Göttingen Roundtable, Part One. Martial Aesthetics Before and After Bruce Lee

Music.

So welcome back, everybody. Thank you for being here still. We come to our last event for today, which is the roundtable discussion on Bruce Lee and martial aesthetics before and after him. Okay, I would like to introduce Katja Pessel from the Center for Modern East Asian Studies here at Göttingen University. Professor Paul Bollmann from Cardiff University, Valentin Morey and Charlotte Böttcher from the Institute of Sport Science, representing the students at this roundtable discussion.

I would welcome also Dr. Martin Mayer from Fechter University and Martin Minerich, myself. And what we would like to talk about now is basically three different topics, I would say.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the first category of questions would be Bruce Lee and aesthetics, then Bruce Lee and ideology, and finally martial arts movies after Bruce Lee. So what the future of martial arts movies might look like.

And i would like to start with uh with the topic bruce and aesthetics and especially what what the aesthetics of kicks are or might be you look at me yeah or whoever would like to answer i think i think that kicks are beautiful to look at and there's the the concept that that max if if max had been able to make it and didn't have conflict wanted to talk about which is so more aesthetic and it's i think there's something unique about feeling of

doing a nice hike like you're a taekwondo or taekyung practitioner and you know how beautiful it is to do some kind of an arcing kick that comes out and hits the target even if that target is just one of those slap like little thing or especially if it's someone's head and in this book there's something quite quite beautiful about the feel of that and you know you know it's going to work but it's so fast, i think that there's a delight in that that has to be called so much that it

is there's a kind of jouissance there's lots of different ways you could describe this and obviously to watch it it's fully spectacular in a way that something like.

Grappling ground fighting wrestling isn't like it takes a lot of literacy to understand say brazilian jiu-jitsu or wrestling because you're just looking at people going what what are they actually is happening there but very easy to see a big beautiful fully extended hit right i think there's something about that which makes it's kind of good and also because Because like Savate is quite a stylish and elegant thing, but it hasn't got the mythos or the kind of.

What's the word I'm looking for? Freesong, the kind of mystique of something that's meant to be ancient Asian, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So the whole Orientalism comes in there as well, I think. So we have two perspectives there, I think. So one perspective is the perspective from the person who watches, right?

Through who watches the kicks and then the perspective of the person who executes the kicks right what what they feel what they experience about that yeah and the person who gets kicked yeah and the person who gets but i for my for my perspective i can say that kicking has some joyful feeling this joyfulness you know this especially when you do this this high jumping kicks and consecutive kicking and and what you mentioned this this kicking mix when

you strike them really nicely they make such a beautiful sound and this this elevates you even more and you're like and then one more it's just it it puts the pressure out the pressure not the pressure but the energy up. Yeah it's a delightful moment so maybe maybe you two you you were in the in the university course.

Fighting right so we we did we did kicking we did punishing how how did you experience that did you uh tell us about the university course what is what is the course yeah basically the the course is it's part of the practical courses for sports students at our at our institute and we have different let's say sporting areas like ones like for example games or individual sports or team sports and one area among those is fighting or combat it's it's difficult to

translate because it's special arts martial arts yeah it's it's basically aimed for for pe teachers so it's it's meant to be in their curriculum and to be also taught in in schools then and i decided to to structure this this course not by practicing one specific martial art but to to structure the course according to different distances and for each distance we recovered different types of techniques so for the long distance we had kicking obviously for the medium range distance

you had boxing or or punishing and so on and so on. So my question would be like, if you can recall, um. A difference in feeling or a difference in how it felt to kick or to punch? Was it something different? Yeah, I would like to start on that. Personally, for me, it was really different doing something with my feet for once, because normally you would do as in judo and throwing people, submitting people in BJJ or anything you mostly do with your hands or arms or upper body.

Of course, there are some chokes with the legs. but for me it was really nice as a change to be able to do something with my feet like apart from just walking on that and running and then also what i really like about kicking is the power you can develop you know i mean obviously really well my own punch was really powerful and effective but i personally always feel like a good kick tops that on the power level and also maybe maybe the control you can develop just because you have more force.

