeze the pause-burst-pause pattern into glances and

small gestures within confined spaces. In the climactic fight of Bodyguard from Beijing, the villains gang has invaded the heroine's living room, and Li must fight them in the dark. At the beginning of one passage, Li twists and

rolls into view before his face rises abruptly into close-up (burst), immedi-

ately freezing warily (pause; Figure 5). Looking down, he sees a sneaker pok-

ing out from behind a pillar (Figure 6). (Beat.) Li's pistol snaps abruptly into the shot and fires (Figure 7). (Beat.) In a reverse angle, we see Li from a low

angle as the opponent drops down into the foreground (Figure 8). Li's pistol

snaps up and fires again (Figure 9) and his victim is hurled out of the frame

(Figure 10). The metronomic fall and rise of the gun arm suggest a robotic

efficiency appropriate to the killer-automaton Li plays.

Very likely the martial arts tradition, with its repertory of forms and

combinations, cultivated a belief that combat involved a balance between

poised stillness and swift attack or defense. Possibly this tendency was re-

inforced by the long pauses and outbursts of violence to be found in Sergio

Leone's influential westerns. And perhaps the technique owes something to

the Peking opera tradition of Hang hsiang ("displaying"), which presents a frozen pose assumed for an instant after an acrobatic feat. (Significantly,

Asian theater was also an important source of Eisenstein's theory of expres-

sive movement: the instantaneous shift from action to pose is akin to the

"transitionless acting" he found in kabuki.8)

The pause-burst-pause pattern is not visible in every Hong Kong action

film, but it seems to occur so rarely in Hollywood action films that we can

treat it as an important mark of difference. In Lethal Weapon the continual, often lumbering movements of the actors do not isolate discrete gestures on

this moment-by-moment basis. Similarly, all the storyboarders in the world

cannot give Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) a visual pulse on celluloid. The opening fight scene in the Shanghai nightclub is at once over-

and underwrought because its compositions and cutting impose a rhythm on

haphazard runs and dives, while the film's protracted climax, showing Jones

in a mine tunnel grappling with a thuggee on a conveyor belt, presents a vague, achingly slow tussle. In Hollywood, too often when a fight scene is

fast, it is not clear, and when it is clear, it looks laborious.

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Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

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Figure 4

Figure 5

Figure 6

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Figure 7

Figure 8

Figure 9

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86 DAVID B O R D W E L L

Figure 10

So when fans praise a Woo or Ringo Lam sequence for its "continuous

action," I am suggesting a slight correction. It is Hollywood that relies on

continuous hustle, and the sequence often suffers from it. One source of a

Hong Kong sequence's power is a clarity born of discontinuity, of lightning

switches between quick, precise gestures and punctuating poses. This stac-

cato performance tactic gives a fistfight or gun battle or martial arts bout a

visual snap almost completely lacking in the American action picture.

The vividness of Hong Kong action depends on more than visual intelli-

gibility. There is as well what we can call the expressive amplification of ac- tion. At bottom, this tactic pushes beyond Western norms of restraint and

plausibility— bypassing that appeal to realism that makes the typical Western

action scene comparatively diffuse in its stylistic organization and emotional

appeal. Like a good caricature, the Hong Kong action sequence selects and

exaggerates for a precise effect. The Hong Kong action sequence arrests us

not because it mimics normal behavior but because it felicitously magnifies

the most emotion-arousing features of pursuit or combat. The stylization of

Eisenstein's "But there are two" line not only clarifies the gesture and the

meaning; it also provides expressive thrust and provokes a distinct response

in the audience. A Hong Kong punch or tumble or agonized death may seem

cartoonish to viewers who do not recognize that in this tradition every

movement gains its proper impact from being "sold" in Eisenstein's sense.

Expressive amplification is one major way in which the Hong Kong film, as the fans like to say, goes over the top.

