Swashbuckling!

Jose Ferrer in Cyrano de Bergerac

The other day I watched the movie, Cyrano de Bergerac (1950), with Jose Ferrer in the title role. (The trailer is at http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi1352663321/  and shows just a little of the fencing from the movie.) It made me think about the many “swashbuckler” movies I watched as a youth: those with Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone dueling up and down the castle stairs, jumping over tables, cleaving the tops of candles with a swoop of the sword; movies where the hero fights off a veritable mob of antagonists who conveniently line up to be skewered one at a time. Hollywood movies are, they tell us, about “suspending disbelief,” so that we accept whatever farfetched lunacy is thrown at us. But did Errol Flynn know how to fence, I wondered. I had recently purchased a book about swords called, appropriately enough, By The Sword, written by Richard Cohen, a five time United Kingdom saber champion and four time member of the British Olympic fencing teams. In it is a delightful chapter entitled, of course, “Swashbuckling.”

Cohen’s book traces the history of sword fighting from gladiator times through the present and touches (no pun intended) on many cultures with the unfortunate exception of the Chinese. There is a brief mention of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but little more about Chinese swords and sword fighting than there is about Star Wars and light sabers. He explains that the scope of the book had to be limited at some point and he may be forgiven for this particular omission since he examines in great detail the evolution of foil fencing and therein lies the interest of the book.

Many of my questions about fencing scenes in movies were answered by the “Swashbuckling” chapter. Everything I mention from this point on comes from Richard Cohen’s well researched and insightful book. Fencing in the movies is more or less as old as the cinema itself, at least dating to the early Twentieth Century and epic films like Quo Vadis? Of course, the many versions of The Three Musketeers (over thirty), The Prisoner of Zenda, Zorro, numerous pirate movies, Shakespearean dramas and so forth featured individual fencing matches between heroes and villains as well as battle scenes. In the individual fights, realism began to emerge as a desirable element.

Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.

Douglas Fairbanks Sr. popularized sword fighting in early silent films and started the long lineage of The Three Musketeers and D’Artagnan films. As Cohen states: “Of all the actors who have fought with swords the best actual athlete remains the five-foot five-inch Douglas Elton Ulman --Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. Yet he made all his swashbuckling movies after the age of thirty-five.” The fact that Fairbanks did his own fencing in the films set a standard other actors would need to follow, and follow they did, taking fencing lessons or training with fencing masters.

Early actors who fenced included Ramon Navarro, Rudolph Valentino and John Barrymore. But as the trend toward realism, the advancement of cinematic techniques and the studios’ paranoia that actors could be injured led to the use of doubles, a new breed of actor was born: one rarely mentioned in the credits or seen in close-ups ---the trainer/doubler. Cohen profiles several important individuals who took on this role, such as Fred Cavens, who taught and doubled for a long list of cinema swahbucklers, including Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. and Jr., Errol Flynn, Louis Hayward, Cornel Wilde and Basil Rathbone.

Errol Flynn in The Seahawk

So was it just a lot of clanging together of swords or did these actors present a fairly good style and technique? Rathbone, Cohen says, was “a good club fighter”. He probably did most of his own fighting and was paired with Fred Cavens, doubling for Tyrone Power or Errol Flynn (although Flynn wasn’t doubled that often when he fought Rathbone) in films like Captain Blood, The Mark of Zorro and The Adventures of Robin Hood. Flynn was “athletic, looked the part and remains the most convincing swordsman ever to have appeared on film,” but hadn’t studied fencing to the extent that Rathbone or Fairbanks had.

Watch this fight between Tyrone Power and Basil Rathbone from The Mark of Zorro: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McDfLkLqJAE

Cohen mentions the 1956 film, The Swan, in which Louis Jourdan is a fencing instructor to Grace Kelly. He describes: “During a couple of lessons, naturally conducted without masks, we see Kelly performing very proficiently --a long lunge, a beat attack, then parries in prime, seconde, quarte, and octave, finishing with a doublé.” Then again, there are foibles: Stuart Granger, making Scaramouche, fell during a duel and was knocked out. He also ended that film with twelve stitches in his leg and a shoulder injury. No doubling here!

And watch this sequence from The Court Jester with Danny Kaye battling Basil Rathbone. Rathbone said Kaye was so energetic after only three days of fencing lessons that he, Rathbone, couldn’t keep up with him! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3oURsGzs9o&feature=related

Although the list of actors and actresses is a long one, those individuals who arranged the fight scenes and trained the actors, also doubling for them is short. Cohen mentions four from before the 1950s that were noteworthy: Fred Cavens, Henri Uyttenhove, Ralph Faulkner and Jean Heremans. Faulkner was the best, competing in the Olympics and acting major roles in various movies in the 1930s.  When Stuart Granger took fencing lessons for Scaramouche in 1952, it was from a British couch, Bob Anderson. Part of Anderson’s career included playing Darth Vader in the laser sword fight with Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back. (For some reason, I always thought the laser swords were computer generated which, now that I think of it, would have made the dueling sequences very difficult to choreograph. They were actual swords made of carbon fiber coated with reflective paint.)