And one thing I also noticed doing it was when you look at yourself or when you see yourself in the mirror, you look more like the image you get from combat sports. I don't know, even a karate club would have a logo where somebody would kick and punch maybe at the same time. In the movies, you see Bruce Lee flying around the place all the time and not kicking somebody.

Money so i think those three factors were like in my mind doing kicking which i did not get during punches also in kick you had any other perspective maybe or was it for you because it didn't didn't have that much combat sports martial arts experience that i did well yeah i think that. Most of the differences that you did judo or rather never had this problem. Yeah.

But for me, it was very nice to, to get more precise with the kicks and also the stability in the stand when I finished the kick, it increased very, very fast. It was really nice feeling and get me like a feeling of more safety when I stood against my partner or something.

Yeah also what you mentioned the beauty of the kicks I think especially for schools it can be very motivating for the students to see what they can create this is like a really good outcome you mean like for the school children when you teach the martial arts or kicking in the school curriculum right yeah.

Because often in schools you don't have to motivate the students and when you have something yeah and when you have something that looks so beautiful in the end and can create like a project or something for example we had like a cutter in the end we should create also by ourselves and yeah you can make it very beautiful well try to so the difficulty of kicks is what it separates from punching you said in the presentation poll that first context with the word was martial arts that people didn't

see boxing as martial arts but when kicking came into it okay this is martial art this is easy recognizable so kicking is like mastery of martial arts or at that time about grappling it seemed to be martial art because you know you have strange dexterity precision so it's much more complicated doing kicks properly than doing strikes properly So this might be some kind of, which are on both aesthetics, that when you watch it, you know how difficult this is.

Even when the scene, enter the dragon, when the bad guy enters the room of Bruce Lee and he stands there only holding his feet up. Everyone says, whoa, okay, this is really, really hard to do. And he's not kicking, he's only standing there. So this is where we can see it's really, really difficult to do sparkly. I was thinking when you're saying.

I like to see i like comedy fights as well in films so like if you remember the fight in bridget jones and you watch how terrible these untrained people are fighting and it's like when you watch someone learning how to kick to do a decent kick they're like they lose their guard and so on okay we're fighting i'm gonna do okay then they're fighting again and it's like the the fact that it all has to come together so when you see a good kick and someone maintains

that guard and their kicks up and they haven't just like put their head out for display there's something, and when you can do that yourself as well and you know you've done that because you've learned to re to re-posture so that you're strong in an artificial position there's something really and then you see that on an image like in a mirror you know because we all we've all done it you know.

I mean how many of us still right when I mean I'm 52 years old and there's a window or something so your reflection I'm always just like chatting, anyway like I knows a little bit about this in the mirror stage, But what all of you mentioned is the aesthetics of kicks, which leads me to a question that's related to my field, like movies. And this is also something we discussed today. The aesthetic of kicks is so strong and everyone knows exactly, ah, this is martial arts kicks.

So in the end, is it only for the aesthetics or is it a real means of martial arts? And I think you also spoke about Bruce Lee's kicks today. So is it necessary to differentiate between a real kick and the kind of aesthetic kick? Or do you say like, well, it's not necessary to do that at all? I think it's one of those things where you can, it's like there's things that, so one of my instructors used to say, possible but not probable.

So it'd be like well i'm going to use this technique and say you know it's high risk yeah a head kick in a serious fight is high risk but it can work and you see these dramatic techniques done in the ufc where someone's going to do a spinning elbow it's never been done before and then it's done and someone's going to do they're going to do a matrix kick off the side of the cage and they're going don't don't try and do it you know and then they do it and it's like Like, wow.

And then it increases the theatricality of it. That's a good term or word in this case, I think, theatricality. So those kicks are theatrical in a way, but that doesn't mean that they cannot hit properly, right? But it's possible but not probable.

