Fighting without Fighting: Kung Fu Cinema’s Journey to the West

by Luke White

From classic Bruce Lee films to the comedies of Jackie Chan, a vibrant look at the enduring fascination with the kung fu cinema of Hong Kong.
 
In the spring and summer of 1973, a wave of martial arts movies from Hong Kong—epitomized by Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon —smashed box-office records for foreign-language films in America and ignited a “kung fu craze” that swept the world. Fighting without Fighting explores this dramatic phenomenon, and it argues that, more than just a cinematic fad, the West’s sudden fascination with—and moral panic about—the Asian fighting arts left lasting legacies still present today.
 
The book traces the background of the craze in the longer development of Hong Kong’s martial arts cinema. It discusses the key films in detail, as well as their popular reception and the debates they ignited, where kung fu challenged Western identities and raised anxieties about violence, both on and off-screen. And it examines the proliferation of ideas and images from these films in fields as diverse as popular music, superhero franchises, children’s cartoons, and contemporary art. Illuminating and accessible, Fighting without Fighting draws a vivid bridge between East and West.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

336 pages, Hardcover

First published June 13, 2022

Reviews

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spied this semi-randomly on the shelf at the Walnut Creek library, where I'd gone while waiting to pick up the boy a bit later and figured I could take pix of the recent Red Barber bio they had on the shelves. Looked fun, so I ordered a copy. And indeed it was, partly because this isn't a subject I had read really anything on, even after watching a bunch of HK movies in the 90s. (It's funny: boy, did I love Hard-Boiled and A Better Tomorrow and such when I saw them, but seeing John Woo's work now, I'm mostly struck by how mannered these movies are.) So there was a lot for me to learn here about the origins of the HK film industry in Chinese opera, the nationalistic (and then self-assertive aspects after 1949) themes in the movies (which you also saw in the large quantity of 1990s HK films set in 1911 China), Bruce Lee's multinational appeal...Having set out the historical context of the development of martial-arts films and then their reception in the US (there's a whole section on Billy Jack and Kung Fu, the series), White then explores race and gender and globalism through recent films like Crouching Tiger and Hero, with sharp points about the crossovers between foundational hip-hop and martial arts (the Wu stuff everyone knows by now, I presume, but I hadn't made the link between the first-generation MCs all calling themselves "Grandmaster" and these movies, which on reflection is kinda dumb of me). The exploration of how Black Americans specifically engaged with martial arts as an explicitly and implicitly "third world" mode of revolutionary self-defense, and which then got included in blaxploitation (in US History Through Film class I've shown Cleopatra Jones, which showcases what, to be honest, is not very compelling kicking by Tamara Dobson) as both narrative element and later furnished entire plots, which then later furnished raw material for 1990s rappers to rediscover, is especially complex and fascinating. Also fun bits here about varying shot constructions at different points in the genre's evolution to emphasize either flying via wire work or the unadorned physical skill and dexterity of the performer. Overall point: this is more complex than you think, neither simply an exoticizable and "inherently peaceful," or whatever, alternative to "Western ways" nor simply a jingoistic masculine assertion of national identity, nor, I suppose, just cruddy low-budget exploitation fare, but rather something in many ways touching all of these possibilities, often at the same time. It's a paradigmatic case of culture being created in one place at one time with a host of local meanings, some of which resonated elsewhere (as with Black viewers for whom the anti-colonial politics made immediate sense) and some of which tended to get muted.

At once fun and educational; while reading, I watched a bit of Chinese Boxer, which really kicked the whole modern genre off (and honestly, was one of those where you kind of have to value it as a period piece), as well as the climactic faceoff from Fist of Fury, which I've probably seen before but wasn't sure. Which reminded me how long it's been since I've watched an actual 70s kung-fu flick. Footnotes are also a treat--I should have guessed there'd be books on the Shaw Brothers and Transnational Cinema, as indeed there are.