(pt. 3)
Chinese Martial Arts on the Silver Screen
This is where Bruce Lee enters our story. It was one thing for Ip Man to create a stream-lined art that was well suited to a modern urban environment. But in an era when few people in the West were even aware that the Chinese martial arts existed something big was needed.
Interest in the Chinese martial arts started as a trickle in the middle of the 1950s. Some servicemen and government personal had been exposed to Chinese fighting methods from the 1930s on, and the sudden concentration of traditional fighting masters (along with American intelligence personal) in Taiwan accelerated this. Many more returning servicemen were exposed to the Japanese arts of Karate and Judo, and eventually the Korean style Tae Kwon Do. Some percentage of these individuals started to ask questions about the history and relevance of the Chinese styles. After all, many of these other styles ultimately traced their roots back to China.
Bruce Lee helped to feed this interest with occasional appearances in the pages of Black Belt Magazine during the 1960s. His brief television role as Kato on the Green Hornet also gave him celebrity status within the western martial arts world and helped to advertise the existence of the Chinese fighting arts. These styles (as well as the myth of the Shaolin Temple) got another huge boost with the release of the television series Kung Fu in October of 1972. This show ran until 1975 and featured David Carradine as a half-Chinese Shaolin monk exploring the old west and righting wrongs.
Still, if you had to name one moment when the Chinese martial arts became a broadly recognizable social phenomenon it would be the months after the release of Bruce Lee’s film Enter the Dragon in 1973. Lee had already produced a small body of cinemagraphic work for distribution in Hong Kong. This was his first film to be widely released in the West and to feature Hollywood production values. It was something new and different.
The movie going public responded very positively to Lee’s performance. He became the first Chinese super-star and a role model for countless people who intuitively and immediately understood what it took for a minority actor to succeed at that level. Within weeks every martial arts school in North America and Europe was packed. Lee was the spark that ignited an explosion of interest in the Chinese martial arts that had been building for some time. The news of his sudden and unexpected death fanned the flames of what was quickly becoming a social movement.
Wing Chun schools benefited from this initial bust of interest, as did practically anyone else who was teaching a martial art. Lee’s legacy continued to generate interest in the style well into the 1980s. But to understand exactly how this happened we must now turn away from Lee and look at both basic socioeconomic conditions in Hong Kong and the city’s relationship with the global economy.
-BY BENJUDKINS
