“The mind is a muscle…”
Yvonne Rainer
This program is an introduction, not a survey. The history
of Thai action cinema is wide and deep and a full
appreciation of what we see today needs the evidence
and perspective of history. Hopefully our modest tribute
to Thai martial arts action is a prelude to more concerted
future efforts.
This program emphasises “real kung fu”. By that, I
mean the generally realistic performance of stunts and
fights without over-reliance on CGI (computer generated
image) enhancement. This form has been at risk of
extinction by CGI movies, and yet it is fundamental to cinema
itself - real action expresses drama which engages
both the intellect and the emotion of an audience. Just as
we are moved by the face of a Falconetti or a Schygulla
in a film by Dreyer or Godard, so too are we moved by
the flick of Bruce Lee’s kick, or Tony Jaa’s crunching
elbow. Humans, not computers, tell stories.
The idea for this program was inspired by a screening
of Chocolatethat I attended in the Cannes market, 2008.
I did not know what to expect other than perhaps another
attempt to cash in on the success of Tony Jaa and Ong
Bak. What I saw was a vertiginous revelation. Not since
the films of Liu Jialiang that I watched at Shaw Bros. studio
in Hong Kong in the late-1970s have I felt the raw
sustained power of pure, unadulterated combat cinema1.
Heroine Jeeja fights her way through Chocolatewith little
more than sheer physical skill (her own and that of the
stunt team and ace action supervisor Panna Rittikrai),
and it’s captured in all its astounding reality by a miseen-
scène that skillfully maintains spatial and dramatic
integrity. No real wire work, no CGI, and from what I could
see, not even a lot of padding and cushioning. It was a
return to action basics - the test of the body, a disregard
for gravity, pure virtuoso work.
A whole generation of cinema separates Liu Jialiang’s
Dirty Hofrom Prachya Pinkaew’s Chocolate. But they both
share the genius of being able to successfully translate
energy and physical power directly into the image. The
excitement that they transmit - the primal identification
your body makes with the action on the screen - is something
rare in today’s over-bloated CGI cinema.
From its earliest beginnings, the unmediated performance
in front of the camera has been one of cinema’s
original strengths. This has been difficult to achieve in
action cinema because plausible action as performance
has required credible action stars - men and women who
can express an emotion not through words or even
looks, but by throwing a punch, executing a well-aimed
kick, or taking us through the highs and lows of a sustained
action scene. Bruce Lee, Liu Jialiang, Tony Jaa -
and in the future, perhaps Jeeja Yanin - are in this rarified
class. They are serious actors for whom narrative
and space are circumscribed by their bodies and understood
by their grounding in martial arts.
Let’s generalize. In the cinema, the Europeans use
words to form a relationship; the Americans use a gun;
and the Asians use their bodies, or rather as Bruce Lee
showed, their fists and kicks. So their bodies are not only
instruments to tell the story, they are also the story itself
- a struggle, a defeat, a challenge, a victory. What did we
use to say? The body is a pen as well as a text. Its movements
and inscriptions speak a history down the ages.
This is the story that goes beyond the plot to explore
how energy is managed and calibrated by the apparatus
of cinema. The notions of training, of combat climax and
anti-climax, the stretching of human endurance, are all
better understood within the realm of energy control
rather than the three-act script.
It is this anthropomorphic centrism that is the basis of
realistic martial arts cinema. The genre flourished in
post-war Hong Kong, and hit its peak with Bruce Lee’s
Golden Harvest films and Liu Jialiang’s Shaw Bros. work in
the 1970s. But this rich vein of Hong Kong cinema was
cut-off by the rise of fantasy kung fu films that had developed
in parallel in the post-war years and were brought
into the modern world by Tsui Hark’s special effects-driven
Zu: Warriors From The Magic Mountain in the early
1980s. Today, Hong Kong cinema has mastered CGI work,
enabling the realization of super-productions like Peter
Chan’s The Warlordsand John Woo’s Red Cliff.
To all intents and purposes, real kung fu cinema no
longer exists in Hong Kong. But it lives on in Thailand.
Tony Jaa and his groundbreaking Ong Bak could have
been a singular phenomenon. But the triangular talents
of director Prachya Pinkaew, action supervisor Panna
Rittikrai (surely the leading martial arts director in Asia
today), and Jaa, have set the stage for Thailand - already
home to the most exciting cinema in Asia - to nurture
and advance this genre2. Energized by success, Muay
Thai movies are also developing a pipeline of talent
beyond the male icon - hence Jeeja Yanin, a female fighting
star, and the younger children whose talents are
already on show in Somtumand Power Kids.
