A Martial Artist's View Of The Film

Bruce Lee in a still from Enter the Dragon, his most famous film that also featured Jackie Chan as a stuntman and extra. The last twenty minutes of the film, directed by Jackie Chan, is the finest set-piece ip man in the history of martial arts cinema as Wong Fei Hung fights a series of increasingly more dangerous foes through a factory, like a kung-fu Charlie Chaplin in a martial arts version of Modern Times.
There are three main reason for this: the mainstream success of Chinese-language martial arts films such as Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Zhang Yimou's Hero and House of Flying Daggers in the West; the use of stylized Hong Kong action in Hollywood blockbusters; and the international success of Jackie Chan , Jet Li , Michelle Yeoh and their cohorts.



When Golden Harvest realized Jackie Chan couldn't, wouldn't and shouldn't be the next Bruce Lee, they teamed him up with director Yuen Woo-ping to create the first film to show drunken kung fu , which was taught to Jackie Chan by Yuen's father, Yuen Xiao-tian.
Although Bloodsport is the movie that announced Jean-Claude Van Damme and his impenetrable accent to the world—as well as serving as the crucible for (seriously) every single plot of every Van Damme movie to come—it's also a defining film of the decade, positioning martial arts as certifiable blockbuster action cinema.

Others fight professionally, and have only continued to expand the complete picture of what a fighter is. Look at the exponential growth in sophistication from the early days of mixed martial arts to how the sport has become in 2015, going from big guys winging punches at one another to a beautiful, scientific system of mixed grappling and striking styles.
The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple (1928) set the pattern for the true martial arts genre with its story of warring martial arts factions, liberal use of special effects , and the presence of women warriors over the course of its (alleged) twenty-seven-hour running time.

Largely resonating with such a trend of asserting the legitimate role of Chinese culture in constructing a new global vision on the basis of a Chinese transnationalism, an artistic reconfiguration of tianxia also provides strategies by which Zhang reinvents the marital arts film as a way to invigorate Chinese cinema in the international film market.
Martial arts films first gained popularity in the U.S. during the 1970s with movies that featured stars like Bruce Lee and Sonny Chiba However, this action-driven genre can trace its history to the days of silent cinema with classics like The Burning of the Red Lotus Monastary.

Less a flesh-and-blood character than an allegorical abstraction, Mr. Yen and Mr. Yip's Ip Man continues the long tradition of the kung fu master hero, exemplified by the much mythologized 19th-century physician and martial artist Wong Fei-hung (incarnated on screen by, among others, Jackie Chan and Jet Li).