The grandmaster of snow: Martial arts, particle systems and the animist cinema

ABSTRACT

By looking at selected sequences from Wong Kar-wai's 2013 The Grandmaster in which characters, especially Gong Er (played by Zhang Ziyi), interact with the ubiquitous falling snow created by particle systems, this essay argues that the film's effects work visualizes the invisible flow of energy in traditions of Chinese visual culture, medicine and martial arts – all prominent or related motifs in the film's narrative. Moreover, such energy gets to be envisaged because of the very medium of the particle system, with its ideology closely related to a worldview based on animism and animation. Growing out of Wong's use of visual effects – specific to the cultural-historical context of the film – and the animist concept behind its technology, I offer a relational perspective for contemporary studies of visual effects to conceptualize the interactions between martial arts actions performed in front of the camera and digital work in the postproduction stage.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to my colleagues and professors, particularly Tom Gunning and Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky, at the University of Chicago and the participants at the 2017 SCMS where I presented earlier versions of this essay. The final stage of its publication was done in memory of my late friend and colleague Hannah Frank, who passed away in summer 2017. Without her method of film viewing, piercing insights, and warm encouragements this article would have never been possible. She is missed greatly.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest.

Notes

1. This line comes from ‘Wong Kar Wai's Journey into Martial Arts’ in the special features section of the film's DVD released by the Weinstein Company. Except where otherwise noted, all translations of the Chinese sources are mine. In this line specifically, the translations of jing, qi and shen are Michael Saso's. See Saso (1997, 231).

2. BUF's official website documents only 509 VFX shots, however (BUF 2013).

3. Examples abound from Lady Snowblood (1973) to the showdown at the House of Blue Leaves in Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003) to the final battle that traverses four seasons in House of Flying Daggers (2004).

4. My approach of frame-by-frame viewing is inspired by Hannah Frank's formidable examination of hundreds of American animated cartoons frame by frame. For the philosophy of her approach, see Frank (2016, 25). The applicability of Frank's way of viewing animated cartoons to my own analysis of The Grandmaster also reveals an aspect of digital effects that is not unlike painting: the computer mouse as the brush, the screen as the canvas and the pixels as pigments.

5. BUF did not remove the natural snowflakes that fall between Gong's body and the camera. The reason, I suspect, is that Gong's body is only captured in this extreme long shot of less than 2 seconds. BUF likely decided that this minutia could be ignored.

6. In Huangdi neijing, there are 12 mo in the body. Donald J. Harper's study of the Mawangdui medical manuscripts, documents related to but older than the textual parallels in Huangdi neijing, recounts that there are 11 mo instead (Harper 1998, 5).

7. This is not to deny, as attentive historians of medicine such as Volker Scheid have pointed out, that Chinese physicians had already themselves engaged in critical reflections and examinations of the institutionalized tradition they were in (Scheid 2013, 323). I am, however, mobilizing this commonplace at the discourse level, which, we shall see, is also taken up by the film's own imagination to be the definitive characteristic of a body lost in the modern era.

8. The four films are The Sword Identity (2011), Judge Archer (2012), The Final Master (2015) and The Hidden Sword (2017). Xu also wrote the original story of Chen Kaige's Monk Comes Down the Mountain (2015).

9. Pushed to the extreme though, as Rogaski points out, hygienic modernity becomes biopolitics that both guards and takes life, as seen in ‘Japanese science during the [Second Sino-Japanese] war that sought both to cause epidemics and to prevent them. The result was a paradox of extreme hygienic efficiency coexisting with the use of germ warfare’ (Rogaski 2004, 20).

10. That said, the 3D version of the film fosters a stronger nationalist sentiment by deleting a few scenes from the international version featuring the character's interactions with and comments on the Japanese. An added intertitle that reminds the viewer Ip Man's faithfulness to his nation also appears.

11. By no means idiosyncratic, Reeves's attempt should be nested in the broader experiment of 80s special effects to navigate on the slopes of the Uncanny Valley, starting from the development of particle system around 1982 to the release of Pixar's Oscar-winning Tin Toy in 1988.

12. As Tom Gunning points out, Epstein's own La Chute de la maison Usher also operates on an animist mode that seeks to reveal ‘a different rhythm to the universe” and “a ballet of matter” which itself “may have a sentient and animate dimension’ (Gunning 2012, 19).

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Pao-Chen Tang

Pao-chen Tang studies in the joint doctoral program of Cinema and Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. His research revolves around nonhuman entities in the cinema, especially landscapes and animals. His essay on dogs (and hot dogs) in early cinema received the 2015 Domitor Student Award and was published in Early Popular Visual Culture.