Jack Smith: "Maria Montez only cares about her own fantasies, she doesn't perform anything except her own fantasies (she attracts fantasy movies to her-they need her-it would be ridiculous to be replaced by any other actor- —Anyone else).” This sentence is the best commentary on Bruce Lee’s performance. The reason why foreigners like him is not all "Kung Fu", but more of his unique way of performing. What he performs is not even Kung Fu, but his own "fantasy."
In "Jing Wu Men", you can see that every shot is capturing Bruce Lee's exaggerated facial expressions. According to today's standards, the performance is very "bad", but this is exactly the "no performance" that Jack Smith likes. You can watch it. In contemporary movies, the performances of other actors including Ti Lung and Yee Dongsheng were normal. Only Bruce Lee made people "act out" because he performed himself. He didn't care how "strange" others thought he was. This was a foreigner. Like his place.
Bruce Lee’s exaggerated facial expressions magnify each "feeling", slow it down, and close-up, until the face cannot accommodate his rich emotions, it becomes body movements and "howls", that is, exaggerated stage-like "martial arts". This kind of martial arts is actually a continuation of his personal emotions, a unique "body language" that belongs to him, no one can imitate, and no one can surpass it. He is a human "psychedelic".
Jack Smith: I would rather like bad performances. Bruce Lee is a "bad performance". In a scene of beating a Japanese rape, he used human flesh to slow down the "beat" action. The man is dead, but his hands are still shaking, and time seems to be static. , Expressing anger in an extremely exaggerated way, this is no longer a demonstration of martial arts. Like Jack said, he stubbornly insisted on his own way, so he went beyond technique.
Jack Smith's theory is actually quite advanced. He believes that "unique people perform themselves" and in this way arouse the audience's fantasy is really hard to surpass. This is the "magic" and "psychedelic" of movies. Many people think that special effects are "fantasy". In fact, the fantasy caused by special effects is far behind "magic", because people are beyond machines, and special effects can only be auxiliary. It is very limited and cannot reach "infinite".
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