I thought my instructor used to say, if I wanted to kick high, if I was doing something, he'd say, no. Because it's high a high kick and you're unbalanced and it could be grabbed and it could miss and you've got to correct yourself afterwards so it's impossible but it's more probable like it's more probable if you do shin kick or knee kick there is a. A theater anthropologist, his name is Eugenio Barba.

I don't know if you ever came across him. And he tried something like defining the core principles of theatrical traditions worldwide. And he tried to analyze different traditions of dancing and acting and whatever. And he tried to boil it down to specific principles. And for him, the connecting idea or the connecting thing is the one of extra daily performance or extra daily behavior, that it's something that is derived from daily behavior, but it's something on top, right?

And when you think of kicks, for example, you could say that when you kick, the kick itself is extra daily because in everyday life, you wouldn't use your feet in that way. So you can call every kick you can call extra daily in a way, probably, I would say. But then again, you have like a second layer of theatricality probably where you don't derive it from this, let's say, everyday activities, but from the martial activities, the combat activities.

And then when you call the low kick, for example, a daily martial activity, then the high kick is an extra daily martial activity. So this is another layer or another perspective of theatricality you have in kick size. thing. And obviously, Bruce Lee did a lot of high kicks, which was quite different from the films that we saw before, like Four Brothers films, where it was more staged, like the opera fight. And then suddenly there was a Bruce Lee with this new form of kick.

So how did this come about? Yeah. I mean, if you, you know, in terms of Bruce Lee's personal biography, you know, he was literally born into a theatrical performance family and he, he was, he was a child actor and he studied it all of his life and, and he, you know, he lived, he lived and breathed fight choreography, camera angles and also, but he was also a very, he was a completely serious martial artist. So he was all about how do you put power into this technique?

So you would study Muhammad Ali and he would study boxers and fencing. And then combining that, like, how do you put, and then how do you sell a technique to an audience? Where should the camera be? There's, there's camera angles and techniques that, that Bruce Lee used that had become stock kind of stock setups in the choreography and performance of it. But he was just as he was a superlative performer and a superlative athlete.

So, you know, that's, that's where it all comes from and so you get this loop where you even get people who were inspired by bruce lee to go on and become athletes and and so there's a there's a biography bruce lee by davis miller called the the tower of bruce lee and he quotes people who were boxers who learned how to put power into their frontiers after seeing bruce lee and trying to copy the stuff on screen so it's it's quite a complicated

loop but we had this interesting discussion yesterday in the movies when we saw Enter the Dragon and there were lots of laughs in the audience. You know, it was like, when Bruce Lee was doing this and that. And there was a guy in the audience who said, why do you do that? This is not, you know, to laugh. It's not a comedy. It's serious. Because you mentioned power, you know. And he saw the power and the kung fu and all the energy that Bruce Lee put into his movements.

But the vast majority of the audience took it for some sort of exaggerated saturated, theatrical, you know, I don't know, opera kind of acrobatics. So I wonder how the reception can be so different. Depending on who sees Bruce Lee doing things. Yeah, 100%. I mean, so the story has this. Did you laugh? Yeah. Me too. Me too. What did you laugh at? Even the facial expressions sometimes.

Yeah. And just also to some comic situations where like the one lady mentioned the appearance of the Grandmaster of the Island. Yeah. where everything just froze and yeah he was the sumo wrestlers.

Instantly yeah and then only apples were flying you know and those situations i love that but those are common situations i just can't think of one right now but there are there are some examples where i've laughed technically and just because of those facial expressions also the sound sometimes yeah like some some of some men described it as a dying little kitten but you know and songs he or somebody made at some point and yeah i found it from the comic and the kind

of sense of comedy in there because i think it is over exaggerated or what do you guys think practicing martial arts would you ever do such songs i know i think that's cinematic and i think but it quickly became a cinematic cliche.

So when Bruce Lee was first seen and he was doing this really eccentric stuff. It's like, what the hell is that? But it was amazing. But now it's a cliche. You're like, you know, you walk past children's playgrounds and there'll be two children. One will be doing Bruce Lee noises. They don't know why they're doing that but they are.

