Gaaaanns

I think one of the most cliché beginnings of any blog post would be “I haven’t done one of these in a while so…” etc. etc. ANYWAY, I’m continuing on the theme from last time of Exploitation flicks just to briefly get away from the Film Studies art house crap.

I don’t feel the need to justify exploitation films but its fun to do so either way. I often see a massive contradiction in the naysayers’ head that they fail to realise. It is an undeniable fact that people like Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and Chow-Yun Fat are totally badass; everyone loves them. When you say you dislike exploitation films, included in those films are things such as ‘Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon’, ‘The House of Flying Daggers’ and anything from the long legacy of Asian martial art films. Many that can be described with no word other than beautiful. However, The essence of these films are essentially a script that tries its best to loosely tie together a string of fight scenes. They glorify, or I would argue, beautify violence- although neither of these functions exists without each other

That’s sort of the end of my first point and the rest of this will be a rant about the rise of special effects into the martial art film bringing with it ‘the gun’, muddying the water, and making this contradiction exist.

All the problems the gun brings with it can be boiled down to one very simple principle. A gun is a weapon that can shoot once and kill once; “one shot, one kill”. This brings with it a whole host of issues and problems. Before this martial arts films were inherently beautiful, simply because it is undeniable that skills such as Karate, or Kendo (samurai sword fighting) are beautiful practices stooped in a rich cultural heritage. In terms of style this resulted in films that simply tried as best as possible to preserve the beauty of what was portrayed, meaning uncut, undisturbed editing maintaining the flow of movement.

It is interesting the parallels about the Samurai film and the Western, both genres at their peak at the same time discussing themes of justice and power. Despite the similarities, with one often being directly translated into another, (‘Seven Samurai’, ‘The Magnificent Seven’) it’s the distinction between one using the gun and the other the sword that proves interesting. I reckon I’ll compare the two as an example quite a few times so I’m shoving this paragraph in here.

Okay, so, there is nothing elegant or beautiful about shooting a gun. In a gunfight death is just death and as I mentioned in my previous post, death and more death quickly become boring and detach the audience emotionally. Deaths also happen far too quickly in a gunfight and it becomes difficult to dramatically milk. There are a lot of solutions to this, a few that have been parodied relentlessly are that directors choose to make the people shooting miss ALL the time, think Storm troopers in Star Wars. Another would be the ability that important people in the films have for withstanding enormous amounts of gunfire and still being fine, anyone in Die Hard for instance. In reality if you get shot you die pretty much instantaneously.

A narrative split can be seen between Westerns and Samurai films, becoming ingrained into philosophies of filmmakers for generations to come. What often occurs is that westerns often have a single anti-hero, think miscellaneous Clint Eastwood character, facing off against society and everyone. Samurai films on the other hand have two equal individuals facing off against each other with themes such as respect for your enemy etc. cropping up (the slew of Zatoichi films as an example). The dichotomy allows the anti-hero to kill as many people as he wants, the birth of the faceless henchman and the trivial death, preserving opposition and maintaining dramatic conflict. The Samurai film normally ends on the final, normally very lengthy duel, with the villain redeeming himself or something.

Duels are not uncommon in Westerns however but they have to be approached rather differently. Sergio Leone does them best. Despite the contemporary complaints of his films being ultra-violent there is in fact extremely little of it. What he does is contrast the extremely lengthy crescendo sequence, starting of with the extreme wide shots gradually building towards the iconic extreme close ups of hands and eyes, all with the increased pace of editing and music, to arrive at the extremely short but graphic moment of violence. He makes a point of emphasizing the speed of a gunshot. I swear to god it’s like describing an orgasm.

Anyway, the issue is that this is not how gunfights work in real life; the western duel is just an invented response to the samurai duel. In actuality the speed of a real gunfight is incredibly disorientating and difficult to portray, the opposite of a Leone duel. Once again there is a difference in response from the East and West. Indeed, it is a common attribute of the generic action film to embrace the disorientation: epilepsy inducing quick cuts, a cameraman usually high on speed all on a telephoto lens. I guess its trying to “capture what its like to be there” but it makes me want to projectile vomit on the director. I think Inception did this particularly badly.

I’m swiftly becoming bored of writing this so I’m going to speed up. There are very influential and varying approaches from the west. Matrix chooses to compromise the speed of the bullet by just slowing everything down, ‘bullet time’. Equilibrium is also particularly cool in its portrayal of gunfights merging it together with martial arts.

This is the point where I would write about the Eastern approach etc. but just watch Hard Boiled, the single greatest martial arts film with guns in it, and my job is done.