Can you explain this strange Chinese movie technique?
January 8, 2018 6:54 PM Subscribe
Recently I've watched Jackie Chan's 1985 Police Story and a 2017 Chinese movie called Free and Easy. Both movies employ a strange technique in which several seconds of a scene repeat or loop. This goes on constantly throughout the movie. It's really annoying. Maybe this is a well-know technique, and it's obviously not new, but I don't think I've seen this before. Can someone explain this - and why anyone ever thought it was a good idea?
Response by poster: It's not done around stunts particularly - it's done around almost everything! It's bizarre. I've watched both movies online on Kanopy through my local library, and it certainly looks like a seamless, intentional technique - no sense this is a glitch in the movies. I've watched lots of movies on Kanopy and never seen anything like it. But....
posted by Jackson at 7:30 PM on January 8, 2018
posted by Jackson at 7:30 PM on January 8, 2018
This Every Frame a Painting episode on Jackie Chan talks a bit about one type of partial repetition as part of a fight scene -- the whole episode is worth watching but the specific bit about editing for repetition starts about 5:25.
posted by LobsterMitten at 10:26 PM on January 8, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by LobsterMitten at 10:26 PM on January 8, 2018 [1 favorite]
I'm with nickgully - having watched a lot of 80's/90's Chinese movies, I definitely noticed this, but as part of highlighting a stunt or the scene where the main Bad Guy finally gets defeated. Often the repeats are slow motion. The Codifier example from the TV Tropes article is the slide down the lights at the end of the mall fight in Police Story, where the director shows the slide from 3 different camera angles; happens about 6:55 in this video.
I don't recall really ever seeing it happen "constantly" throughout the whole movie - what you're describing really doesn't sound like the movies I've seen.
For whatever it's worth, I found At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World on GoogleBooks, which contains an essay by David Bordwell titled Aesthetics in Action that goes into this in some detail. Link.
Not to copy the whole essay here, but Mr. Bordwell writes:
There's a lot more to the essay, but in short his point is that Chinese cinema, especially martial arts or action films, have specifically and intentionally developed a style that intends to amplify the emotional impact of a scene through exaggeration, and repeating that scene is one of the methods. And that you probably find this disconcerting or annoying because you were raised in and are primarily familiar with a different cinematic tradition and language, one that at least pays lip service to plausible reality. (The ironic thing being that in Chinese cinema the stunts and fights are often done by the stars themselves with what Hollywood would consider entirely inadequate safety measures - they're very real - whereas "realistic" Western cinema relies far more on stunt doubles and CGI and set building and camera angles that hide the fact that punches never actually land.)
Again, though, we're talking about repeats for stunts and for major action sequences - if what you were watching had, like, looping repeats of someone walking down the street, or of conversations in restaurants, then I'd say you had some kind of glitching going on.
posted by soundguy99 at 10:44 PM on January 8, 2018 [9 favorites]
I don't recall really ever seeing it happen "constantly" throughout the whole movie - what you're describing really doesn't sound like the movies I've seen.
For whatever it's worth, I found At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World on GoogleBooks, which contains an essay by David Bordwell titled Aesthetics in Action that goes into this in some detail. Link.
Not to copy the whole essay here, but Mr. Bordwell writes:
"The vividness of Hong Kong action depends on more than visual intelligibility. There is as well what we can call the expressive amplification of action. At bottom, this tactic pushes beyond Western norms of restraint and plausibility - bypassing that appeal to realism that makes the typical Western action scene comparatively diffuse in its stylistic organization and emotional appeal. Like a good caricature, the Hong Kong action sequence selects and exaggerates for a precise effect. The Hong Kong action sequence arrests us not because it mimics natural behavior but because it felicitously magnifies the most emotion-arousing features of pursuit or combat."Later in the piece Bordwell writes about Repeat Cuts being one of the methods used for this expressive amplification, and, no surprise, gives Jackie Chan's work in general and Police Story in particular as examples.
There's a lot more to the essay, but in short his point is that Chinese cinema, especially martial arts or action films, have specifically and intentionally developed a style that intends to amplify the emotional impact of a scene through exaggeration, and repeating that scene is one of the methods. And that you probably find this disconcerting or annoying because you were raised in and are primarily familiar with a different cinematic tradition and language, one that at least pays lip service to plausible reality. (The ironic thing being that in Chinese cinema the stunts and fights are often done by the stars themselves with what Hollywood would consider entirely inadequate safety measures - they're very real - whereas "realistic" Western cinema relies far more on stunt doubles and CGI and set building and camera angles that hide the fact that punches never actually land.)
Again, though, we're talking about repeats for stunts and for major action sequences - if what you were watching had, like, looping repeats of someone walking down the street, or of conversations in restaurants, then I'd say you had some kind of glitching going on.
posted by soundguy99 at 10:44 PM on January 8, 2018 [9 favorites]
if what you were watching had, like, looping repeats of someone walking down the street, or of conversations in restaurants, then I'd say you had some kind of glitching going on.
Or a Hollis Frampton film.
posted by Herodios at 10:35 AM on January 9, 2018
Or a Hollis Frampton film.
posted by Herodios at 10:35 AM on January 9, 2018
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Or: You're looking at source of movies that were reassembled incorrectly or altered to avoid anti-piracy measures.
posted by nickggully at 7:07 PM on January 8, 2018 [3 favorites]