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Hong Kong martial arts films owe much of their success to martial arts choreographers. But their history is mainly undocumented.
A brief 1999 essay by the Hong Kong Film Archive’s Yu Mo Wan, called Martial Arts Directors in Hong Kong Cinema, set out the historical framework of the craft and provided some of the material for this story.
The first wuxia films were made in Shanghai, then known as “the Hollywood of the East”, in the 1920s. According to Stephen Teo’s all-encompassing book Chinese Martial Arts Cinema, 1922’s Vampire’s Prey is the earliest example of a film with wuxia characteristics, and The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple, released in Shanghai 1928 and directed by Zhang Shichuan, is generally considered to be the first of the genre as we would recognise it.
February 07, 2021
Jet Li as Wong Fei-hung in Once Upon a Time in China 2 (1992), directed by Tsui Hark.
Wong Fei-hung is the most famous of all the exponents of southern-style Chinese martial arts, and his exploits have passed into legend. There have been around 100 films about him, 77 of which feature actor Kwan Tak-hing, who became synonymous with Wong during the 1950s and 1960s .
Radio plays, pulp novels, newspaper story serialisations, and television series have been devoted to his life. At one point, no less than seven newspapers were running serialised novels about Wong at the same time.
The martial arts master became known to international audiences in the 1990s when he was played by Jet Li Lianjie in Tsui Hark’s supremely successful
Fortune Star Media Limited
What makes a good martial arts film – realistic kung fu or special effects and wirework? Should the performers be trained martial artists, and does the story matter as much as the action?
The legends of the genre give their opinions.
Sammo Hung Kam-bo, who was generally absent from the effects-driven martial arts films of the early 1990s, talking to
Cinema AZN
in 2005: “When I first saw special effects in martial arts films, I was very excited. But now everyone uses something, every film has a special effect. I liked special effects at first, but they use them too much in martial and action films now. People don’t trust the action any more.