I call this tendency expressive amplification because it seeks to charac- terize each chase or fight quite emotionally. A given sequence will vividly

exemplify power, elegance, vengeful fury, awkwardness, indefatigability, or

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AESTHETICS IN ACTION | 87

some combination of such qualities. In our Hearty Response sequence, Joey Wong's performance is defined by her frantic, quavering desperation mixed

with a reckless impulse for vengeance. This informs her every action — firing

at the tattooist, scrambling up from the pavement, crumpling under his blows

in the nightclub, and finally advancing, pistol trembling, on her trapped at-

tacker. In addition, a scene can articulate contrasting expressive qualities,

building emotion by their alternation. In Woo's Killer, the gangsters who have invaded Johns apartment die in grotesque poses of slow-motion agony

while in separate shots he cruises serenely through the haze.

A Hollywood action scene may occasionally display such expressive qual-

ities, but it tends not to be as sharply delineated on a moment-by-moment

basis. In our Lethal Weapon case, we know that Mel Gibson is furious, but although he races along the pavement urgently, nothing else in his demeanor

evokes the rage his character is presumably feeling. And Donner supplies

no close-ups comparable to those that specify the emotional flow in Hearty Response.

Nor does much emphasis fall upon the sheer physical effort Gibson in-

vests; unlike Hong Kong characters, he never gets so winded he must col-

lapse in tears. A performer like Jackie Chan creates an extended suite of pos-

tures and facial gymnastics just in order to exhibit the strain of executing a stunt. This can be played for laughs, as Chan frequently does when, after

fiercely delivering a blow, he half-turns to hide his smarting hand. In Fong Sai-Yuk [Fang Shiyu] (1993), after a ferocious barrage of blows to the villain, our hero steps back, scrunches up his face, and suddenly flaps his arms

frantically, creating an unmistakable picture of shooting, stinging pain. For

such reasons, the expressive characterization of the action may well mix in

recognition of the physical harm it involves. The hair-raising stunts of Jackie

Chan, Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao, and many other adepts modify the actions

dominant expressive quality — say, resourcefulness or tenacity — by remind-

ing us how easily the hero might be hurt.

I call this tendency expressive amplification because the emotional quali- ties are not presented laconically; the filmic handling magnifies them. Thus,

the actor may exaggerate the gesture to underlie its expressive quality, as

Jet Li does in the Fong Sai-Yuk instance. Or the expressive quality may be amplified through ensemble playing, the exchange and rhyming of gestures

among the performers. This was of course a staple of the 19705 martial arts

film. Later in the decade, the comic kungfu movies turned each combat ep- isode into a distinctive, almost dancelike symmetry of action and reaction.

The same tendency was developed in the heroic gunplay movies of the 19805.

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88 I DAVID B O R D W E L L

The synchronized running, leaping, and diving of Waise Lee and his partner

in the incendiary climax of The Big Heat (1988) add up virtually to a circus act. By American standards, many Hong Kong films (of all genres) look

broadly played, perhaps seeming closer to silent film conventions than to

those of post-Method Hollywood. But I suggest that this is part of a distinct

aesthetic, in which expressive amplification is central to the performance of

actor and ensemble. The Hong Kong cinema goes beyond the performance and uses other

film techniques to amplify the expressive dimensions of the action. Con-

sider, for instance, the much-maligned zoom shots of the 19708 kungfu films. The rapid zoom itself often manifests the pause-burst-pause pattern found at

the level of the performance, as pose-strike-pose can be underscored by static

framing—fast zoom—static framing. Moreover, the zoom often intensifies the

expressive qualities of the bodies' postures and movements. Although 19805

action films tend to avoid the zoom, the technique illustrates the tendency of

the Hong Kong tradition to take a commonplace stylistic device and exploit

it to make the action larger than life.

Editing also offers a rich array of tactics for amplifying the action, and

here the 19805 action picture owes an even larger debt to the martial arts pic-

ture. Editing can, as in the hero's leap and bounce in Sacred Knives of Vengeance, create a smooth continuity of action, tracing out the geometry of the body's trajectory. Cuts can mark the pause-burst-pause pattern in a vari-

ety of ways. The rapid action may start at the end of one shot, continue across

one or more shots, and halt in a final shot. Or the pause-burst-pause pattern

may be confined to a single shot, and a series of shots may play the actions off

against one another. Right before the moment I have already discussed in

Legendary Weapons of China, the assassins hop abruptly apart, each one as- signed a separate shot and a path that mirrors that of the other.

