I'm not sure how many of you will be interested in this... it may only appeal to Opus and Jason Bortz, but I'm posting it just the same. There's a terrific article in the Sept/Oct issue of Film Comment about a massive restoration project devoted solely to Hong Kong's Shaw Brothers. Apparently, there was a 12-film Shaws retrospective at the current New York Film Festival.
Full Version: The Shaw Brothers - Redux
| QUOTE (Chuck Stephens - Film Comment) |
| From a library of more than a thousand titles, at a cost somewhere in the range of $75 million, Celestial Pictures is now in the midst of a five year project to restore and reissue some 760 Shaw Brothers films from the studio's mid-Fifties-to-mid-Eighties Golden age. Long rumored to have turned to dust in the vaults during the decades since the studio ceased feature-film production and reinvented itself as the television empire TVB 20 years ago, the negatives to nearly all of the Shaw's classic titles -- not just priceless percursors to the Hong Kong film renaissance of the Nineties but cornerstones to Chinese cinema as a whole -- turn out to have been remarkably well preserved. As each successive wave of Celestial DVD releases demonstrates, every fucshia sunset and severed limb is still oozing its original colors, and every flourish of ecstatic camera-whoosh and frantic splice-flurry are still as sharp as the edge on Golden Swallow's blade. For the aging Shaw acolytes who remember these movies from their childhood, for the latter-day Tsui Hark and John Woo worshipers who've yearned to explore the formative films that their autere-heroes so explosively remade, and for all the true believers yet to come, it's a miraculous rolling away of the stone. One-armed swordsmen and oily maniacs, killer clans and castrating courtesans, disco bumpkins and lecherous eunuchs, flying guillotines and mighty Peking men -- back from the grave they'll all come a-marching. Kingdoms and beauties and lovers eternal; three smiles, five venoms, seven golden vampires, and The Sexy Girls of Denmark, too. |
You gotta love that!
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