Blade runners

There’s something really beautiful and really lethal about Arnis, Eskrima and Kali fighting, and that’s what Jay Ignacio’s documentary, The Bladed Hand, captures best.

The fact that most of the masters demonstrating what has come to be known collectively as Filipino Martial Arts (FMA) are already in their 70s and upward is also amazing, and a little sad. Because if this balletic fighting style involving sticks and blades is to survive into the Next Generation, it will require young students willing to master its skills.

Watching The Bladed Hand at a preview (it gets a wider Philippines screening on Sept. 15), I could see why Ignacio (band member of DaPulis and co-founder of The Silly People’s Improv) spent three years tracking down his story. Where did Filipino stick and blade fighting come from? Why did it splinter into three competing, in-fighting branches — Kali, Arnis and Eskrima? And why is it Hollywood’s best-kept action movie secret?

Ignacio’s film explores these questions, with a wealth of interviews and archival footage — but it’s the action that really nails you. Whether it’s septuagenarian Grand Master Cacoy Cañete easily deflecting blows from a trainee a third his age, or the sight of well-padded young girls learning Arnis training — the visuals are what draw you into FMA.

And yes, it is now “FMA,” a national form of fighting recognized as such in a recently passed congressional bill, thus paving the way, Ignacio hopes, for greater recognition and dissemination as an art form. A very lethal art form, that is.

Already, Hollywood is awash in FMA moves — riffs abound, from all the Bourne movies thus far to The Book of Eli and Repo Men; not to mention Kick-Ass. And — as I wrote about a decade ago — it was the backbone of The Hunted, that otherwise middling Hollywood flick with Benicio Del Toro and Tommy Lee Jones as lethal combatants with Kali skills.

On July 7, Ignacio held a screening of The Bladed Hand at Crossroad 77 in Quezon City and it was special because several of the aging FMA masters and participants in the movie trooped onstage to receive steel blades from the director/producer. (Sadly, four of the masters in the movie have since passed away in the three years it took to make the film.) The film itself points out how difficult it is to unite fighting styles in a group of islands that have a hard time settling on a common language among hundreds of dialects. No wonder fighting styles can’t all just get along.

Most agree that Spanish fencing styles had something to do with birthing Kali, Arnis and Eskrima. But it goes much deeper. With UP anthropology professors explaining its roots in Indonesia (where the kris blade comes from) and Mindanao, and modern practitioners as far away as Russia, Canada, France and Israel extolling the use of FMA in police and anti-terror efforts, the film makes a good case that stick fighting is not just some low-born street style. It’s an art form.

Plus, it just looks really cool. From Chloe Moretz demonstrating her balisong knife skills in Kick-Ass, to Jeremy Renner working some hand-to-hand combat in The Avengers, Hollywood has embraced FMA as the new kung fu. Yet few characters in the movies actually mention its Filipino origins. It’s always employed by Chinese or Japanese or otherwise unnamed Asian characters — or plucked from thin air by seemingly well-trained Caucasian characters — so the local roots are hidden.

The Bladed Hand points out that a crucial nexus came when Fil-Am Dan Inosanto — now chief guro at Inosanto Academy in California — was asked by a movie studio to train with new Hong Kong import Bruce Lee back in the mid ‘60s. It was a fruitful hybrid — Lee’s Jeet Kune Do pollinating with Inosanto’s stick and arm movements to masterful effect in movies like Enter the Dragon and Game of Death. From then on, other Fil-Ams provided Hollywood with a steady supply of martial art moves that look convincingly fast and furious onscreen (Matt Damon taking out a couple of cops trying to roust him from a park bench in the first Bourne movie readily comes to mind).

What was once a deadly style of knife combat — many of the blades shown in the documentary look like they could dig the Marianas Trench across somebody’s aorta — has evolved (or devolved) into a stick fighting style, mostly because sticks are cheap, easy to find and less deadly.

Irony abounds when The Bladed Hand shows American trainers demonstrating FMA and its roots in instructional videos sold abroad, or the segment showing a police attaché from the French Embassy training Filipino PNP men in combat methods they’re not even aware come from the Philippines. But it’s always been that way: you have to cast your bread upon the waters before it comes back as pan de sal.

Ignacio also focuses on the next generation — today’s Hollywood trainers like Robert Alonzo, Jeff Imada and Jon Eusebio, and local enthusiasts like former senator Miguel Zubiri and Daniel “Mumbakki” Foronda — to show where FMA may be heading. With passage of the Arnis Law (Republic Act 9850) declaring Arnis, Kali or Eskrima as the National Sport and Martial Art, it could lead to more seminars in the Philippines and around the world. (Myself, I’d like to see an interactive video game version — as long as the right people get paid for their expertise, that is. Coming soon to your Xbox: Arnis Fighter: Sticks of Death!)

Though The Bladed Hand is, as Ignacio acknowledged at the screening, still in “rough form” (one would like to see more translations and subtitles, and perhaps demonstrations of basic FMA moves onscreen — though, arguably, one can watch instructional videos for that), it places the focus where it should be: on yet another unique world-class skill that Filipinos can call their own.