The expressive force of running, jumping, punching, or kicking can also

be strengthened by overlapping editing. Repeating a portion of the move-

ment at the cut is common in the Hollywood action picture, often in order

to fake stunts like Mel Gibsons roll across the taxicab hood. In Hong Kong,

however, overlapping serves to clarify key gestures by distending the time

they take onscreen. Indeed, Hong Kong directors often unabashedly repeat

entire actions. The most famous examples are Jackie Chan's instant-replay

stunts, such as the fall from the clock in Project A [A Jihua] (1983), the slide down the post in the climactic mall fight in Police Story [Jingcha Gushi] (1985), and his leap from a motorcycle to a pallet dangling from a crane in

Armour of God II [Feiying ]ihua] (1991). Another example is Conan Lee's ap- palling plunge from a lamppost in Tiger on the Beat II [Laohu Chugeng II]

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A E S T H E T I C S IN A C T I O N | 89

(1989). One way to make an action transparently evident is simply to run it

again, but this means of clarification is not available to the Hollywood film-

maker, bound by conventions of a certain kind of realism.

Repetitive cutting to bring out a movement's trajectory is similar to the

expansion of an action by slow motion, and of course this has long been a fa-

vored resource of 19705 and 19805 filmmaking. For the Hong Kong action

film, slow motion can intensify the fury or effort or danger of a blow while

also stressing its grace. Similarly, fast-motion cinematography can emphasize

the precision and timing of the kicks, punches, and parries. Tsui Harks and

John Woo's willingness to intercut shots displaying different rates of slow tion to the stuttering pause-burst-pause printing one finds in Wong Kar-wai's

work probably owes a debt to the tradition of amplifying an action's emo-

tional overtones by playing with speed of motion.

Like the zoom, the soundtrack of the martial arts movie has had its share

of bad press. Westerners are often put off by the impossibly loud, absolutely

uniform whacks, smacks, whooshes, and air-smiting thuds to be heard in film

after film. Yet these can be understood as conventional signals that a blow has

landed or missed. The sounds, that is, clarify the action on a moment-by-

moment basis. (I am especially fond of the rustle of fabric or invisible wings,

which announces that someone has taken flight.) Just as important, these im-

plausible noises give the action an extra expressive force, like the crash of

cymbals during combat scenes in Peking opera.

The action scene, then, can draw on a wide range of cinematic tech-

niques that underscore and magnify the performers' movement. But this pro-

fusion presents a new problem. For if every blow or block is bracketed by

pauses, if every kick or punch emits the same thud, if variable-speed photog-

raphy and printing constantly clarify and accentuate a gesture — then how

can there be any gradation of emphasis? How can the decisive punch stand

out from all the hundreds of other blows that might look and sound exactly

the same? Directors soon developed a multi-accentual system enabling them to single out certain pieces of action. The performance, filmed in long shot

or broken into closer views, along with a normalized level of sound effects,

yields a baseline over which certain techniques can be layered to highlight

a particularly intense moment. In the kungfu film, a key action can be pre- sented as, say, a stupendous piece of acrobatics, treated in super-slow motion

accompanied by a piercing cry from the attacker and a throbbing, high-

reverberation thwack on the soundtrack.