And it immediately became cliche comedy like, you know, and it became parody and it became, it's been and so for the first time something that came out in 1973 yeah what was then new and like wow is it's like when you know you see like special effects over the ages we look back now and go at the animation in like the titans or something like that at the time it blew people's minds and then now we're going to clash of the titans and skeletons

coming up to that you know and it looks ridiculous to us and like the sound of flesh and flesh and it's not like like someone slapping someone. Yeah, Indiana Jones. But also Paulo Jan, the muscle guy from the movie, you know, he entered like the stage and he was like, his facial expressions. I mean, a lot of people in the audience, they had to laugh immediately. And then he was juggling his breast muscles. And I was like, geez, why?

You know, is this comedy or is this serious now? And also when he fought, I think Ropa, there was, there were like a wrestling on the ground, basically and then the facial expressions like you know it felt like and it was in slow motion I think even which made it more hilarious to watch yeah we had a big discussion going on and we couldn't make out if it was related to age or you know how often you've seen the movie how often you've

seen Bruce Blightation content you know I have a question I read once the contemporary for a very audience laughed when the three fighters chose the women. So the black guy, I need three or four women. He's the black guy, the white guy, he choose one woman. He's pretty loyal. And who's the character? No, I don't need a woman. So the Hong Kong audience loved, especially at this moment that he did not choose a woman because he's Muslim.

It's just a myth or. or the only thing that I know about the reception on, of that film is that, so in his previous phones, he was very popular in Hong Kong. But in Enter the Dragon, the reception was one of anger because he plays, so Hong Kong being Crown Colony and Great Britain, and then Mr. Braithwaite comes and asks and recruits Bruce Lee to, like, what? You know, Her Majesty's Secret Service, to go off and be a spy.

And they were outraged because basically Bruce Lee sold out to the British colonial police, and they didn't like it.

And I heard... This is a little bit slow, right? yeah so so whereas the earlier films where it always plays a kind of chinese hero in this he's playing a kind of a an agent for the british and it was not received well but and i heard i read somewhere that they would slash the seats in the cinema oh really nice because to demonstrate their disapproval of the film i do not i don't know about the laughing yeah i guess they probably Maybe they knew a bit about Bruce Lee's reputation.

He has a bit of a womanizer. And I just have this one girl who's a spy. All right. I got the feeling that we're slowly moving away from kicks. What? In a way. Not at all. But maybe let's move back to the topic, right? Because at least a bit. But what I would like to discuss also is the way Doosley revolutionized kicking in martial arts movies. What were the kicks also in Hong Kong movies or in Eastern martial arts movies? What were the kicks before him and what were the kicks after him?

Can anybody contribute to that? well i think that if you if you look at a film like fist of fury which in america was the chinese connection wasn't it and you know there's the scenes the trailing scenes in the chinese for the jingu school and and the guys watching them while you're nodding and that kind of choreography that's happening now that kind of training sequence where there's straight legs and kind of technically good kicks because you're really grounded and there's straight

kicks going and then Bruce Lee comes into that and it's not that it's not deconstructed but it's retooled so it's less of the straight lines, of the kick and more of the. Explosive spiral I guess that would be the difference between a straight angular shape of a kick which ends slap it's almost like clack there's the kick whereas with Bruce Lee it was smash you know like his upper cock thing that he would do and spinning off like a... And so there's all that extra energy.

In the immediate wake of Bruce Lee, in terms of Hong Kong films, I don't know if you know more about this than me. I think that what you said also reminds me of the rhythm of the fight choreography. And I think that in the earlier Shaw Brothers movies, they were mainly, you know, made in the studio and the fights were more of a going back and going forth, going left and going right. But Bruce Lee's rhythm is entirely different. And then someone who's like dumb, you know, dealt with.

