[QUOTE=Ronin22;857579]I know the shaw brothers library is being remastered does anyone know where you can by these online? And are they available in dubbed or just subs? Thanks, appreciate it[/QUOTE]
The originals are all subtitled, and I believe are mostly region 3 (won’t play on American DVD players).
Some of them have been re-released in region 0 with the dubbing from the original releases, though. I got the dubbed version of the remastered 36th Chamber from Amazon, I think.
Shaw Brothers
There are a ton of bootleg Shaw Brothers titles floating around. Celestial picked up the Shaw library and remastered them for region 3. We covered that in two e-zine articles, both published prior to 2003 (or thereabouts - I’d have to really dig to figure out the pub date on those) by Dr. Craig Reid:
SHAW BROTHERS: RELOADED
Another Shaw Brothers Update: Distribution and a New Kung Fu
Some of these Shaw Brothers titles have been picked up for American distribution by Dragon Dynasty. We’ve been working to promote Dragon Dynasty in a cooperative venture, thus our current sweepstakes for FLASHPOINT and our previous one for PTU. I watched a check disc of their soon-to-be-released title COME DRINK WITH ME last week and was blown away by the quality of the remastering that Dragon Dynasty has done with this classic film. They really treated it with respect. Even on my HDTV, the image looked incredibly sharp and the subtitling was perfect. Now I’m looking forward to seeing more of the old classics on Dragon Dynasty’s label.
Thanks for the replies guys
Interesting articles Gene…
Specifically I’m looking for the ones that Celestial is remastering. I can’t find them to buy anywhere. I don’t think the region restrictions will be a problem as i think my DVD player is region free.
Any ideas where to go online to get them?
Actually now that I’ve checked the site Masterkiller supplied I believe that intercontinental video ltd is the distrib for Celestial, is that right?
Yeah IVL distibuted Celestial’s remastered Shaws for a few years. For English dubs look for the Dragon Dynasty and Media Blasters (Tokyo Shock) DVDs. Image Entertainment also has English dubs on some of their releases. In fact, their last 3 releases have had English dubs. Deadly Breaking Sword, MAgic Blade and Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan.
Thanks jethro
Yeah I’m trying to decide if i want to go with subs or not, it seems there aren’t a lot of choices from Dragon Dynasty for english dub. How about Image and Tokyo Shock, do they have a lot more titles?
Also, is there a good online store for these? Thanks
Image has a bunch of titles out, and Media Blasters is just getting started with their releases.
As far as where to buy them, I’m sure there are many sites. hkflix.com is the first one that comes to mind, and for american releases there’s always Amazon.com.
Karmaloop
I wonder if this will effect Dragon Dynasty. We have a very good relationship with Dragon Dynasty - they provide many of our sweepstakes prizes.
New Multi-Platform, Youth Targeted Network Gets Dozens of Genre Films that Have Inspired Creativity in Hip Hop, Video Games and Fashion
BOSTON, Nov. 8, 2010 /PRNewswire/ – Karmaloop TV, the new multi-platform programming network designed to help operators “reclaim” viewership among the 18 to 34 year old demographic, has announced its first film licensing deal with Celestial Pictures. The Hong Kong based company owns, restores and licenses the world’s largest collection of Chinese-made films including the Shaw Brothers library of fan favorite kung fu and action classics such as THE 36th CHAMBER OF SHAOLIN, THE FIVE DEADLY VENOMS and THE ONE-ARMED SWORDSMAN.
“This is a unique genre of films that has a huge following and influence on Verge Culture, the multi-cultural community of tech-savvy young people who communicate digitally to share the latest trends in fashion, lifestyle and entertainment,” states Greg Selkoe, CEO of Karmaloop TV. “This is particularly true of the Shaw Brothers’ kung fu films, which have inspired everything from the names, rhymes and album titles of iconic hip hop superstars like Wu-Tang Clan to action films like Quentin Tarantino’s KILL BILL to a vast array of art, video games and fashion.”
The licensing deal with Karmaloop TV also means that kung fu and action film fans in the United States will see these films in their digitally restored versions, many of which will be premiering for the first time on U.S. television in High Definition. The licensed collection includes more than 60 of the greatest martial arts masterpieces, movies which launched the careers of stars like Jet Li, Ti Lung, David Chiang, Alexander Fu Sheng, Gordon Liu and Jimmy Wang Yu.
