#ASIAN KUNG FUN BRIDGE TV#
Martial-arts films are artistically unique, influenced by all the artifacts of kung fu culture, both high and low comic books and classical Chinese literature, TV serials and traditional Chinese painting, superstitious beliefs, pulp novels, and so on. This cinema form’s survival depended on a variety of factors. But after the 1949 revolution, the Chinese commercial-film industry left Shanghai for Hong Kong, and the martial-arts cinema flourished again. Tightening censorship and the Chinese cinema’s growing engagement in social issues resulted in few martial-arts films being produced in the 1930s.
One such story, The Legend of the Strange Hero, proved so durable since its original publication in 1928 that it has survived at least five film adaptations in as many decades. Originating in Shanghai in the 1920s, the first of these action-packed screen dramas cashed in on the contemporary popularity of pulp novels, drawing liberally on traditional tales and legends of superhuman swordsman and magical feats. More popularly known as kung fu films in the West, the martial-arts cinema is almost as old as the Chinese film industry itself. HK’s martial arts film stylishly bridge time, space, and now cultures This article appeared originally in the all-Hong Kong issue of Bright Lights #13 (1994).
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