Cohen more or less bemoans the advent of high-tech cinema, giving Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as one example. Too easy to lop off arms and legs in the editing room or fly actors on wires, bouncing them up walls and across roof tops. The old timers, the Fairbanks and Flynns, were actually striking metal against metal, he argues. The language of the cinema (a.k.a. special effects) was secondary to skill and prowess and acting ability. Although we have come to take for granted spectacular computer graphic effects and yearn for more, more, more… it is also true that the traditional fighting skills embodied in fencing and other sword oriented martial arts are grist for the mills of the entertainment industry in ways that cars chases (and crashes) could never be. Something fundamentally human resides in the romantic, exotic, exhilarating combat of long gone ages that is so compelling, it has endured since the advent of cinema to today. The clash of metal on metal!

The overall attitude presented by Richard Cohen in his chapter, “Swashbucklers,” in the book, By The Sword, seems to me to be a purist belief that skillful and accurate fencing should be the goal in the portrayal of sword fighting in the movies. This notion appeals to my own snob sense. I do think that although the viewer may be uninformed about the nuances and rules of foil fencing, watching the real thing is always going to be more rewarding than experiencing the gratuitous, exaggerated mimicking we sometimes see in films. However, (there is always a however), it may be appropriate to end this dissertation with a little gratuitous exaggerated mimicking: the fight scent from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhCHw0Ovqf4

The Brennan Translation: Sanshou

There is a blog you should know about called Brennan Translation, http://brennantranslation.wordpress.com/ where you will find many translations by Paul Brennan of Chinese martial arts manuals. Recent posts include, “Methods of Applying Taiji Boxing Taji Quan Shiyong Fa),” by Yang Chenfu, originally published in 1931, “Taiji Two-person Set (Taiji Sanshou Duida),” by Chen Yanlin, 1931, and “Dragon Shape Sword (Long Xing Jian),” by Jin Yiming, 1932, as well as other classic Chinese writings.

I was particularly interested in reading about Sanshou, the two-person form. My teacher in Santa Fe, Michael DeMarco, introduced advanced students to Sanshou once he felt they had sufficiently mastered the Long Form and had had some experience with Push Hands. It is rarely taught in most venues for learning Tai Chi, perhaps because the form itself, be it Short Form or Long Form, Yang, Wu, Chen or Sun, demands a great deal of time for learning and for serious practice. Through Brennan’s translation we have this description from Chen Yanlin:

Paired practice is related to each of the entire series of thirteen dynamics [i.e. the eight techniques of ward-off, rollback, press, push, pluck, rend, elbow, and bump, plus the five directions of footwork – forward, back, left, right, and center] within the solo set. One by one they are plugged in, according to appropriateness of response, and linked together with each other to compose the two-person sparring set. The way it has been put together can be described as seamless, constantly transforming, endlessly subtle, and is truly the masterpiece within the system.

You begin your study of Sanshou by practicing solo, that is, doing one half of the “dance” without a partner. This lets you concentrate on the form of the movements and establish a natural flow and rhythm. Later you work with a partner in a choreographed sequence of movements. The roles of each participant are reversed and the form becomes cyclic.

There is what I would call a “combative” form of boxing called Sanshou, which has evolved from different martial arts techniques, wrestling, kick boxing and so forth. The term means “free hand” and is characterized by a seeming lack of rules, an “extreme” combat sport. There are many tournaments of Sanshou boxing and the similarity between this and the traditional Tai Chi form is hard to visualize. Around 1979, the Chinese National Sports Committee began experimenting with Sanshou as a competitive sport. In “A Brief History of Sanshou” by Master Li, Yongqian, Master Li explains:

Sanshou: San means open or free . Shou means hands . Sanshou literally means open or free hands . Sanda: San again means open or free . Da means hit, beat, or fight . Sanda is the more common term, whereas Sanshou is the official name since Da makes it sound too brutal or violent.

But the Sanshou form we are concerned with is the antithesis of violence. It is about sticking and following, about sensing your opponent’s energy, as Chen Yanlin says, “neutralizing and issuing” in subtle and continuous movement. I’ve always found Push Hands to be limited, especially the fixed stance version of Push Hands. In the Two-person Form of Sanshou the art of Tai Chi reveals itself, the nature of the individual movements becomes clear.