“It seems only natural that we begin building our film programming with such a resonant collection, one that lends itself to repeated viewing,” adds David Sehring, Karmaloop TV’s Executive Vice President of Programming, the man who built and curated the impressive film libraries of AMC and MONSTERS HD prior to joining the new upstart youth network. “We’re especially pleased to give this library the kind of multiple platform home needed to truly commune with a young audience, wherever and whenever they want to watch these action classics.”
Now on iTunes
Only in Asia though. How is that controlled exactly? I don’t use iTunes. My family does but I don’t.
Celestial Pictures debuts Shaw Brothers movies on iTunes Store
Among the first titles to launch are Gordon Liu’s “The 36th Chamber of Shaolin” and Stephen Chow’s “Out of the Dark”.
Posted on 08 August 2012 by Kelvin Ong
Hong Kong – Celestial Pictures Limited (CPL) announced today that select titles from Celestial’s Shaw Brothers Film Library are now available on the iTunes Store in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and nine additional countries in Asia. This announcement marks the first time the films will be made available on the iTunes Store in these territories.
Ride with EL REY
I have just split the EL REY NETWORK posts that were here into their own separate thread.
Flying Five Finger One Armed Eight Pole Shaolin Exploding Death Touch Thursdays ROCK!
Shaw Brothers making a comeback
http://variety.com/2015/film/asia/hong-kongs-tvb-says-shaw-bros-to-make-movie-comeback-1201462397/
The new SB logos:
Shaw Brothers Studios Now…
Filmed by urban explorers. I find this both fascinating and sad. Clearly, when SB ceased production, they left a LOT of good stuff sitting around to rot. Since it’s now going to be preserved as a historic site, I hope whoever’s in charge will clean up and properly preserve it. Looks like a lot of (most likely) toxic mold will have to be removed.
UCLA Film & Television Archive
The Shaw Brothers Collection of Films on DVD Distributed by Celestial Pictures
Thanks to a generous donation from Celestial Pictures over 500 DVDs of Hong Kong films originally produced and released in theaters by the Shaw Brothers between 1956 and 1997 are now available for viewing onsite at UCLA by appointment. The Shaw Brothers DVD Collection at UCLA represents all genres, from kung fu and martial arts to romantic comedies, from historical epics to docu-realistic dramas, from horror fantasies to musicals, Huangmei opera, and period dramas to adult-themed films. Titles include: Kingdom and the Beauty (1959), Come Drink with Me (1966), The Silent Swordsman (1967).
Directors represented include: Li Han-hsiang (1926-1996), Doe Chin (1915-1969), Yen Chun (1917-1980), Lo Chen (1923-2003), Lo Wei (1918-1996), Ho Meng-hua (1923-), Yueh Fung (1910-1999), Kao Li (1924-), Chang Cheh (1923-2002), Pan Lei (1927-), Cheng Kang (1924-), Inoue Umetsugu (1923-), Sun Chung (1941-), Kuei Chih-hung (1937-1999), Pao Hsueh-li (1937-), Chu Yuan (1934-), among others.
Download a listing of the titles available for onsite viewing from the Shaw Brothers Collection in PDF format or an Excel spreadsheet.
For additional information, consult the Archive Catalog record, or contact the Archive Research and Study Center (ARSC) for assistance.
This was just brought to my attention. Follow the link for the links.
RZA screens Five Elements Ninjas
I was contacted by a Celestial rep about a month ago about a potential national tour of RZA screening select Shaw Brothers films. I hope it happens.
JUNE 16, 2016
BY NICOLE DISSER
REEL PSYCHED
RZA Screens Kung-Fu Selects
RZA’s Dream Double Feature: Five Element Ninjas
Saturday, June 25, 7:15 pm at the Metrograph: $15
Classic kung fu with a member of the Wu-Tang Clan? Yes plz. RZA will be on hand to present this 1982 feature out of Hong Kong. Five Element Ninjas among other movies directed by Chang Cheh, including Five Shaolin Masters (1974) (he’s sometimes called the “godfather of Hong Kong cinema”), was clearly a huge inspiration to RZA and the rest of Wu-Tang. Cheh, in turn, took careful notes from Japanese Samurai films in addition to the Western movies of Sergio Leone.