It's it's it's not a kind of whole a wholesome kind of dance you know some kind of rhythm or music it's very fast and then it's over so i think he's kicking in this respect is quite different and and for me it moves away from the kind of opera idea of chinese cantonese opera yeah where there's a staged fight with a certain rhythm that goes on and on and on bruce lee is just you know who also what what you mentioned this goes in a similar direction i think the the

kicks with the with the uh the the straighted knee how do you say this yeah right so so rising front rising side rising backwards right and bruce lee is it's it's not doing that at all right he's there there is like the the warm-up scene i think where he does some leg raises but only for warm it's not for for fighting right all the kicks he uses for fighting out with the like the you you you take out the knee then you straighten the

leg and then you take it back yeah right but nothing with completely straight legs from beginning but the sidekick is the one that you can hot that you hold first a little while so like boom it's done and you hold it and then just but you don't he doesn't do it is the same with his roundhouse kick that'll that'll be like a tank it got all All the way around. Yeah. If it, if it missed its target, you would have gone all the way around

coming with another kick. Yeah. But with the sidekick, you can go, boom, and then you can either hold it there or you can hold it there. And I think that it does. I mean, if we could look at them and analyze them a bit and see what I'm saying. I used to do that. You land a good sidekick. Yeah, you're like, oh, bye. Just to make a point. Yeah. Just to be a little flashy. But can you say that there were no sidekicks and no roundhouse kicks before Bruce Lee in martial arts cinema?

No, I don't think we're saying that. And I think what I'm saying is it's the way, it's the delivery, the technical delivery, physicality of that delivery. So Bruce Lee was, if we're talking about his intervention into, say, Hong Kong or Japanese film, probably initially didn't make that much difference at all. I think that's the consensus. It's like, wow, Bruce Lee. Anyway, I want to crack on with what we're doing because Bruce Lee was more steeped in the Hollywood tradition as well.

And his influences included, like, you know, style of Sergio Leone and things like this so he would use a lot of the camera handles and ins and outs and eyes this kind of thing i think that his immediate effect was in Hollywood and he massively raised the bar fight choreography there and then when Bruce Lee had gone like there while we looked around and they were like well what have we got and they went to down in a santo

and they went and that's when he started to get Jeff Imada and all of these other fight coming first coming through you who were you know the apple didn't fall that far from the tree some of these amazing, fight choreographers who've gone through dinah santa with academy among other academies of course. I think that in hollywood they looked around for something that could be as good as bruce lee for quite some time and there was bruce exploitation obviously that in all different strikes.

Yeah, David Carradine tried to be a martial artist, and it's just such embarrassing films in my mind. Hyper-orientalist films. And you said the grittiness was new. Was it really, you said, like on physical, and especially when you see the kick, which you showed us in the presentation, which is, I think, not from Out of the Dragon, but also to the same black box. So when the black box approaches him, he slaps the sidekick.

So it's so forceful that Bruce Lee himself has to step back and you see that the weight difference between the two is huge. So the black belt is about 100 kilograms and Bruce Lee is about 60 or so. So you see the force behind that and you see it only works so fast. It only connects because the black belt is approaching for half a second. And then this is a perfect distance to kick in.

Yeah and the this is great this the best yeah and i guess that little that that little fall backwards as well that little correction like yeah because the gymnasts they've landed because the sidekick is one that can go very wrong if your foot isn't planted and your weight isn't right if you kick this if you hit a sidekick on somebody who's heavier than you and they're not moving like they're grounded if you're not grounded probably you're going to go back yeah that's very embarrassing

and I've been filmed doing that and it was put online where is it you haven't seen it yet it was a long time ago right. But it's still out there but yes I'm sparring with a guy who's heavier than me and I step in for a sidekick but it was still wrong and I hit him and just bounce off and I go off screen.

