"Heroic Grace" catalog - UCLA Film & Television Archive

SWORDSWOMAN OF HUANGJIANG [HUANGJIANG NÜXIA]
China 1930 Directors: Chen Kengran, Zheng Yisheng, Shang Guanwu
This entertaining curtain-raiser to the adventure series, SWORDSWOMAN OF HUANGJIANG, is sadly missing credits and footage at
the beginning and end. (The 12 later episodes in the series are also presumed lost.) Nevertheless, enough remains of the film’s
ebullient mixing of special effects and now-familiar martial arts motifs—“weightless” vaulting, swordfighters competing to prove
their superior technique, nighttime skirmishes in a temple—to make it an exemplary precursor to the Hong Kong “sword and
sorcery” films of 30 years hence.
The eponymous swordswoman Fang Yuqin roams the countryside with her “martial brother” Yue Jianqiu, dispensing aid and
protection to people in need. While travelling in the mountains, she chances upon a group of villagers terrorized by a giant
“golden-eyed eagle.” The monster has caught a little boy, and it is up to our nüxia (female knight-errant) to save him. That she
does and spectacularly, with an animated superhuman leap across a deep ravine (although the primitive special effect may look
quaint to modern eyes).
Fang is then induced to a neighboring town where she is challenged to a duel by a young martial artist, who can boast of her
own gravity-defying feats. As Fang and her challenger parry and thrust, crossing blades, their all-female contest—a marvelously
choreographed sequence posing a surprising and early reversal of Zhang Che-esque masculinist rhetoric—turns into female
bonding. The erstwhile combatants decide to rout the robbers who are threatening the younger woman’s town. Fang and Yue set
off on the mission. As night falls, they stop at a temple where, as surely as the way of the jiang hu (underworld) evoked in the
series’ title, danger steals in with the dark.
—Cheng-Sim Lim
Studio: Youlian. Scenario: Gu Mingdao. Cinematography: Yao Shiquan. Cast: Xu Qinfang, He Zhigang.
Beta-SP, silent with Chinese and English intertitles, 74 min.
Tape Source: Asian Union Film Ltd.
With live musical accompaniment by KCRW DJ Anne Litt
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SUNDAY MARCH 2