Thread by @HeadExposure

Hollywood fights are often shot by several cameramen catching action as best they can. Scenes are assembled by alternating long shots w/ closer ones. In HK, no camera position is repeated. Here each image is composed around a specific action and other actions require other setups

Brilliant break down of the scene by David Bordwell:

"The handcuffing phase of the scene gives us eighteen shots in only twenty-four seconds, making this passage as rapid-fire as any edit- happy Hollywood director might wish. Yet each shot is absolutely legible."

"The scene shows how the pause/burst/pause pattern can be modulated by the pace of editing. Often the cuts link movement smoothly across shots (8.88–8.89), but a shot can also highlight a marked beat, from the most vivid action to lesser ones (8.84–8.85)."

"The medium shots serve to show the geometry of intersecting body parts, as well as to allow for surprise entrances from people off-screen (Fig. 8.97). Each image includes no more of the parlor than we need to see at that instant."

"The final shot of the 4 men cuffed gains its comic force from the fact that each one has been subdued in a string of close shots; this is our 1st view of their full humiliation. Abandoning Hollywood “coverage”, the scene is a triumph of constructive editing & segment shooting."

"To conceive the premise—a woman subdues 4 men with 1 pair of cuffs—and to work it out in incisive detail requires imagination, a sense of the absurd, and awareness of those mechanics of forceful, legible filmmaking pointed out by Kuleshov, Pudovkin, and Eisenstein in the 1920s."

"The construction is all the more admirable for the fact that it was developed on the set in a single day, with the director quickly deciding on each shot as each bit of action was conceived."
-Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (pp 149-153)