But this this leads me to another question that I thought about yesterday also during Enter the Dragon we're talking about reality and that bruce lee's you know fights felt more real so what is what is meant with real because in any case this island of dr han or not dr han the super villain han right it's totally artificial there it's not real what so what what is the reality of his kicking of his you know on stage because you can in martial arts movies you it's relatively easy

to fake an impact of a strike so martian only has to do it and you see of course and bruce but kicking when the kick really makes contact and especially in the bruce lee movies like and especially in the long shots his long kick and you see the flex, against Doha that you really make contact with a really powerful kick and this is not.

Actor or so this is real this is a real kick so it kicks in into the chairs and you see in an audience everyone was laughing at this point when the chairs were like tumbling right and everyone was and so this was also one of the moments where the guy in the audience said why do you laugh but it's not it's not so it's not so strange to laugh because that looks like that was accidental dance on yeah so there's a book by a guy called either tm kato mt

kato i can't remember it's called from kung fu to hip-hop and the argument in that book is that some of the argument is phrased quite preposterously like that's a moment of the eruption of the real because that's actually the real power he wasn't meant to kick him that hard and it's like well maybe not it looks good anyway but you can laugh because it does look a little bit like it's it should have been on the the outtakes but it was so good they left it in yeah and it's a

I mean comedy well it's a comedy there was some of those scenes right for example when this one guard when he's walking around swinging the launcher and yeah accidentally he hits this incense burning lion statue something lion statue I think that's meant to be that's meant to be a joke thing demonstrate his incompetence yeah right I don't.

And there's also the scene in Enter the Dragon, which is also a very interesting camera angle, when you see the bad guy in front, and he instantly kicks him out of the image. So there you see the power, and of course, like spaghetti-wrapping sounds, or the bad hand, and you say, okay, this is pretty strong. I remember a lot of guys in the audience also had a good laugh when they heard the bone breaking or the neck breaking, you know, because it sounds...

And they were like, ha ha ha. And then there was Polo. He was like squeezing the guy in his arms. And then he was like, Dad, you heard the bomb break? And he fell off Polo, basically. And so I think this was... And in the cinema, and this is why I think it's so important to screen Bruce Lee's movies in a cinema. Because it's a big screen and it's good sound. And it's very different to see it in cinema, in a theater, a movie theater. And there's a new dynamic in the movie theater.

One person laughs, other people start laughing too. Because I watched a movie at home on Blu-ray like two days ago and there was no laughs at home. I was just looking at the screen of my laptop and taking notes. So the dynamic of seeing this in a real movie theater is quite different.

I think the degree of realness with the contemporary audience experience that I know the dragon is like what we had when we saw Unbuck for the first time so Unbuck was also very very real and you could see okay these are really connecting with their album strikes and kicks and so on so this is weirdness and must be pretty shocking about that time I went I made a mistake with Unbuck and I heard about it and I watched it I think I got the DVD or something thing and i

thought it was like waifu this is just and then sometime late i heard that there was none of that and it was totally it was no cgi of any kind there's no wires there was not like what if i know if someone had said this is all legit there's no wires involved in this it would probably have blown my mind but it kind of misinterpreted the choreography because i was I was like, yeah, interesting people. If you watch The Making of, it's more interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But what would you say? Is there a need that we need training to interpret the realness of those movies? So do we need guidelines to help us understand that this is real? Or is this something that comes natural? Because some people laugh, some nod. So how was it in the movies? Did you understand the realness? I guess you haven't seen under the dragon before yeah what. Do we need kind of movie education for martial arts movies?

I think it was really helpful that you guys introduced the movie and like all the facts, a little bit of context before screening it. Not just for me, but I feel like for the whole audience, because like you said, we were watching it from a different angle. We were not sitting at home taking notes, but we were there and enjoying the art, enjoying the martial art, enjoying Bruce Lee and at his best.

Yeah so i think that helped a lot and maybe like you just mentioned your example with wiring and the other movie yeah it helps you to enjoy those movies those old movies a lot more as if we are used to a lot of cgi right now we there are always some wires involved maybe just for insurance reasons or whatever so i think yeah it helps with the old movies and maybe also with modern ones where they don't use CGI or wires because I also know that I listen to a podcast

that is about cinema a little bit and they sometimes review a movie and then I go and watch it because they did a really good review and I like what they said and then watch different enjoy more because they highlight a little angle maybe or the aspect or whatever but they're just personally familiar Then you can see also the problem of modern martial arts movies, because the martial arts itself has changed to show the audience all the techniques correct.

