There is a fight movement style in America that’s basically been the same for the past 20 years. I call it “Cardinal”. Cardinal Movement is a formalized and rigid action style that is in everything. (Sometimes it’s also known as “twisties”.) As we’ll see, gymnastics, XMA, and Wushu underwent the same process that created Cardinal.
Cardinal movement has 3 qualities: intensity (sell impact as hard and often as possible), safety (avoid hurting actors, make it easy for them to learn), and economy (able to plug-n-play fight sequences anywhere on set, at any time during production).
Intensity
As we know from American cinema, impact is everything. The American Punch style I describe in my book If These Fists Could Talk is a battle between wrecking balls. The wrecking ball with the most character wins. It’s highly interruptive, story-driven, and perceptibly uncooperative. (Consider American Pro Wrestling, which is cooperative mechanically, but it’s designed to look uncooperative. Same idea.)
Emphasizing intensity necessarily means you can’t choreograph long strings of movements, known also as “phrases”. Falling or hurt bodies are the real “shapes” here, making the audience wince. This means less of the “shoe leather” which you find in Hong Kong Punch.
There are martial origins of the Cardinal style. Karate seminars with cooperative takedowns, board breaking, Bruce’s strength demonstrations, sport karate/XMA emphasizing intensity over subtlety. What unites the seminar arts is performing for a large crowd at 4 cardinal directions. Your movements have to be seen at all angles. This is how you score with the judges, gain students, sell tickets, etc.
Contrast with an old southern kung fu form, which would have been performed in a small room or square with people watching from a few yards away, where nuance could be enjoyed.
Safety
The lead actor in the film is trained in Cardinal Movement not only to get them in sync with the stunt team, but to streamline training as much as possible. No need to train all kinds of stances or subtle hand techniques. Focus instead on the big.
Cardinal Movement tends to be static. This again comes from its seminar origins. The business of the fight happens in a single spot with little if any movement off the base. Once you start moving around, the fight becomes infinitely complex.
If you introduce footwork during the business, an actor without sparring training can’t judge distances like a martial artist and could get hit. So the fight happens in a specific spot, then impact. Then fight happens in another spot, then impact, etc. Moving at odd angles infinitely complicates movement.
If footwork is introduced, people are liable to get punched. If an actor gets punched, the stunt team gets blamed. If a stunt performer gets punched, the actor hurts his/her hand, and the stunt team gets blamed. Insurance and arbitrage come down against stunt teams, who are supposed to be the safety experts. Cardinal Movement solves this.
Economy
Cardinal Movement doesn’t employ many kinds of moves. There are only a few punches, a few kicks (front, round, side, and sometimes a spin hook), and 4 directions: North, South, East, and West.
There is really only 1 stance: front stance, where the front knee is bent 135-90 degrees. The back leg extends out, driving power to the front to increase power. We can thank sport karate again for codifying this stance. There is no upright boxing stance, horse stance, cat stance etc.
As I mentioned, Cardinal fight “phrases” (all the movement or “shoe leather” between impacts) take place in a contained space, which I call a “Persian rug fight”. We see this all the time: 2 performers trading punches, kicks, and blocks, not moving anywhere.
Despite the fact that there’s an entire environment to interact with, Cardinal Movement can’t really choreograph any interactions with it because the coordinator can’t know if the environment will change on the day. Changing the environment changes the choreo, confuses actors, breaks noses, and creates lawsuits. Stunt team gets blamed.
Watch the Matrix 4, even many recent Star Wars fights: they’re a bunch of 2-person seminar sets taking place around the environment. It’s possible these weren’t even designed beforehand, but there is no way to give them breath because then they start bumping into other groups, which screws up continuity. We can’t blame the stunt teams, they’re doing their best. The production model forces Cardinal Movement. It’s a structural issue.
The Language of Movement
Cardinal Movement emerges naturally from the American studio model. It bears more than a passing resemblance to language. Just as languages have dialects and accents, Cardinal Movement produces various “accents” and “intonations” in its users movements. These tend to be blunted and kind of bulky. I wonder if it’s difficult to undo these.
There’s an interesting parallel in the Chinese language. According to Hong’s History of the Chinese Language, Ancient and Middle Chinese, spoken before the 18th century, featured a richer sound library, such as a variety of final sounds (-p -m -k -t), which we still have in modern Cantonese. But when Mandarin was codified in the 20th century, they dropped most of these final sounds, blunting them into -n, -ng, or none at all. Going from being a native Mandarin speaker to speaking Cantonese can be difficult, but going from Cantonese to Mandarin is easy.
Whenever you take a variety of languages and condense them into a single, imperial language, you get this blunting of aesthetics. You can see this same blunting in American English sentence structure, which is rigid probably because English has been codified thanks to the printing press. Interestingly, American English has a robust sound system, being a combo of French, German, and Latin. This makes it easy for Americans to sound fluent in French, German, even Chinese, but we have a hard tiime learning the complex case and declension systems of Latin, Greek, Sanskrit. Native speakers of those languages would find American English sentence structure rigid and stifling, unsuitable for stream of consciousness, and pronouncing American English would be next to impossible.
Just as language was blunted by assimilation, gymnastics, Wushu, and XMA (all being “imperial” styles) were blunted by assimilation. They’re beautiful in their own ways, but they are predicated on impact, safety, and economy, just like Cardinal Movement. They lack the movement vocabulary of “ancient” styles. Someone trained in ancient Chinese movement (as taught in the opera schools) will find it easy to appear “fluent” in wushu. Vice versa, impossible. The snappy wushu and XMA head movements alone make it difficult to teach these performers how to appear like “fighters”. They’re usually too dramatic. On mocap shoots, I literally have to stand where I want them to look. I like to use Yuen Biao as an example of ancient Chinese head movement, which is theatrical while maintaining amazing poise, something I rarely see in Wushu.
Cardinal Movers can crosstrain and learn subtle head turns, small footwork shifts, and overlapping action, but not in a Cardinal class. You need to crosstrain in an older movement “dialect” to increase your fluency, or just go to open sparring classes. Then you can begin code switching effortlessly from one movement language to another.
I talk about movement and many more topics in my book Badass on a Budget: A Timeless Guide for Zero-Budget Action Filmmakers which you can order on Amazon.
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