BY KELLY GRAML
UCLA Today
Were you one of the thousands who marveled at
“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and thought its
female warriors, “wire-work” stunts and mystical
swordplay were fresh and innovative?
Then you’ll be surprised to know that
some of the earliest Chinese silent martial arts films also
featured women warriors who leaped, somersaulted and flew while
wielding swords in the name of justice.
Today, the reach of the Chinese martial arts
film is international; moves dreamt up by Hong Kong masters
have morphed into the pixilated mainstream of video games and
inspired such Hollywood film directors as Quentin Tarantino.
But according to Cheng-Sim Lim, co-head of programming
of the UCLA Film and Television Archive, knowledge about the
genre on this side of the Pacific remains woefully sketchy.
Few realize that Chinese folkloric tales of chivalrous heroes
with remarkable fighting abilities were passed down orally centuries
before being celebrated in print and finally on celluloid. The
genre drew liberally on China’s religious tenets, its
performance traditions in opera and acrobatics, its political
history and turn-of-the-century encounter with modernity.
An Archive film series to screen Feb. 28 through
March 16 will enlighten campus audiences on the development
of the martial arts film from its silent-era beginnings in Shanghai
in the 1920s to its creative and box-office apogee in the ’70s.
Most of the films to be shown have been out of circulation for
more than 20 years, and many have never been screened in Los
Angeles.
Lim, who spent five years putting together “Heroic
Grace: The Chinese Martial Arts Film,” said, “What
with faded color, panning and scanning and atrocious dubbing,
the martial arts prints and videotapes that existed gave only
the faintest impression of the films’ original impact.
We’ve sought to remedy this by presenting as many new
35mm and archival prints as possible.”
All films will be presented in Chinese, but
many will have new English subtitles. Later, select films will
tour nationally to more than a dozen venues, including the Seattle
International Film Festival. For details, visit www.cinema.ucla.edu.
