Can poetics break bricks?

Song Hwee Lim

pp. 147-165

in: Gary Bettinson, James Udden (eds), The poetics of Chinese cinema, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Abstract

This chapter examines the use of digital technology on the genre of martial arts films and argues that this practice has implications for the notions of both spectacle and poetics. In particular, the use of bullet time engenders a new kind of spectacle that eschews epic scale, fancy camerawork, loud sonic effect and fast speed for a poetics of smallness, stillness, silence and slowness. Drawing on recent wuxia and kung fu films, the chapter revisits an earlier appropriation of the Chinese martial arts genre, the situationist film Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (René Viénet, 1973), to question the notion of labor. If conventional martial arts films had relied on actors' ability to physically break bricks to perform bodily spectacles, this chapter asks, in the post-Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon martial arts films in which virtual small objects in slow motion are created by digital technicians, can poetics break bricks?