The martial arts film is a crucial yet little-understood genre of Chinese cinema. While today fans of the martial arts film can be found around the world, and filmmakers from Hollywood to Japan to France draw inspiration from it, the unique origins, history, and outstanding artistry of the genre remain relatively unknown. This program focuses on the ascendancy of “new school” Mandarin wuxia pian (swordplay films) in Hong Kong and Taiwan in the 1960s and the kung fu (unarmed combat) heyday of the 1970s.
The achievements of some of the genre's most innovative directors prior to the 1980s-names such as Zhang Che, King Hu, Lau Kar-Leung (Liu Jialang), and Chu Yuan-have gone largely unheralded beyond circles of specialists and fans, in part because there were no good prints of their films in circulation. What with faded color, panning and scanning, and atrocious dubbing, those prints and videotapes that did exist gave only the faintest impression of the films' original impact. Thanks to the curatorship of Cheng-Sim Lim, the UCLA Film and Television Archive remedies this situation by presenting as many new 35mm prints as possible; all films will be presented in their original language with English subtitles.