If you’re all eye-rolly about ninja movies– don’t be, yo. This one’s regarded not only as a cult classic, but as a classic classic of the genre. And again, RZA will be there.
Rising up again
Shaw & Golden Harvest united.
China Media Capital Trio Takes Control at Iconic Shaw Brothers
Patrick Frater
Asia Bureau Chief
China Media Capital Trio Take ControlCOURTESY OF SHAW BROTHERS
OCTOBER 27, 2016 | 02:14AM PT
Li Ruigang and two fellow executives from his China Media Capital group have taken three directorial positions at iconic Hong Kong studio Shaw Brothers.
The company made famous by Sir Run Run Shaw was once a dominant force in Hong Kong and Asian cinema, but largely ceased film production in 1987. Today, however, the company holds a key 26% stake in Television Broadcasts (TVB), Hong Kong’s leading free-to-air TV broadcaster and owner of one of the largest Chinese language rights catalogs in the world.
Li has been appointed chairman and non-executive director of Shaw. He is joined by Jiang Wei, MD of the CMC-owned mainland Chinese film distributor Gravity Pictures, who is appointed an executive director of Shaw. Also joining is Thomas Hui, president, chief strategy officer and executive director of CMC Holdings, who will be an non-executive director.
They replace chairman Allan Yap, and directors Gu Jiong and Wong Ka Ching, who are all resigning due to other “heavy work commitments” elsewhere.
The appointments further increase the control of Li and his CMC team over TVB, following Li’s appointment as chairman of TVB last week. That appointment added to some industry concerns that mainland Chinese interests are dominating Hong Kong’s supposedly unrestricted media not through censorship or central government control, but by economic ownership instead. Another high profile example was the acquisition earlier this year of the South China Morning Post newspaper by Alibaba.
The executive appointments also further expand CMC’s control over the Flagship Entertainment Chinese film production venture with Warner Bros. CMC and TVB have a narrow majority of the shares and Gravity Pictures is set as the unit’s distributor in mainland China.
CMC also owns the Fortune Star library of films produced by Shaw’s arch rival Golden Harvest.
Boasting a Hong Kong stock market listing of its own, Shaw could now be positioned to become a far more active company than of late, either as a production company or as a vehicle for fund raising.
In its heyday, Shaw was responsible for iconic Hong Kong studio movie classics films including “One Armed Swordsman,” and “The 36th Chamber of Shaolin.” As the golden age of Hong Kong cinema waned, Shaw ended film production to concentrate for over a decade on television. In 2002 its film catalog – some 760 titles – were sold in 2002 to Malaysian billionaire Ananda Krishnan who used them to found Celestial Pictures, a company that now has a TV channels business with Lionsgate and Saban.
Shaw tentatively restarted film production in 2009 though volumes have been low. In the last year, it has been involved as a partner in two film adaptations of TVB series, that went on to become hits in mainland China. Its “Line Walker” recently earned $90.9 million, while “Triumph In The Skies” earned $24.6 million in 2015.
This could be both good and bad news.
I sure hope that since these film libraries are owned by a mainland company that they aren’t edited for content. As any fan of SB and GH film would know, both SB and GH movies often contained content that would be deemed unacceptable to the mainland Chinese censors. And while I myself always found certain content (rape scenes, for example) something I strongly dislike, IMO all films from these libraries should be kept as they are. I do not like censors going in and deciding what parts of a film are or aren’t acceptable for me to watch.
This is AWESOME!
Jim Vallandingham
Posts Visualizations Experiments About
A Data Driven Exploration of Kung Fu Films
January 24th, 2017 Demo Source
Recently, I’ve been a bit caught up in old Kung Fu movies. Shorting any technical explorations, I have instead been diving head-first into any and all Netflix accessible martial arts masterpieces from the 70’s and 80’s.
While I’ve definitely been enjoying the films, I realized recently that I had little context for the movies I was watching. I wondered if some films, like our latest favorite, Executioners from Shaolin, could be enjoyed even more, with better understanding of the context in which these films exist in the Kung Fu universe.
So, I began a data driven quest for truth and understanding (or at least a semi-interesting dataset to explore) of all Shaw Brothers Kung Fu movies ever made!
