Why Wong Kar-wai’s film The Grandmaster is the most distinctive in martial arts films
In recent years, martial arts films have an unshakable position in the movie market. More and more people love it. This unique movie theme has attracted the attention of the audience. The success of martial arts movies is no accident. This research report will use Wong Kar-wai’s film “The Grandmaster” to analyze why this film is the most distinctive film among martial arts movies? And why this is a successful martial arts movie.
First of all，martial arts film is regarded the action movies that contain the characteristics of wushu ‘martial arts film’, which mainly involves showing the type of action of masculine characters (Hiramoto, 2012). Moreover, The Grandmaster is an art drama film that tells the life story of Ye Wen, the grandmaster of Wing Chun, focusing on the flashbacks of his life, starting from his seven-year-old childhood, and how he passed the competitors by enhancing audience interaction via dazzling virtual, melodrama, and fighting sequences to illustrating the choreography (Kermode，2014).
The representativeness of The Grandmaster is related to the adoption of camera coverage in terms of camera shots, shooting angle, and camera movement. Directors commonly adopt close-up camera shots to present the spatial relations of the captured characters and the psychological implications to demonstrate the feature and relationship among individuals (Pelletier, 2018). This is fully reflected in the movie. Wong Kar-wai relies heavily on close up to show the spatial position of lights, seats, buttons, etc., where train movement also belongs to this category. These subjects are positioned on the edge of the frame through shielding and frame restrictions, forming the uniqueness of Wong Kar Wai’s unique style. For example, one dialogue between two males discussing the fame and prospects is unfolded during the conversational atmosphere, and the atmosphere zooms into firewood. Regarding the shooting angle, director Wong used a lot of low-angle and adjacent shots to enhance the audience’s sympathy and connection to achieve a coherent integration (Ildirar & Schwan, 2015). Therefore, the grievances and hatreds of martial arts masters over generations could be expressed as insufficient for showing psychological salience and admiration, where profile shots will enrich senses and sharply contour their attitude towards other masters and consider their literary dramas.
Director Wang also appropriately explained the storyline of Ye Wen through fast motion lens by enabling the proper explanation on the main plot (Archer, 2016). Meanwhile, slow motion has been widely used in shot editing, where Wong Kar-wai applies higher-than-normal frame rate, enabling present higher fidelity actions to the audience (Shen et al., 2014). Shooting convention would be 24 frame per second (FPS) for presenting full background noise intensity (Mitsuhashi et al., 2014), yet Director Wong uses low frame rate effect and utilizes photo burst mode to improve the audience experience. Moreover, the photographer used many slow-motion close-ups to demonstrate the collision of water drops with the hat’s brim and the hem, instead of directly expressing the martial arts movement itself. Through these subtle details, express the speed and power of Kung Fu.
The extraordinary thing about The Grandmaster also stems from the use of color and light in the clip. In The Grandmaster, Director Wong set black as the main accordatura to revealing the grievances and emotional attachments for the characters, and manages to embed such to express seriousness and mystery black by symbolizing martial arts masters. In addition, the movie heavily used Rembrandt’s lighting to producing the shots both natural and realistic (Shaw, 2012). Director Wong substantially used the overhead lighting to set the scene introduced the characters for the benefit of presenting the image of the characters in an adequate illustration manner. This visual presentation enables the demonstration of the feeling of the characters by compelling small and inverted lights. This is comprehensively observed in the entire clip, where the audience could be capable be focus on the facial expressions through Rembrand light by zooming in the details.
The last element is the superb acting skills of the actors. Actors’ performance is a prominent element in filming where it has a decisive influence on the quality of the film that makes the audience get a high degree of attachment and recognition (Drake, 2016). Actors who successfully create roles will eventually make the movie shine, which is an indispensable part of the movie. “The Grandmaster” fully verified this concept and created a competitive advantage for film by enhancing the viewing experience. Moreover, the heroine in the movie won 12 best actress trophies for her role Kong Er. One remarkable clip relates to Kong Er’s farewell to Ye Wen many years later. Wong Kar-wai directly showed the dialogue between the two in close-up shots. In the clip, Kong Er sat sideways almost during most of the dialogue, as if talking to himself. There are no major facial movements throughout the entire process, except for few moments where she looked up to the martial art master in light emotional movement. It perfectly interprets the complicated and powerful inner changes of Gong Er. However, this enables the audience to analyze her psychological activity with minimal changes.
In conclusion, reasonable slow-motion use, remarkable camera coverage, unique use of colors and lighting, and superb acting skills of the actors for The Grandmaster is an impressive martial arts film that worth a comprehensive assessment.
Reference:
Archer, N 2016, ‘Speeds of Sound: On Fast Talking in Slow Movies’, Cinema Journal, vol. 55, no. 2, pp. 130-135.
Drake, P 2016, ‘Reframing Television Performance’, Journal of Film and Video, vol. 68, no. 3-4, pp. 6-17.
Hiramoto, M 2012, ‘Don’t think, feel: Mediatization of Chinese masculinities through martial arts films’, Language & Communication, vol. 32, pp. 386-389.
Kermode, M 2014, ‘The Grandmaster review – thrilling but often incoherent martial arts epic’, The Guardian, 7 December, viewed 18 May 2021,
Ildirar, S & Schwan, S 2015, ‘First-time viewers’ comprehension of films: Bridging shot transitions’, British Journal of Psychology, vol. 106, pp. 133-135.
Mitsuhashi, M, Ohtera, Y & Yamada, H 2014, ‘Near-infrared imaging of liquid mixtures utilizing multi-channel photonic crystal wavelength filters’, Optics Letters, vol. 39, pp. 5301-5304.
Pelletier, L 2018, ‘From Photoplays to Movies: A Distant Reading of Cinema’s Eventual Legitimation from Below’, Film History, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 1-34.
Shaw, J 2012, ‘Light and darkness in Elsheimer, Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Beckett’, Samuel Beckett Today, vol. 24, pp. 219-231.
Shen, L, Allison, R, Wilcox, L, & Fujii, Y 2014, ‘Motion discrimination of high frame rate movie’, Journal of Vision, vol. 14, pp. 57.