Heroic Grace: The Chinese Martial Arts Film, Part II July 12 – 20
In keeping with martial arts movie tradition, the UCLA Film & Television Archive returns with this sequel to the successful Heroic Grace touring program launched in 2003. Heroic Grace II picks up where the first series left off. While the debut program focused on seminal films in the genre produced by the Shaw Bros. studio during the 1960s and early 70s, this installment carries the story forward through the ’70s and into the early ’80s, covering that enormously creative period when kung fu entered the popular lexicon in the West. Heroic Grace II accords a closer look at some of the most influential auteurs from this era.
To the roster of established masters such as Zhang Che (Chang Cheh) and King Hu (Hu Jinquan), we can now add Chu Yuan (Chor Yuen), Lau Kar-leung (Liu Jialiang) and the Korean émigré Chung Chang-wha. All of these directors made bold and inventive martial arts films while under contract with Shaw Bros., and their contributions to the genre paved the way for the ’90s generation of Hong Kong action as well as the more recent pan-Chinese wuxia pian (swordplay film) revival. The martial arts cinema was nothing if not star-driven in its “new school” incarnation, and the stars who emerged in the 70s and ’80s were the brightest of them all: Chen Guantai, Luo Lie, David Jiang (Jiang Dawei), Di Long and Gordon Liu (Liu Jiahui). Equally dazzling were their distaff counterparts, the female stars who blazed paths of glory across the jiang hu (literally “rivers and lakes”; metaphorically the mythic realm of the martial arts): Kara Hui (Wei Yinghong), Jing Li, Betty Bei Di and Nora Miao (Miao Kexiu). Heroic Grace II features a selection of career highlights from these remarkable performers, presented in restored or archival prints, many of which have been unavailable for public exhibition until now.
