Film form and the combat sequence in contemporary Chinese martial arts cinema: a neoformalist analysis of Blades of the Guardians: Wind Rises in the Desert (2026)

Chinese martial arts cinema is among the most widely circulated forms of Chinese popular culture, yet a systematic literature review found formal and aesthetic analysis to be its least developed strand. This study analyzes the film form of a combat sequence from Blades of the Guardians: Wind Rises in the Desert (2026), a leading production of the wuxia revival. It asks how the sequence builds its film form from its devices, their functions, and their motivations, how that form defamiliarizes the conventions of contemporary Chinese martial arts film combat, and what dominant organizes it. Thompson's neoformalist approach was applied through directed qualitative content analysis supported by shot measurement, with a sequence from Legends of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants (2025) as the documented baseline. Results are reported under five themes: defamiliarization; systems of form and style; fabula and syuzhet; device, function, and motivation; and the dominant. Every device proved conventional for its stratum, but their organization did not. The sequence's narrative, stylistic, and temporal systems converge on still shots, which carry the transactions of the story. The syuzhet delays and stretches a simple fabula at its turning points. Compositional motivation carries most of the construction, transtextual motivation supplies its inherited figures, realistic motivation keeps violence consequential, and artistic motivation marks the weight given to stillness. The findings propose stasis as the local dominant of the sequence, a defamiliarization of organization rather than of device. The study offers communication research a documented and replicable procedure for describing how the film form of a visual narrative is built in contemporary Chinese martial arts cinema.