Bagua Zhang of the Grandmaster

[wushutiger]

In 2013 Wong Kar-Wai released his epic martial arts film - The Grandmaster. It featured depictions of authentic Chinese martial arts styles. In this episode I select scenes from Gong Er (Zhang Ziyi) fighht scenes and highlight their traditional Bagua Zhang techniques contained within.

[everything]

love your super cool edit. love that morgan freeman narrates. it's hard to imagine someone better looking than Zhang doing these moves. she moves super nicely, but it's also hard to imagine she could do any actual bagua lol. as an actress, she seems to have only one main "determined" facial emoting expression. great fun to watch regardless.

[zrm]

My teacher (Han Yan Wu) was the lead Baguazhang coach for this movie. They had her training pretty hard. Something like 12 hours a day for six months. He had her doing all the traditional stuff.

[everything]

awesome about your teacher. hmm, 2160 hours isn't much training in the scheme of things but 12 hours a day for 180 days straight (and no off days?) is crazy and probably over-training. actors prepping for roles are a bit nuts.

[Bao]

Most people I know don't like it. I am probably one of very few fans. But I can understand why, most people would probably need some context to appreciate it. The movie was supposed to be 4 hours long. I like it as it is, but it lacks character development, so I would still love to watch it as it was intended. But WKW has no plans to release one. The original theatrical cut was 123 minutes long, however, there was a 130 minute domestic cut released to Chinese audience only. I am thinking about trying to get hold of it.

My teacher (Han Yan Wu) was the lead Baguazhang coach for this movie. They had her training pretty hard. Something like 12 hours a day for six months. He had her doing all the traditional stuff.

Interesting... I am surprised she needed so much and hard training, she is a dancer.

[zrm]

Interesting... I am surprised she needed so much and hard training, she is a dancer.

The director Wong Kar-Wai is notorious for being a perfectionist. Has been known to do upwards of 40 takes for a single shot.

[Bao]

Interesting... I am surprised she needed so much and hard training, she is a dancer.

The director Wong Kar-Wai is notorious for being a perfectionist. Has been known to do upwards of 40 takes for a single shot.

Not really, many of his old movies were made by guerilla filmmaking without a script. And for more traditional filmmaking 40 takes is quite common, not really considered to be a lot.

I understand that he wanted the fighting to feel genuine, and as it was performed by masters. But this still doesn’t explain why a person with a dancer's background would need so much training. Common people would need it yes, just look at Matrix, they practiced for months but their fighting still look bad. But it should be different for a professional dancer. Especially a Chinese one who has done a lot of fighting scenes in various movies. The amount of training certainly tells me much more about her than about the filmmaker.

[GrahamB]

"“It was very intensive because [director] Wong Kar-wei didn’t want us to pretend we know a little bit about kung fu — he really wanted us to be the master,” she tells EW about the six-month-long training process. “For this reason, we had to train many hours a day from 4 in the morning to 4 in the afternoon. I had three different kung fu masters to train me. It was like boot camp.”"

https://ew.com/article/2013/08/21/the-g ... iyi-zhang/

[GrahamB]

I was always a bit disappointed by the portrait of Xing Yi in that film. It kind of gets reduced down to simple punches, while Bagua gets all the glory.

[Bob]

I was always a bit disappointed by the portrait of Xing Yi in that film. It kind of gets reduced down to simple punches, while Bagua gets all the glory.

Agreed - insert bajiquan in place of xing yi

I thought Characters lacked substantial depth

[Bao]

I thought Characters lacked substantial depth

Yes, I agree. All of the movie feels a little bit like surface only. This is why he should release his 4 hour version. But I guess he/they believe it wouldn’t sell. I suspect this would be the case, though it should probably become a much better movie.

[GrahamB]

For a movie that was supposed to be substance over style, it was very obsessed with style...

[everything]

I was always a bit disappointed by the portrait of Xing Yi in that film. It kind of gets reduced down to simple punches, while Bagua gets all the glory.

Agreed - insert bajiquan in place of xing yi

I thought Characters lacked substantial depth

bagua "looks cooler" on film due to the "circling"

xingyiquan is just "too efficient"

[everything]

the bit about the "long training" is also "good hype" ... kinda works on me TBH. i'd probably watch zhang doing baguazhang even without that BTS story. maybe the clips are enough from the sounds of it.

[robert]

I was always a bit disappointed by the portrait of Xing Yi in that film. It kind of gets reduced down to simple punches, while Bagua gets all the glory.

Agreed - insert bajiquan in place of xing yi

I thought Characters lacked substantial depth

Yeah, but the fight scene with Razor is still great.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pusJT1UTzT8