For those not dedicating some portion of their finite lives to these retro wonders, the Shaw Brothers Studio is the most famous (to me) Kung Fu film producer of all time. Their memorable title screen is almost always a part of my Kung Fu watching experience.
I figured this company’s entire martial arts collection would provide for a consistent and thorough look at the genre. Fortunately, after a bit of searching, I stumbled on what appears to be a comprehensive list of Shaw Brothers Films. I decided to pull down details for each of these movies from the amazingly useful Letterboxd movie-list-creation site to explore them in a data driven way to see what patterns could be discovered and what context I could learn from those patterns.
So here is a bit of data exploration fun. The analysis is in R, using tips and tricks from Hadley Wickham’s wonderful new Data Science in R book.
The full analysis code can be found in this R Notebook, which includes the code and graphs in an integrated format. And (spoilers!), the end Actor Collaboration Network and the rest of the code can be found on github.
Come for the Kung Fu, stay for the word embedding and interactive networks!
#Shaw Brothers, Through The Ages
To get started, here is a look at the count of Shaw Brothers films by year.
I’m using the wonderful theme_fivethirtyeight for these charts. Someday, I’ll make my own.
That’s 260 films over 22 years.
The first Kung Fu Shaw Brothers film in this data set is Temple of the Red Lotus from 1965. From the reviews, it sounds like it was a bit rough around the edges - but that’s about what you would expect from this burgeoning genre.
Looks pretty sweet to me, I’ll have to check it out
The studio hits its stride in the early 70’s, with a lull in the mid 70’s and another spike in the late 70’s / early 80’s. Keep in mind that even during the lull, most years the studio is still putting out 10 or more Kung Fu movies.
To create this graph, I first loaded my raw JSON file into R using the tidyjson package like this:
[QUOTE]# load the library
library(tidyjson)
filename = ‘../out/shaw.json’
shaw_json <- paste(readLines(filename), collapse=“”)
films <- shaw_json %>% as.tbl_json %>% gather_array %>%
spread_values(
title = jstring(“title”),
director = jstring(‘director’),
year = jstring(‘year’),
watches = jnumber(“watches”),
likes = jnumber(“likes”),
time = jnumber(“time”)
)
I then graphed count by year using ggplot:
films %>% ggplot(aes(x = year)) +
geom_bar() +
labs(title = ‘Shaw Bros Films by Year’)
Not too shabby.
#Which Shaw Brothers Film should I watch?
If you are just getting started with the Kung Fu classics, 260 movies can be difficult to wade through. How do you get to the best of the best to make your initial experience in this genre a pleasant one?
Well, we can use the Letterboxd “watches” and “likes” metrics to help winnow down to the films that are the best bang-for-your-buck.
As you might expect, these two metrics are highly correlated:
Basically, anything with more than 400 watches or 100 likes seems like a good place to start. The standout, with over 800 watches is 1984’s Eight Diagram Pole Fighter. Not the catchiest title, but as one reviewer puts it:
Some of the raddest fights from any Shaw Bros films I’ve seen (specially that last one).
I haven’t seen this one yet, so I can’t comment - but it’s definitely on my list!
#Prolific Directors
We have the director for each movie in our dataset, let’s look to see if there are any popular standouts.
I’d say! Chang Cheh directed 67 or roughly 26% of all Shaw Brothers Kung Fu!
According to his Wikipedia page, he was known as the “The Godfather of Hong Kong cinema”, and rightly so - at least in terms of quantity.
Let’s pull out the top 5 directors, in terms of movie count, and see when they were most active.
Here’s the R code:
pull out just the top 5 directors
top_directors <- by_director %>% head(n = 5)
films_top_director <- films %>% filter(director %in% top_directors$director)
films_top_director_all <- films %>% mutate(director_label = ifelse(director %in% top_directors$director, director, ‘Other’))
films_top_director_all %>%
ggplot(aes(x = year)) +
geom_bar(aes(fill = director_label)) +
labs(title = ‘Shaw Bros Director Count by Year’, fill = ‘’) +
theme_fivethirtyeight()
and plot:
We can kind of see that Chang Cheh’s reign is towards the beginning of the Shaw Brothers timeline and tapers towards the end. Let’s view the same data as a percentage of the total movies made each year:
This shows how dominate Chang Cheh was in directing nearly half of Shaw Brothers films in some years. In the mid and later years, Chor Yuen came in to direct many films as well.[/QUOTE]
continued next post
continued from previous post
#Title Showdown: Shaolin vs Swordsman
We will get to the actors in these films in a second, but first I wanted to explore the words used in the titles of these movies.
