![art of war 2 bruce lee dragon logic art of war 2 bruce lee dragon logic](https://static1.colliderimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/dragon-donnie-yen-600x348.jpg)
Recent efforts to theorize martial arts cinema have showcased a renewed interest in issues of cinematic realism, and in step with this recent turning of the realism tide, I will endeavor to think through the dialectical relationship between realism and aesthetics. Even the pioneering work on martial arts cinema from scholars such as Stephen Teo, David Bordwell, and Leon Hunt show signs of a curiously widespread desire to minimize the difficulties of cinematic realism. Whether scholars turn their attention to classical Hong Kong martial arts films such as Fist of Fury (1972) and Five Fingers of Death (1972) or post-classical Hollywood action/martial arts hybrids such as Above the Law (1988) and Rapid Fire (1992), questions of realism inhere in all analyses of martial arts cinema, yet realism is conspicuously absent from much of the foundational work on martial arts cinema. Similar to the fate of realism in the standard reading of Bazin, realism has become a terribly muddled concept in the academic discourse on martial arts cinema, and the project undertaken by Morgan of rethinking realism in Bazin, while promising further insights into the career of arguably the most important film theorist of the 20th Century, is also crucial for my project of rethinking realism in martial arts cinema. As Paul Bowman observed in the first of his two provocative studies of Bruce Lee, after the “Kung Fu Craze” took hold in the 1970s, the discourse surrounding martial arts cinema was “overwhelmingly dominated by one word,” a word uttered “in reverential, awestruck tones, and printed in emphatic italics. The issue of realist aesthetics has permeated the discourses in myriad realms of film history, but one cinematic realm that has not been theorized with much frequency or rigor is martial arts cinema. According to Morgan, this puerile perspective has led scholars to content themselves with a “thin and impoverished picture” both of Bazin’s theories in particular and of the possibilities of the cinema more generally (Morgan 2006: 444-445). Furthermore, Bazin’s conception of cinematic realism is typically spelled out as a list of stylistic attributes (such as long takes, deep focus, and camera movement), directors (notably Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, and Roberto Rossellini), and periods/movements in film history (primarily Hollywood in the 1940s and Italian Neorealism). The standard reading of Bazin generally attributes to him a straightforward understanding of cinematic realism as resulting from films that bear fidelity to our normal perceptual experience of the objective external world. In his nuanced rethinking of the work of the renowned film theorist, André Bazin, Daniel Morgan laments the ubiquity of the complacent oversimplification of Bazin’s canonical work on realism and aesthetics. Action Aesthetics: Realism and Martial Arts Cinema, Part 1 Theoretical Considerationsīy Kyle Barrowman Volume 18, Issue 10 / October 2014 42 minutes (10294 words)