John Kreng calls this the art of non-verbal dialogue. In a good fight the viewer should be able to tell why these people are fighting and the story should be advanced by the fight.

The last element is storytelling and there is nothing specifically Chinese about it. The actors could do gravity defying acrobatics and even the props could be controlled to follow specific paths of action. This element added the wire work to the fights. Even if fighting close the action can keep going and even on the ground the elements of Chinese opera keep the fight interesting to watch instead of looking at two guys rolling around on the ground until they get tired. It adds an element of acrobatics that serves to keep the fight at a distance and thereby avoids the clench. Chinese opera keeps the fight from becoming boring. The audience gets bored starting at the clench. First the fighters throw a few moves from distance to close, then they fight in a clench, then they go to the ground. Real fights are all the same and pretty much boring to watch. The individual moves have to actually work. This is obvious because the fight has to appear to be real. More specifically, those are the elements essential to a perfect fight sequence. A perfect martial arts movie is composed of these elements – real martial arts, Chinese opera, puppetry and storytelling.

I consider him to be the greatest man in the history of martial arts movies and dub him the Grandmaster. He learned fight choreography on the set of the early Wong Fei Hung movies starring Kwan Tak-Hing. Liu Chia-Liang or Lau Kar-Leung learned martial arts from his father who was a student of Lam Sai-Wing who was the number one student of Wong Fei-Hung.

Kung fu box mod