Popular Culture in East Asia

Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon


The director of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon movie, Ang Lee, was famous for his details in creating a movie. In this specific movie, he spent lots of third-person perspective and used two shot technique purposely for the audiences, so that they were able to see the traditional Chinese martial arts. Also, I was amazed how Ang Lee could take care lots of other details, such as the meaningful eye contact between two sides, making the audiences completely understand the meaning of what they want to say without the presence of dialogue between those two. Moreover, I was blown away knowing that they do the fight scene as real as possible by hiring Yuen Wo-Ping, an action scene choreographer. He mentioned that in order to make a great fighting scene, the most important thing is doing the correct form, not the function. It’s the one who looks most masterful that matters. Watching most Chinese martial arts movie, I always assumed that the scene was edited since they were always seen flying 40 ft away in the air holding on to trees. I was wrong. Turns out, most of the edits were used to remove the safety wires from the flying actors. Not only that, most of Chinese martial arts movie was set the protagonist as a narrative perspective such as Bruce Lee. However, I notice that in “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon”, the director stand in neutral POV, the protagonist was not clear in this movie unlike other Chinese martial arts.

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