Duels on Screen

After denigrating the actual practice of dueling, I have to admit, to my chagrin, that I love watching one-on-one duels in movies. 

Most martial arts movies would include both brawls and duels. Both types of fighting can be well choreographed and well shot, edited, and presented. Nevertheless, a duel usually takes center stage as the climax of a movie. 

From of a purely instinctual perspective, a martial arts movie is composed of a series of ever escalating fights, because that's what human audience consistently wants from a story. Escalation. The hero of the story, with whom we identify, encounters fights of increasing danger and difficulty. If the sequence is reversed into decreasing difficulty, we would invariably lose interest before the triumph arrives. 

There are of course movies that climax on the biggest brawl. The one that comes to mind is the 1925 Japanese silent movie Orochi, possibly the earliest chanbara film. Chang Cheh also liked to end his movies with brawls, followed by the hero's death. Nevertheless, in the genre of martial arts movies, duels clearly outnumber brawls. The reason is quite natural---brawls are impersonal and anonymous, in which our emotional attention is on only one person, while duels concentrate and heighten the drama between two key characters and are therefore personal. One can fit a lot more emotional content into a duel.  

Orochi (1925)

I was thinking about climactic duel scenes in general when I recently re-watched the kitchen fight scene in The Raid 2 (2014) between Iko Uwais and Cecep Arif Rahman. Having only two actors, both top Silat practitioners, do a one-on-one combat, provides a kind of clarity that was less than fully realized in The Raid 1 (2011). Note how this scene is brightly lit with long takes and mid-range full-body shots. Everything in the scene is devised to illustrate the art of Silat as well as the characters' emotional states in high-fidelity details. 

Two other classic duel scenes that I re-watch from time to time are Kill Zone (SPL, 2005), between Donnie Yen and Wu Jing, and Once Upon a Time in China 2 (1992), between Jet Li and Donnie Yen. (Oddly enough, both involve Yen.) 

One of the most classic dueling fights, however, is neither so vicious as those above nor even used in climax. It's right in the middle of Pedicab Driver, between Sammo Hung and Lau Kar-Leung (1989). It's brimming with humor and personality, truly one of my all-time favorite fight scenes. 

As we can see from these clips, the dueling format forces the action choreographer, actors, and cinematographer to do good work, as there is little room to hide incompetence, unlike shaky camera, quick editing, blurry brawls, and all the tricks to allow the stunt team to do most of the heavy lifting. Thus, these scenes build an intimacy between the audience and the dueling characters, in which the audience feels the bruises, cuts, and bleeding far more acutely than a brawl scene.