I’m going to miss most of these. Have done already. However, in case you’re in the area and love the genre as much as I do, I thought I’d mention it. UCLA’s Film and Television Archive are doing a wonderful festival/series of Kung-Fu films, several of them quite rare. It looks like such fun.

Their whole schedule is here: Click on the words “Heroic Grace II’ within the schedule for a page telling you all about the series in great detail. An extract , after which I’ll tell you the physics link:

While the debut series traced the development of this most influential of Chinese film genres, from its origins in Shanghai in the 1920s through the halcyon days of Hong Kong-based production in the 1970s and ’80s, this series digs deeper into that enormously creative period when kung fu entered our popular lexicon, and teases out linkages to the ’90s generation of Hong Kong action and the more recent pan-Chinese wuxia pian (swordplay film) revival.

Heroic Grace II accords a closer look at the overlooked auteurs of the martial arts cinema. To the roster of masters Zhang Che (Chang Cheh) and King Hu (Hu Jinquan), we can now add Chu Yuan (Chor Yuen) and Lau Kar-leung (Liu Jialiang), and possibly Chung Chang-wha, Wu Ma and Huang Feng. At various points in their careers, these directors worked for major Hong Kong studios Shaw Bros., Cathay and Golden Harvest. At other times, they branched out on their own, shooting movies in Taiwan or for smaller independent companies in Hong Kong, or in the case of Chung, worked in South Korea.

Martial arts cinema was nothing if not star-driven in its postwar, “new school” and beyond incarnations, and the stars who emerged in the ’70s and ’80s were the brightest of them all: Bruce Lee (Li Xiaolong), Chen Guantai, Luo Lie, David Jiang (Jiang Dawei), Di Long, Gordon Liu (Liu Jiahui), Jackie Chan (Cheng Long) and Jet Li (Li Lianjie). Heroic Grace II will screen a selection of their career highlights, as restorations or archival prints, many unavailable for public exhibition until now.

And finally the Archive celebrates the women who blazed paths of glory across the jiang hu (literally “rivers and lakes”; metaphorically the mythic realm of the martial arts), whose talents younger film fans may have glimpsed only in fragmentary form, oftentimes on butchered video. Heroic Grace II will present rediscoveries of some of the best, rarely screened works featuring such martial arts queens as Angela Mao Ying, Helen Ma (Ma Hailun), Kara Hui (Wei Yinghong), Xu Feng, Jing Li, Betty Bei Di and Nora Miao (Miao Kexiu).

The physics link? Oh, I learned this from Albion Lawrence a while ago, back in the Summer. One of the biggest of the film companies mentioned is the Shaw Brothers. One of those brothers (Run Run Shaw) is the same person who founded the Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences, Astronomy, Life Sciences and Medicine. I like that connection!

-cvj