Film Comment: Shaw Brothers

Auch im Film Comment findet sich ein Text zur Shaw Brothers Retrospektive in New York. Schön und enthusiastisch geschrieben, mit einigen Informationen und erfreulich lang.

Chances are, all of those magical moments - those, and a thousand others just as bold and frequently more bizarre - will come as something new to you, even if they were all committed to celluloid between 20 and 40 years ago. They were gone for a very long while, those moments - locked away behind the walls of one of world cinema's most fabled walled cities, rarely screened and only occasionally available from list-clutching chopsocky specialists on bootleg videos so murky they might have been intercepted scramble-casts from a Martian moon. But now that they're back, letterboxed and luminescent, their value is plain to see. The astonishing legacy of Hong Kong's legendary Shaw Brothers studios - razzle-dazzle musicals, death-steeped melodramas, huangmei diao Chinese opera adaptations, super-noir swordplay sagas, gristle-ribboned urban thrillers, and some of the greatest martial-arts movies ever made - is risen. And a stool-brown monkey shall lead us; behold, the celestial view.