So we're talking about like BJJ techniques, MLA techniques, where you have to have more knowledge to understand what is going on in the screen. And it's more difficult to show to the amateur audience what is happening right there. So one of the first movies, I think, which did a very good was Warrior. But to try and set it to the audience seems to be pretty hard.

Yeah, I think there's a challenge in... I think that filmmakers are obviously always, especially action filmmakers, they want the next thing that has to look different and better than what went before. So they'll incorporate different styles of life and choreography in it and make, make up stuff. And, and I think that they struggled for a long time to convey the dynamism and exciting effective kind of charge of grappling and ground fighting. I remember I accidentally watched the Expendables.

Force before i've had the misfortune of and i was like god this is the worst but i remember they just in the fight scenes there which went on for hours they're a bit like the fight kind of it's just back and low and there that and they would just like there'd be someone just for no reason a double leg takedown and then someone doing an arm bar and someone doing gillis and it'd just be like and then some guns and it was they were trying to kind of show the stuff

that's been been really popular in the ufc without actually showing wrestling around on the ground fight.

And it is i think they're learning how to make grappling and ground fighting look good there's a lot more films with brazilian jiu-jitsu in yeah i have a very question for you then how did you like john wick and yeah good question and stance and action i like every question i like first john wick and then i was like oh judo again, return to judo okay I like that I really like the judo and then I watched the second John Wick and I was like okay and I think I

got oh and there's one where we which is the one where he finds some nunchakus and uses them is that three or four I don't know I just it's it's something about it I need to I need to think about what it is about John Wick that just goes over for me let me see.

Ridiculous like it always was ridiculous it always was right it's hyper real it's it's off the top of the but there was something there's something for me it has to be it's about the fight choreography and i have to invest in that so like some sometimes the fight choreography they're just preposterous whereas and they've got me cgi in them and stuff and like at the one end you've got like marvel fight scenes which to me are just i don't know what a blast of energy

feels like like oh but then at the other end you've got something like the ray, with which has got like rusty machetes and light bulbs and stuff like that and, now i'm more at that end of the scale where they're showcasing indonesian martial arts by jack silas and they're doing it in a really pretty horrible way but there's also it's also also get, that gets a bit too much when they have that fight in the, in the drug,

and the drug lab level, and it just goes on and on and on. It's like, they've taken the drug themselves. They're like, come on, more wind and say, but. Yeah, Johnny Wick, I love the judo, and I do like the way they've incorporated Brazilian jiu-jitsu into it. I like that a lot. But the film is almost a bunch. The first one, the dog, the wife, the dog is good.

I'm with you. I think it's good to come up with one of the later questions, so maybe the future of martial arts movies.

Movies and we got in germany there for the don't make movies you you need many many actors and many many stunt choreographs and fighters and fighter radios and also but these are from different countries and some of them are from germany and they're coming back and doing martial arts movies so in this way don't make spreads into a lot of nations which do their own martial arts movies again so this is kind of rise of the german martial arts movie for sure in the last three or four years,

so there are several movies coming out of this. This is one of the future indications of your weight. Didn't NetJets just upload it like 16 minutes? Yes, 16 minutes is what I've done.

I haven't watched it, I've just listened to a review on the podcast I told you about, like the cinematic podcast and it's a boxer, I believe, or a martial MMA fighter or something and they just fight for 10 minutes to risk for his daughter or he has to fight used to fight something and he just fights himself through for some reason sounds watchable sounds watchable yeah the.

