Red Heroine, A Silent Film Showing Accompanied by a Live Music Performance
Sponsored by IU Asian Culture Center, Union Board, and Department of Communication and Culture
Date: Monday, September 15, 2008
Time: 7 p.m.
Venue: Whittenberger Auditorium, Indiana Memorial Union The Devil Music
Ensemble is offering a live music performance with an amazing and virtually unknown classic silent Chinese Kung Fu film called Red Heroine (directed by Wen Yimin 1929). The performance consists of a projection of this amazing film accompanied by a new original soundtrack performed live by the DME. This film is the only feature length Chinese martial arts film from the silent era that still exists in its entirety! The score created by the DME will be the only modern score to be written specifically for this film!
This performance gives students the opportunity to see an extremely rare film from the silent era given new life with a brand new score by the DME. The event highlights issues of cultural difference in relation to gender, cultural traditions of music, the roots of martial arts cinema, and the traditional/updated combination of live music with silent film.
About the film
RED HEROINE (Hong Xia)
starring Fan Xuepeng and directed by Wen Yimin 1929 Episode six of RED KNIGHT-ERRANT a.k.a. RED HEROINE, the only surviving episode of the 13-part serial, is also one of the few complete and earliest extant silent martial arts films. This a prime example of the Wuxia pain (errant knight swordplay genre) often based on published novels or serials. A band of outlaws raids a village and kidnaps a maiden, causing the death of the young woman's grandmother. The captive maiden is rescued by a mysterious Daoist hermit and reemerges three years later as a full-fledged warrior, flying to the sky to revenge her grandmother's death. While generously sprinkled with anachronisms and prurient incongruities, the film remains a robust telling of a young woman's transformation from abject victim to resolute warrior.
