July 04, 2021
Facebook/The Official Bruce Lee Facebook Page
Bruce Lee has been talked about ever since he first appeared on American television in the late 1960s. Nationalist or narcissist? Chinese hero or Pacific Man? Fighter or philosopher? All have been weighed up by critics and colleagues down the years.
Here is what some of them had to say about the martial arts star who died an untimely death in Hong Kong in 1973.
Legendary martial arts director
Chang Cheh
, writing in his memoirs: “Bruce Lee was the disciple of Ip Man. Besides receiving a modern education, he was especially gifted. He was a wing chun adept, but he did not confine himself to one school, to one style, which also explains his extraordinary achievement. Quite a few practitioners of wing chun do not approve of him, and I find this too narrow minded.”
Everybody needs to have an angle, and that’s true for martial arts stars, too: Jimmy Wang Yu played one-armed roles, Jackie Chan brought comedy to the genre, Hsu Feng claimed she used to “act with her eyes”, Brigitte Lin played gender-bending characters, and David Chiang put athleticism over brute strength. Here’s what stars of the genre have said about what.
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Hong Kong martial arts films owe much of their success to martial arts choreographers. But their history is mainly undocumented.
A brief 1999 essay by the Hong Kong Film Archive’s Yu Mo Wan, called Martial Arts Directors in Hong Kong Cinema, set out the historical framework of the craft and provided some of the material for this story.
The first wuxia films were made in Shanghai, then known as “the Hollywood of the East”, in the 1920s. According to Stephen Teo’s all-encompassing book Chinese Martial Arts Cinema, 1922’s Vampire’s Prey is the earliest example of a film with wuxia characteristics, and The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple, released in Shanghai 1928 and directed by Zhang Shichuan, is generally considered to be the first of the genre as we would recognise it.
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What makes a good martial arts film – realistic kung fu or special effects and wirework? Should the performers be trained martial artists, and does the story matter as much as the action?
The legends of the genre give their opinions.
Sammo Hung Kam-bo, who was generally absent from the effects-driven martial arts films of the early 1990s, talking to
Cinema AZN
in 2005: “When I first saw special effects in martial arts films, I was very excited. But now everyone uses something, every film has a special effect. I liked special effects at first, but they use them too much in martial and action films now. People don’t trust the action any more.