These classic Kung Fu films typically have thrilling and mysterious names, like The Thundering Sword and The Invincible Fist. I wondered if there were any terms used frequently in titles, common threads or themes that became popular in the genre.
As I really wanted a chance to play a bit with the exciting new tidytext package, I decided to use it for this very simple text analysis.
This package works well to extract text-based data into a format ready to be analyzed and parsed with dplyr, ggplot, and other packages from the tidyverse.
Here is how to split the titles column of our dataset so that each word is a separate row in a new data frame.
[QUOTE]# load the library
library(tidytext)
title_all column,word column -titles <- films %>% mutate(title_all = title) %>% unnest_tokens(word, title)
Not too difficult right?
I also wanted to remove stop words, and that can be easily done with the included stop_words data:
load stop_words into R environment
data(“stop_words”)
titles_filter <- titles %>% anti_join(stop_words, by = “word”)
anti_join is part of the dplyr package.
Let’s take a look at the most frequently used words in these Shaw Brothers films.
Interesting! Our latest two films from my Netflix history were the afore mentioned Executioners of Shaolin and Shaolin Martial Arts, but I hadn’t realized “Shaolin” movies were so prevalent in the Shaw Brothers cannon.
Also interesting is the number of “Swordsman” movies - a term I don’t remember seeing yet.
Were these terms associated with different eras? Let’s graph their usage over time:
It would appear as if “Swordsman” movies were the hot stuff during early Shaw Brothers years, but they switched to mostly Shaolin’s in the mid-seventies. Here are the two terms overlaid:
Now the count-per-year isn’t mind-blowing or anything, but it does seem interesting that there was at least one movie with “Swordsman” in the title for six straight years, before an explosion of “Shaolin”.
I wanted to investigate a bit further. One of the first Swordsman movies they created was The One Armed Swordsman, and according to Wikipedia it was a big hit.
It was the first of the new style of wuxia films emphasizing male anti-heroes, violent swordplay and heavy bloodletting. It was the first Hong Kong film to make HK$1 million at the local box office, propelling its star Jimmy Wang to super stardom.
I must confess, being a casual enjoyer of Kung Fu, I was not familiar with the term “Wuxia”, so this needed a bit more investigation.
Almost immediately, I found a useful description from This essential guide to Wuxia:
The Chinese martial arts movie is generally split into two primary subgeneres: the kung fu film and the wuxia film. The kung fu film is newer and focuses primarily on hand-to-hand combat, it’s steeped in traditional fighting forms and there’s a general emphasis on the physical skill of the performer: special effects are generally disdained.
Wuxia is a much older form, based ultimately in the long tradition of Chinese adventure literature … Its heroes follow a very specific code of honor as they navigate the jianghu, an underworld of outlaws and bandits outside the normal streams of civilization.
Ah Ha! So the Swordsman / Shaolin dichotomy could be representative of the switch from this older style wuxia, to the new hip pure Kung Fu. The reappearance of both terms in the eighties could indicate a new found enjoyment for both styles. Apparently more famous modern films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon fall into the wuxia category.
I say “modern” here, but can you believe this movie is 17 years old? Time flies!
Or, it could be that the creators of these movies were lazy and just wanted to rely on the success of The One Armed Swordsman to make some money. Either way, its an interesting split.
Not knowing much about Chinese culture from that time period, I was also interested in learning more as to why “Shaolin” in particular was such a buzzword for Kung Fu movies. I’m still learning, but I found a great essay on history in the Shaw Brothers that points to an answer:
These films, focused on the Shaolin Temple as a center for anti-Qing resistance, provide a dizzying metaphorical potential, with the Qing variously standing in for Western imperialists, the Japanese, the Nationalist Kuomingtang, the Communists, or even simply the Manchurians themselves, while the Buddhism of the monks allows for examining of the contradictions at the heart of traditional Chinese belief systems, between the imperatives of social justice and withdrawal from worldly concerns.
