The formality is no accident. Zhang and his action director/choreographer on both films, Tony Ching Siu-Tung, make the heightened ideal of combat they create inseparable from the techniques of ancient Chinese classical music and calligraphy ("Hero") and Chinese classical dance ("House of Flying Daggers").

Early in the latter film, Ziyi Zhang performs a traditional sleeve dance, manipulating the long skeins of fabric at the end of her arms into liquid, calligraphic swirls. A few moments later, her sleeves become percussive, and her dancing as boldly fantasticated as the film's combat sequences, when co-star Andy Lau throws pebbles or beans against a wall of drums, challenging her to match their trajectories and rhythmic patterns.

As she whirls though the room, flinging sleeves against drums, this dazzling "Echo Game" sequence offers a vision of what a dance musical might be in the hands of Zhang Yimou and Tony Ching Siu-Tung. And even when the film evolves into an extended chase — or when "Hero" juxtaposes conflicting versions of the same events — the stylized combat scenes punctuate the narratives like dance numbers in a vintage MGM musical.

Both films explore conflicts between conscience and duty, depend on elaborate deceptions involving the fate of the Chinese nation and incorporate love stories (unexpectedly in "Hero," predictably in "The House of Flying Daggers"). Each also provides a climactic renunciation of violence.

The large-scale "Hero" is the more visually poetic of the two — partly due to its haunting use of color — though essentially masculine in its narrative focus and conditioned by a justification of what we might call Chinese manifest destiny.

In contrast, "House of Flying Daggers" sets up but never resolves a final confrontation between rebels and government forces, remains comparatively feminine and intimate but ultimately makes as powerful a case as "Hero" for linking human conflict with turbulence in the natural world.

Instead of blood, the lethal swordplay in these films generates vortexes of snow, rain, falling leaves, with the whole environment invested in the protagonists' duels to the death. When autumn changes to winter in the midst of a fight between comrades who have turned into rivals, nature itself becomes a kind of pitiless referee and mere midair combat no longer seems the most extreme statement of Chinese martial arts fantasy.

Indeed, these films take us back to a Shakespearean world in which every component of the social fabric and natural order is intricately connected. In such a world, an extraordinary man or woman can be literally a force of nature, and it may take a thousand arrows — or a flying dagger that magically splits in two — to end that exceptional life.

That's a major key to these films' hold on our imaginations: seeing incomparably powerful individuals define their destinies and even deliberately throw away their lives at a time when our own futures have become compromised by an eroding economy, reduced employee benefits, growing gridlock and all the other mundane realities that no flying Chinese warrior ever has to face.

Moreover, as they skip across the surface of lakes, or spiral into the sky, the exhilarating physical feats executed by those warriors establish new standards and expectations for others to match.

In October, martial arts champion Matt Mullins presented a male sextet titled "Sideswipe" at the American Choreography Awards, adding lots of vertical gymnastic buoyancy to the chop-and-kick virtuosity standard in this kind of showpiece. Mullins didn't use wires, so his cast couldn't actually fly, but his debt to Chinese martial arts spectacles proved unmistakable.

Films and television have long conditioned our sense of human possibilities, starting with the illusion that human beings can dance full-out indefinitely. A show like Twyla Tharp's "Movin' Out" bought into that illusion, just as Mullins' sextet bought into the one popularized by Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou, along with the "Matrix" and "Kill Bill" films.