More recent action films exploit the same multi-accentual system. In

Hard-Boiled [Lashou Shentan] (1992), during the massive gun battle in the hospital, Tony Chiu-wai Leung accidentally shoots a fellow policeman. How

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90 I DAVID B O R D W E L L

to distinguish this crucial moment from the dozens of other gunblasts that

have preceded it? As Leung hears an elevator open offscreen right, he whirls

and fires, and the multi-accentual system comes into play. In an instant, the

shot slips into step-printed slow motion, the camera pans right and moves in

on the victim, the natural sound drops out, and we hear the spectral tinkling

and roiling of synthesizer music. The camera swings back to Leung, who

halts abruptly. The camera holds on him as Chow Yun-fat steps toward him

from behind and pushes him into the elevator. Woo refuses one obvious ac-

centual cue, a cut to a closer view of the victim, evidently because that would

disrupt the very long tracking shot that has followed Leung and Chow

through a maze of corridors and will stay with them in the elevator and

through the firefight on the next floor. And step printing by itself would not

distinguish movement from other stretches of slow motion in the shot. Woo

chooses to laminate several received techniques together to intensify this piti-

ful accident. By combining cues for expressive qualities, the filmmaker can,

as it were, underscore an action doubly or trebly.

I do not mean to suggest that clarifying and amplifying physical move-

ment is just a matter of conveying important information to the viewer.

These processes do that, but they also aim at a piercing arousal of the spec-

tator's senses and emotions. Clearly many Hong Kong filmmakers aim, as

Yuen Wo-ping puts it, to make the viewer "feel the blow."9 Not only must the action be legible and expressively amplified; it must be communicated, as energy is communicated from one body to another; it must be stamped on

the spectators senses. And this is what Hollywood fights, falls, and car crashes

so often fail to do. We watch them, sometimes with keen interest and antici- pation, but we seldom feel them because all the resources of performance, filming, and editing are not focused upon transmitting the sensory and emo-

tional expenditure of energy that propels the scene from instant to instant.

All this is, once more, far closer to the tradition of Sergei Eisenstein than

of Steven Spielberg. Throughout his career Eisenstein, always a man of the

theater, emphasized that expressive movement was the core of cinematic

mise-en-scene. First the filmmaker had to discover concrete actions an actor

could be trained to execute in simplified and stylized form. Then the film-

maker had to devise ways of framing (mise-en-cadre) and editing (montage) that would sharpen the expressive movements and make them more dynamic.

And at key moments these techniques could complement, double, and in-

tensify one another in a massive assault on the spectators senses.

If the effort was successful, the force of the movement and its onscreen

presentation would stir in the viewers body a palpable echo of the actors ges-

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A E S T H E T I C S IN A C T I O N | 91

ture. "It is precisely expressive movement built on an organically correct

foundation, that is solely capable of evoking this emotion in the spectator,

who in turn reflexively repeats in weakened form the entire system of the

actor's movements; as a result of the produced movements, the spectator's in-

cipient muscular tensions are released in the desired emotion."10 Since for

Eisenstein affective qualities were no more than the result of agitation of the

nervous system, expressive movement could give a viewer a uniquely exhila-

rating experience, at once physical and emotive. He dreamed of an ecstatic

cinema, one that carried spectators away, tearing them "out of stasis" and

arousing a rapt, electric apprehension of sheerly pictorial and auditory mo-

mentum.11 The delirious kinetic exhilaration we find in Hong Kong cinema

seem designed to elicit just such a response.

It is not the whole story, of course. Part of our pleasure is created by an ap-

preciation of innovation — imaginative variations on formulas, unexpected

uses of familiar schemas. Consider the device of one fighter tossing the gun

to another. Woo uses the gesture to suggest the rituals of courtly honor when

the opponents of A Better Tomorrow II [Yingxiong Bense Xuji] (1987) ex- change pistols. In Pom Pom and Hot Hot [Shenqiangshou Yu Gali Ji] (1992), however, it becomes a manic gag; two cops caught in a firefight must share

the same automatic and flip it back and forth, always just in time to dispatch an attacker.

And certainly part of our pleasure comes from the film's display of skill

for its own sake. In any art, we enjoy the virtuoso s mastery of craft, the way

she or he sets up difficult problems and solves them with easy brilliance.

Later in our specimen sequence from Bodyguard from Beijing, Jet Li is fight- ing the main villain around, behind, and on top of a kitchen counter. Earlier

Yuen Kwai has conveyed the pause-burst-pause visual pulse by coordinat-

ing cutting with performance, but now he manifests it within a single flashy

shot. To prevent his adversary from reaching water, Li cracks a towel like a

whip, snapping the swiveling faucet sharply from side to side before our eyes

(Figures 11-12).