[/QUOTE] continued next post
Continued from previous post
#Silly Kung Fu Titles with word2vec
Inspired by the ever wonderful Lynn Cherny’s word2vec experimentation, I wanted to use this opportunity to experiment just a bit with word embeddings and “word arithmetic”.
So I came up with an idea too silly to be useful, but fun for me to play with. For each noun detected in a title, I used Gensim’s word2vec implementation to find the nearest word to that noun, after subtracting “Chinese”, and adding another country.
Again, don’t take this seriously, I was just wanting to see what would happen.
So, cherry-picking a comical example:
[QUOTE]buddha - Chinese + American = God Fearin’
See? kind of funny at least in theory. I did this for every title, for a number of different countries. In practice, the results aren’t as hilarious as I had hopped for, probably because country vectors don’t impact the trajectory of most of these words much. Also, I used a pre-trained model which obviously impacts the embeddings.
But, I made a little toy for exploring these new titles anyways, check it out!
The raw results and the code I used to generate these are also available.
#Actor Troupes, Groups, and Clusters
Let’s end this exploration with a few insights into the actors in these films.
Even with my novice-level consumption of Shaw Brothers films, one thing you notice early on is a lot of familiar faces show up over and over in many of the movies.
We can see the extent of actor-over-use with another simple chart counting the number of movies frequently seen actors are found in.
Wow! Ku Feng apparently appeared in 82 Kung Fu movies. That’s a lot of Kung Fu!
His Wikipedia page isn’t as impressed with this feat as I am, providing little information on this Martial Arts Maniac. Apparently his real name is Chan Sze-man, and his first film was in 1959, and he is still acting today! The HKMDB, or Hong Kong Movie Database, provides just a bit more info:
In 1965, Ku formally signed an acting contract with Shaw Brothers where he made around 100 films for them and became most notably known as one of their top character actors. He has worked with just about every top Hong Kong director in a variety of films.
Ok then, well props to you Ku.
Did most of the top actors’ careers span multiple decades, or did actors come and go quickly?
We can graph the number of years an actor was featured in a movie over the total number of years in our dataset:
Pe
For the top actors, we see most were active more than half of the entire time Shaw Brothers Studios was making Kung Fu movies.
Here’s another quick graph showing the beginning and ending of these actors’ tenures:
#Finding a Mob of Venoms
One phrase that came up when researching these Shaw Brothers films, related to actor-reuse, is the Venom Mob, a group of actors that did indeed appear in a lot of Shaw Brothers films together. They became well known after the success of The Five Venoms, hence the catchy name.
So, can we find a Mob of Venoms in our data?
Inspired by David Robinson’s network analysis of Love Actually, I decided to try out the igraph package for a bit of network exploration.
After a lot of filtering and frustration, I ended up with a basic, but still fairly hairball-y network:
In this network, the nodes are actors who have appeared in many films. The edges are co-occurrences of actors in the same movies, with the width of the edges proportional to the number of movies they were found together in.
You can see that there are a lot of actors appear together.
The Venom Mob includes Chiang Sheng, so here, I’ve highlighted in red everyone he is connected with. In this sub-cluster, you can see Philip Kwok, Lu Feng, and many of the other Venoms.
igraph is great for digging into properties of nodes, edges, and networks - and there is plenty more that could be done in this tool just for this simple dataset. I however, was wanting a bit more of an interactive exploratory tool that I could use to browse Kung Fu actor connections.
You were too? Great! That’s why I created the amazing Shaw Brothers Actors Network Visualization.
With it, you can clearly pick out the Venom Mob on the right, in the screenshot. But that’s not all, you can also browse all the movies actors appeared together in, and modify the network in lots of fun ways.
The code is based on my interactive network Flowing Data tutorial, which recently has been updated to use plain old Javascript and D3v4.
That wraps up my little data-driven exploration of Shaw Brothers films. As with any analysis, there’s plenty more to explore - but hopefully this was fun for you too, and inspires some data-driven exploration of your own.[/QUOTE]
I love graphs like these. Kudos to Jim Vallandingham for these ultimate stats.