Choreography is supposed to be really good but don't focus too much on the plot yeah but this was the same question yesterday forget about the plot really focus on other stuff I think it's the only German martial arts movie actually which comes to my mind There was, like, maybe 10 or even more years ago, maybe 15 years ago, there was this one German actor, and there was also a TV series where he played something like a warrior monk or something. Do you remember?

No, no, no, no, no. It was a blonde guy with beard. He was like a warrior monk. Yeah. No, but it wasn't like Shaolin monks or something, but like… Yeah. European or German monks or something like that. Yeah, Christian monks and there were like warrior monks. Christian monks. I remember. I have to answer you. Yeah, it's a bit of a speechy way. Yeah. Yeah. It's easier. The fist of God. Fist of God. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

But it's an interesting observation that doesn't seem to be this martial arts movie tradition at all in Germany. And it seems what you said, there's a new opportunity coming up. And I recently talked to a friend of mine who's a director. He did a documentary about his family. He's Chinese, Vietnamese, and German. And he's now planning his next movie. It's going to be a Kung Fu movie in Berlin.

Really? It's strange because, you know, as some of the research that German researchers such as like Sven and Mario and you have looked into it's like the the massive, popularity of things like Wing Chun. And like Shaolin like the Shaolin Temple Europe was one of the first ones outside China, it was in Germany and like the uptake of martial arts like Wing Chun is massive in Germany compared to other European and yet there's no Does it find its way

onto the screen in Germany? Like that Wing Chun tradition? I don't think so. Not at all. But also karate or judo doesn't really find itself represented in Germany. But we have a lot of clubs and really active ones. Yes, true. It's really fun. Maybe also because in Germany there is this sports club culture that you don't have in other countries to a similar scale. Maybe this also helped the spreading of martial arts in Germany.

I don't know. I mean, on the other hand, there's loads of series about policemen, like crime series and series about doctors for 30, 40 years. This is what we see on German TV. Like every Sunday, it's Tatort. Everyone knows Tatort. Everyone knows Schwarzwald Klinik. As you see, there are a lot of movies about that. And this is in contrast to the other great martial arts movies, like almost a great scene called MCU. Every movie is bad.

Acted martial arts. So I think there is on the mainstream level oversaturation. And maybe this is comparable to the time before Uncle Buck came. So Uncle Buck entered the ring and came at times when people had enough of over-articulation. So we need the greatest stuff that we can start. Maybe this time comes back but do nothing.

I also think that the only reason why John Wick was so successful and there's a fourth movie right now because you didn't watch it for the plot like at least i did not watch the week for the block but for me yeah martial arts displayed there for the creativity yeah for all the factors they took into because for me personally was the first time that i actually saw what what is in my opinion a really complete display of a lot of different styles one which is i don't

know like proceeded needed for seeing which was a pioneer thing to do at his time but right now and what what comes to my mind when.

You asked about will the real be back on german tv screens or movie screens is that like kung fu as i saw it in many of these films as well it's related to class struggle right and i i wonder because what you said today is well nowadays the kind of qigong and taiji it's for self-improvement it's for being you know better at your workplace and stuff like that and purifying yourself but a class struggle like you know in the big wars or either colonial anti-colonial struggle

this is not about self-improvement or purification but there's entirely different moments in history and what we what we what we see in martial arts so i wonder how would a German kung fu movie look like today? Is it about migrants? Is it about lower class people fighting for justice? Like in Fury. Like in Fury. Yeah. But political martial arts movies is not a new development. It's all the time. Like the Wuxia movies, Hero, Chai Gang Frightening, these were all political movies. I mean, then...

Bruce Lee's kind of Chinese ethno-nationalism is political. Yeah. And even in a film like Way of the Dragon, when he's gone, he goes to Rome to rescue the Chinese restaurant from the mafia, which is hilarious and a delight to watch. He's still very nationalistic in his talk about it. Every day I have this. And you're very popular today. I'm popular. Not a cuckoo. It's quite fitting that we move in this direction because the next topic I would like to move towards to is Muslim ideology.

Because aesthetics always have something to do with ideology, our representation of ideology, perhaps. Music.