The enframing of CGI in martial arts films: Action beyond the body

This article examines how CGI operates as both a structuring and affective device within a strand of auteur-driven, transnational contemporary wuxia cinema, focusing on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Shadow (2018), and The Grandmaster (2013). Rather than treating digital effects primarily as spectacle or narrative markers, this article argues that CGI enframes wuxia action by organising the conditions under which movement becomes perceptually and culturally legible. Working alongside non-digital techniques, CGI connects production practice with spectatorship and narration by shaping trajectories and environmental traces into meaningful and narratively consequential forms. Through its integration with wirework, weaponry design, and environmental reinforcement, CGI shifts wuxia action from planar visibility towards volumetric legibility, transforming ­figure-ground composition into a dynamic field. By situating these techniques within the intermedial and transnational contexts of wuxia cinema, this article repositions CGI techniques as culturally located modes of configuring sovereignty that remap wuxia’s expressive and affective terrain.