How had I never seen...“Enter the Dragon”?

by Cláudio Alves

I often find myself bristling at the idea that cinema is, essentially, a form of storytelling. Many a great filmmaker has said those words and many passionate cinephiles have done so too. Far from me to begrudge anyone that thus defines the seventh art. To each his own, but it’s difficult not to think that storytelling is simultaneously too broad and too narrow a description. After all, what of experimental cinema or aesthetic marvels that have little to no story?

Narrative isn’t the only type of cinema there is and even if we account for the narrative value of documentaries, many fact-based projects circumvent that too. Not to sound facetious, but, to me, cinema is moving image and time, it’s editing and it’s audiovisual stimuli. Such words may smell like pretention and taste like academic nonsense, but through them, one can understand the appeal of certain films in a way that’s impossible when thinking of them as storytelling.

Enter the Dragon is garbage as storytelling. As a spectacle of color and rhythm, however, it’s pure delight…

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40 Years a Dragon

Hey all, it's Tim. The twin altars of worship at The Film Experience are Actresses and the Oscars, but I hope you’ll forgive me if I take a moment to go as far as possible in the opposite direction from either of those points, all the way to the land of grind houses and the classic age of chop socky martial arts film. For this weekend marks the fortieth anniversary of the U.S. release of the iconic Bruce Lee vehicle Enter the Dragon, and with the imminent North American debut of Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster, the story “of the man who trained Bruce Lee”, as the ads insistently proclaim, it seems the ideal moment to visit a legendary film that, to my shame, I had never seen before.

Stories don’t get a whole lot more basic: Han (Shih Kien) the shadowy crimelord owner of an island just barely grazing the edge of Hong Kong’s territorial waters has proclaimed a martial arts tournament, and among the many fighters in attendance are three whose private reasons for attending are revealed to us: Lee (Bruce Lee) has been sent by the British government, hunting for illegal arms and primed to get revenge for the life of his sister, killed by Han’s goons; Roper (John Saxon) is hoping to scare up a lot of money immediately before the mobsters he’s in debt to break his legs; Willam (Jim Kelly) is on the run from… racism? Anyway, he’s there too, and he’s old war buddies with Roper. In between scenes of the competitors fighting in the tournament, there are scenes of them fighting in the shadow recess of Han’s palace, attempting to take down his empire of evil. [more...]

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