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Understanding Grandmasters’ Spirits: COOL Magazine

 
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 23, 2013 5:15 am    Post subject: Understanding Grandmasters’ Spirits: COOL Magazine Reply with quote



Place: New York
COOL- Bilingual Art Magazine

Understanding Grandmasters’ Spirits
http://www.cool-ny.com/en/archives/1804

Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and Jet Li contributed to spread of Kung fu as a cool martial art all over the world. It has influenced Hollywood films like “The Matrix” and “Kill Bill,” and even became animation in “Kung Fu Panda.” Through film we have become quite familiar with the physical aspects of Kung fu while other aspects remain mysterious. Wong Kar Wai’s long-awaited new feature “The Grandmaster,” which was the opening film for the 63rd Berlin International Film Festival, presents the unexplored facets of Kung fu.

“The Grandmaster” tells the life story of legendary martial artist Ip Man (Tony Leung), whose most famous student was Bruce Lee. Unlike Donnie Yen’s “Ip Man,” the film depicts the skill, spirit and struggle of grandmasters based on Ip Man’s history as well as a tremendous amount of research and elaborate interviews with the current grandmasters. “I wanted to tell the story of Ip Man which is really true, historically correct,” says Mr. Wong.

In China in the 1930s and ‘40s, while fear was slowly swallowing the world and a Japanese invasion spread in the country, Gong Yituan (Wang Qingxiang) from the north has decided to announce his retirement as Grandmaster and will pass on his status to the most talented master. The candidates are Ma San (Zhang Jin), a Xingyi master, and Ip Man. Gong Er (Zhang Ziyi), Master Gong’s daughter who is the only heir of lethal Bagua-style “64 Hands,” also participates in the challenge.

Ip Man was born in a wealthy family in Foshan, China. Even though he was educated in a Catholic school in Hong Kong and groomed to be a businessman, the direction of his passion was always towards martial arts. Ip Man is normally talked about as a heroic figure but Mr. Wong reveals his opinion about the martial artist, “I think in this film, what I find from Ip Man, it’s more heroic for him to fight not physical opponents; he’s actually fighting with the time: the ups and downs of his life. When we look at his life story, he was born with a silver spoon and at the end of his life he lost almost everything except the commitment to the martial arts.”

Ip Man fled the Communist party which won the Chinese Civil War, and eventually arrived in Hong Kong where he began teaching. Even though Ip Man is a historical character, not much material still exists that tells of his life before he escaped to Hong Kong. Actor Tony Leung, a long time collaborator with Mr. Wong, talks about how he created the character, “Kar Wai showed me a lot of books about martial arts in the New Republic period, so I had a chance to understand all the culture and the custom of the martial arts world in that period of time. He asked me to merge Bruce Lee’s character into Ip Man too. Bruce Lee left us a lot of books on his vision, the philosophy and his understanding of Kung Fu. This really helped me to build up the confidence and the soul of the Grandmaster.”

In the film, rain and snow make a remarkable contrast during the fight scenes; in the opening scene, Ip Man fights with combatants in the pouring rain, and later there is Gong Er’s stunning fight scene on a train platform under falling snow. Mr. Wong explains about the hang-ups of his visual style, “Because if we were talking about a punch, a punch is not really about the fist, it’s the coordination of the whole body: how the foot works and the twist of the body and the shoulder. You have to show the power of the strike. That’s why we need the rain; we need the snow, because you can see the contrast. You have to shoot with different speeds of the cameras to capture that.”

Actress Zhang Ziyi plays the fictional character Gong Er. Gong Er has chosen to pursue martial arts, hiding her emotion towards Ip Man, in a time when the society considered a woman should be only a good wife and good mother. Mr. Zhang, who performed in such martial arts-themed films as “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” “Hero” and “House of Flying Daggers,” looks back on her harsh experience filming the fight scene in the snow, “I was suffering in the snow. Every night the weather was -20 to -30[°C]. We were standing outside. You couldn’t move. My hands and feet were always numb. Even if someone cut off my feet I couldn’t even have felt that. Of course, sometimes you get punched but you didn’t feel anything. But when you get home, you see a bruise.”

Ms. Zhang actually has a dance background and professionally trained for six years. This gave her an advantage to understand her character who was obsessed with martial arts, “To build up the strength: that’s what I learned from the dance background. I just wanted to concentrate on the training, so we built up the character together as we were shooting. She needs a lot of strength and power to get the life that she wants because she is not allowed to do a lot of things. That’s why she represents the independence issue and the strength”

As Ms. Zhang says, Kung fu is not just physical strength or fighting techniques, but also a way of training your mind. Mr. Leung speaks about his experience of learning what the true Kung fu is, “After I studied all those books from Bruce Lee, I know that Kung fu is like meditation in Buddhism: how to keep you mind free from emotion and desire. Actually the goal of Kung fu is not to oppose your opponent, or to give way, but to be harmonized with your opponent’s movement. If you put it in real life, you try to be in harmony with Nature or the whole world, and not try to oppose or give way. I think Kung fu really inspired this man to deal with life so he can move on.”

Simply by watching the fight scenes that were captured in “The Grandmaster,” we notice that Kung fu masters are communicating with each other through Kung fu, as if they were parts of an orchestra. Living in contemporary society, where technology continues to develop, we tend to have the idea ‘Human vs. Nature.’ However humans as well as technology are a part of nature, like Mr. Leung says: harmonizing with the whole world is key in life. Mr. Wong concludes, “It’s not about winning or losing; Ip Man was more conscious about inheriting the skill and its spirituality.” If you are aware of the harmony that the film exhibits, the film eventually will communicate with you.


text & portrait photo of Tony Leung by Taiyo Okamoto
portrait photos of Wong Kar Wai & Zhang Ziyi by Nobuhiro Hosoki
still photo by Weinstein Company
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