ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a cinematic tradition that portrays the martial artist’s capacity of controlling the exchange of natural energies between the interior and exterior of the body. The Grandmaster (Wong Kar-wai, 2013) illustrates this skill through its distinctive use of digital effects. By analyzing a central character’s interactions with the ubiquitous digital snow, the chapter demonstrates how the film’s visual effects materialize the energetic flow, drawing from traditions of Chinese visual culture, medicine, and martial arts—all prominent motifs in the film’s setting in early to mid-twentieth-century China. The chapter further studies the specific technique that produced the effects, particle systems, to highlight its links to both the animist worldview and its cinematic offspring, animation.