Nonetheless, at the base of these more "knowing" pleasures remains the

sheer kinetic transport offered by doings that are felicitous, functional, and

laden with infectious emotion. These actions are the opposite of brute force.

They rivet our attention because they are clearer and more expressive and

expansive than ordinary running or jumping or arm swinging. Hollywood of-

fers an all-purpose blanket "excitement." Directors try to turn graceless stars

into action heroes by hurling them into a loud, vague bustle. Hong Kong ac-

tion genres at their best offer balletic performers carrying out concrete,

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92 I D A V I D B O R D W E L L

Figure 11

Figure 12

intelligible physical tasks. Each gesture is honed to a fine edge and carries

specific expressive qualities, standing out by virtue of a visual design stripped

of clutter, amplified by the resources of film technique.

What I have proposed are only hypotheses; probably they need recasting

and nuancing.12 There are other questions to be asked as well. Are there not

distinct stylistic trends in this tradition? What more specific lines of influ-

ence can we trace out — n o t just within Chinese traditions and between

Hong Kong and Hollywood, but also between Hong Kong and Japan? (The

Zatoichi and Lone Wolf and Cub films, for instance, achieve a more sober,

attenuated, and grotesque expressivity, and this resurfaces, it seems to me, i

the films of Kitano Takeshi.) And how much theoretical merit is there in

Eisenstein's account of the spectator who repeats, in less forceful form, the

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A E S T H E T I C S IN A C T I O N | 93

muscular rhythms apprehended on the screen? Approaching Hong Kong

action movies as an "ecstatic cinema" may help us understand why so many

of them infect even film professors, heavy with middle age and polemics if

not baked brie, with the delusion that they can vault, grave and unflappable,

over the cars parked outside the theater.

Notes

1 Stefan Hammond and Mike Wilkins, Sex and Zen and a Bullet in the Head: The Essential Guide to Hong Kong's Mind-Bending Films (New York: Fireside Books, 1996), 11.

2 Quoted in Vincent LoBrutto, Selected Takes: Film Editors on Editing (New York: Praeger, 1991), 181.

3 Indeed, Pudovkins example is an automobile accident, broken into several shots to give the impression of the event. See V I. Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting, trans. Ivor Montagu (New York: Grove, 1960), 95-100.

4 Quoted in Eric Rudolph, "The Rock Offers No Escape," American Cinematogra- pher 77, no. 6 ( J u n e 1996): 64-73.

5 I do not mean to argue that Hearty Response is a masterpiece or even a particu- larly good movie, only that it is fairly typical in its stylistic strategies.

6 For excellent discussions of the martial arts film as a genre, see A Study of the Hong Kong Martial Arts Film (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1980), particularly Sek Kei's fine overview, "The Development of 'Martial Arts' in Hong Kong Cinema," 27-38.

7 Sergei Eisenstein and Sergei Tretyakov, "Expressive Movement," in Meyerhold, Eisenstein, and Biomechanics: Actor Training in Revolutionary Russia, ed. Alma Law and Mel Gordon (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1996), 189.

8 Sergei Eisenstein, "Beyond the Shot," in Selected Works, vol. i, Writings, 1922- 34, ed. and trans. Richard Taylor (London: British Film Institute, 1988), 148. See also "An Unexpected Juncture," ibid., 115-22, and "To the Magician of the Pear Orchard," in Selected Works, vol. 3, Writings, 1934-47, e^- Richard Taylor, trans. William Powell (London: British Film Institute, 1988), 56-67.

9 Interview by author with Yuen Woo-ping, 23 November 1996. 10 Eisenstein and Tretyakov, 187. 11 I discuss this aspect of Eisenstein's theory, as well as his conception of how mise-

en-scene and other techniques can create the effect of ecstasy, in The Cinema of Eisenstein (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), chapters 3-5.

12 I try to refine these arguments in chapter 7 of Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).

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