While we have not delivered here the ontology of Muay
Thai cinema, there are some characteristics, similarities
and differences worth noting. Its realistic styles have
been influenced to a degree by Hong Kong kung fu cinema.
This is most notable in the PechPanna Productions
of the 1980s. These B-movies, directed by and often
starring Panna Rittikrai, were conceived as vehicles for
sustained sequences by his stunt team. The stories are
almost secondary, often featuring drug lords and gangsters
- supremely urban types - who go about their business
in rural settings, reminiscent of the connivances in
Southern Chinese villages in an early Yuen Woo-ping or
Jackie Chan movie. Low-budget and shot mostly in the
countryside, the PechPanna films embrace their realistic
stunts and non-urban landscapes out of consideration
for budget as much as aesthetics. But what drives them is a kind of response to watching
Hong Kong films, an inspiration for them to centre the film
around the unbelievable action gag played in real time and
space, or the sustained action fight and chase sequence
that is the whole point of the narrative and plot premise.
The stunt team (sometimes wearing ninja outfits or stocking
masks to hide their reappearance as a fresh batch of
goons) is put through its studied paces of flipping over
cars, fighting in numbers on top of a fast moving small
van, smashing into billboards, and doing things with
motorbikes that you should definitely not try at home.
These are not only emulations of Hong Kong film stunts
but also ambitious attempts to take them further.
Some other intriguing points that require further
research are briefly sketched below.
Hong Kong kung fu cinema is generally horizontal -
powerful thrusts based largely on Southern hung kuen.
Attack and retreat, power punches, Wing Chun stances
that assume flat planes have all influenced the track and
hit rhythms of Hong Kong kung fu films. Where it occasionally
goes vertical, as in the films of Jackie Chan, the
accent is on acrobatics (a run and flip, or a scramble up
a wall) rather than serious combat3.
By contrast, Muay Thai is a vertical art with leaps and
duels that move between different levels. Camera angles
often look down rather than up, to stress the veracity of
a high fall and the general absence of safety nets and
cushions. The style of Muay Thai with its use of points
(angled elbows, bent knees, downward strikes) often
requires taking the “high ground” for advantage, so
upward leaps and downward strikes to the head with an
angled elbow is an effective combination of movement
and concentrated crunch.
Because of their religious roots, both Chinese kung fu
and Muay Thai stress moral philosophy and inner calm
as an essential ingredient for success. But Chinese martial
arts - which are seen as part of an overall “healthcare”
system - give more weight to stress nodes and qi.
Systematic inner energy “soft” systems are less relevant
to the “hard” style of Muay Thai where the emphasis is
on aggressive striking tactics.
Fighting style gives wayward heroes an identity and
often a raison d’être. On a broader front, fighting style is
identified with nationalism. Thai films have more complex
relations with farangs (foreigners) than Hong Kong
movies, possibly because Thailand was never colonised
by the West. It relies heavily on Western tourists whose
values are quite different and have to be tolerated for
economic reasons. In general, from Tsui Hark’s
Dangerous Encounters - 1st Kind to Piti Jaturaphat’s
Fighting Beat, all gweilos or farangsare bad guys. In Ong
Bak, Tony Jaa fights nasty foreigners after they insult a
Thai woman in the illicit fight club. In Tom-Yum-Goong an
Australian and a Chinese are seen in corrupt and evil
collusion. But in movies like Somtum, Westerners can be
good guys too4. And in Chocolatethe Japanese yakuza is
a “good” guy. Indeed, its heroine Zen is supposedly
Thai-Japanese, a pan-Asian synthesis that embodies the
new millennium.
Just as Hong Kong shed its “chop socky” image, so too
is Thailand shedding its “kickboxing” image. It is not only
on the cusp of joining the great action cinemas of Asia but
also refreshing them. Welcome to the real world. Action!
NOTES
1. See Roger Garcia, “The Autarkic World of Liu Jialiang”, in
A Study of the Hong Kong Martial Arts Film, ed. Lau Shing-
Hong, Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1980.
2. For a comparative analysis at the time, see L. Hunt,
“ Ong-Bak: New Thai Cinema, Hong Kong and the cult of
the ‘real’” in New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary
Film , volume 3, number 2, 2005.
3. One of the few serious attempts at “vertical combat”
might be seen in some of King Hu’s work including the
split level hostelry in Dragon Gate Inn and the aerial
fights in the bamboo forest in A Touch Of Zen.
4. Albeit with somewhat freakish characteristics. In
SomtumNathan Jones is a huge wrestler-type who disports
himself as a fey pussycat and can only get it on to
fight after ingesting vast quantities of spicy somtumthat
gets his testosterone roaring.
Roger Garcia