Sunday, September 21 at 7:30 p.m.
Year: 1929
Running time: 94 Minutes
Director: Wen Yimin
Cinematographer: Yao Shiquan
Principal Cast: Fan Xuepeng, Shu Gohui, Wang Juqing, Wen Yimin, Sao Guanyu
The only surviving episode of the Chinese 13-part serial Red Knight Errant, Red Heroine (directed by Wen Yimin, 1929) is also one of the few complete and earliest extant silent martial arts films, a prime example of the Wuxia (errant knight swordplay) genre, often based on published novels or serials. A band of outlaws raids a village and kidnaps a maiden (Fan Xuepeng), causing the death of the young woman's grandmother. The captive maiden is rescued by a mysterious Taoist hermit and re-emerges 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 (imagine a bandit's harem of beauties in bikinis), the film remains a robust telling of a young woman's transformation from abject victim to resolute warrior.
The Devil Music Ensemble consists of three multi-instrumental musicians from Boston who have established themselves as one of the primary American groups in the field of silent film accompaniment. Known for their tightly-synced, genre-bending, hypnotic musical performances that can make an audience forget there is a live band directing the mood, emotion, and pace of the visual imagery they are immersed in. The score that the DME has composed for Red Heroine pulls from the traditions of Chinese classical and folk music, as well as soundtracks from classic kung fu cinema, and is the only modern score made expressly for this film. Special admission: $15
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