The Shaw Brothers Costume Exhibition
01 JUN SHAW BROTHERS’ COSTUME EXHIBITION FACEBOOK LIVE STREAM IS TODAY!
Posted at 00:45h in News by admin Share
The Shaw Brothers Costume Exhibition Facebook live stream is TODAY, May 31!
Join us on Facebook today we showcase the history of Shaw Brothers’ illustrious films through their exceptional costumes!
Shaw Brothers films are known for their creative stories lines, exciting visual effects, and wondrous characters. Like the films themselves, each costume is crafted with artistry, exhilarating color, and fine detail. Though there are many we could’ve chosen, we’ve decided to highlight nine costumes from different cinematic dynasties.
From Shaw Goddess Linda Dai’s iconic wardrobe in the classic Huangmei operatic film “The Kingdom and The Beauty,” to what our king and queen of comedy Stephen Chow and Anita Mui wore in “Justice, My Foot!” – this exhibition has it all!
We have been preparing these majestic costumes to be exhibition-ready for almost a year! If you are in Hong Kong or have plans to visit this summer, this exhibition is something you won’t want to miss. However, if you can’t make the trip, check out today’s live stream on Facebook!
Facebook Live Stream Time
HK: 9:45am on Thursday, June 1st
PST: 6:45pm on Wednesday, May 31st
EST: 9:45pm on Wednesday, May 31st
The ship to the past is boarding soon….
Are you getting on board?
Here’s the Facebook page.
Agfa
AGFA + Shaw Brothers Studio team up for theatrical distribution
Wednesday, January 17th, 2018
American Genre Film Archive, the largest non-profit genre film archive in the world, is excited to announce a theatrical partnership with Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers Studio. AGFA will distribute thirty new restorations from the Shaw vaults to theaters in 2018. This is AGFA’s latest collaboration following their distribution partnerships with genre home video labels Arrow Films (DONNIE DARKO), Severin Films (SANTA SANGRE), and Vinegar Syndrome (DOLEMITE).
Founded in 1958, Shaw Brothers produced the most significant and popular Chinese-language genre films of all time. From kung-fu battle-epics like THE 36TH CHAMBER OF SHAOLIN to psychedelic monster-mashes like THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN, the studio is responsible for setting off a worldwide cultural explosion of martial arts mania and influencing multiple generations of filmmakers. Quentin Tarantino once told the Los Angeles Times, “For a year, I’d watch one old Shaw Brothers movie a day — if not three.”
AGFA has curated thirty sparkling restorations from the Shaw Brothers vaults to reissue in theaters throughout the year. This includes fan favorites such as THE SUPER INFRAMAN, as well as deep cut horror-blasts like THE BOXER’S OMEN.
“It’s a dream come true to help a new generation of film lovers discover the Shaw Brothers catalog,” said AGFA director Joe Ziemba. “These movies deserve a new life on the big screen, where they can fulfill their destiny of melting as many minds as possible.”
Shaw Brothers movies are available on DCP — and in some cases, 35mm — for theatrical bookings from AGFA starting immediately.
The full list of Shaw Brothers titles distributed by AGFA:
THE 36TH CHAMBER OF SHAOLIN
THE AVENGING EAGLE
******* SWORDSMAN
BLACK MAGIC 2
BLOOD BROTHERS
THE BOXER’S OMEN
THE BRAVE ARCHER
BUDDHA’S PALM
COME DRINK WITH ME
CRIPPLED AVENGERS
DIRTY HO
THE DUEL
THE EIGHT DIAGRAM POLE FIGHTER
THE FIVE VENOMS
GOLDEN SWALLOW
THE HEROIC ONES
HOLY FLAME OF THE MARTIAL WORLD
HUMAN LANTERNS
INTIMATE CONFESSIONS OF A CHINESE COURTESAN
KING BOXER
LEGENDARY WEAPONS OF CHINA
MAD MONKEY KUNG FU
MASKED AVENGERS
MARTIAL ARTS OF SHAOLIN
THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN
ONE-ARMED SWORDSMAN
SHAOLIN TEMPLE
THE SUPER INFRAMAN
VENGEANCE
THE WATER MARGIN
To book a Shaw Brothers title at your theater, contact us here.
Interesting selection of classic titles. Most of these are available on the major streaming services now - Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, iTunes (rent-able) and of course, El Rey Network.
