Most famously, Hu is a daring cutter. The smoothness of his dialogue scenes gives way to the majestic disjunctions of the fights; sometimes the editing stretches time, sometimes it pinches it. Some shots are only six frames long—a quarter of a second on the screen. The effect is to make these warriors’ prowess all the more astonishing: the camera can’t keep up with them. In the bamboo-forest sequence, Shi and Yang pop in and out from every side, scampering, hopping, swooping, dive-bombing. After a flurry of close-ups, a sudden long shot forces us to hunt for the characters in crannies of the frame. Xu’s sudden attack on the abbot is rendered in a jump cut with the force of a fist blow: leaping from far back in the shot, Xu suddenly drops into the foreground, nearly in our faces. Here, cinematic technique amplifies the staccato force of disciplined, near miraculous physical action.

Tags: Film, Bordwell

Tags: Music, Electronic

Tags: Trailer, TV, Geek

Over the past few decades, documentary-makers have taken enormous aesthetic leaps away from the static, talking-head educational films they grew up with, embracing reenactment, animation, stylized staging and other fiction-film techniques to bring energy and urgency to their narratives. In most cases, they have striven to hide the artistic liberties they take — the better to keep the audience fully immersed in the tale they’re spinning. But such coyness is beginning to feel hopelessly dated at a time when audience expectations have changed: Today, transparency has become the new standard. Perhaps it’s time to bring that same creativity to full disclosure, whether in the form of brief explanations during opening or end credits, or more artfully within the body of the film.

Tags: Documentary, Ethics