Special Edition: Goran Topalovic on the 10th Old School Kung Fu Fest

Old you is, folks, it's show time. People pay good money to see this movie. When they go out to a theater. They want cold sodas, look hot popcorn, and no monsters in the projection booth. Everyone for ten podcasting isn't boring off he ch ch kind of a solitude resourcing for ye see, Welcome to the Projection Booth.

I'm your host, Mike White. On this special episode, I'm speaking with Goren Topolovic. He currently serves as a board director and programmer at Subway Cinema, and he's one of the folks who programmed the tenth Old School Kung Fu Fest sword Fighting Heroes Edition, which plays the Metrograph Theater in New York April twenty first, thirty, twenty twenty three. It's a great lineup of films and I guarantee it's something you'll want to check out. I hope you enjoy the interview.

Tell only about you. I want to know a little bit more about your history. I know we don't have too long to talk today, but I want to know about your history and how you got involved in programming Asian films. I mean, are you familiar with Subway Cinema, as an organization. I've heard of Subway Cinema for years and years and years.

I had a friend that lived out in New York and he would always talk about Subway Cinema. One of the original founders of Subway Cinema, right, So, you know, we were just a group of fans. We used to hang out in you know, Chinatown theaters in Manhattan and you know, watch double features for like six bucks, so you know, martial Arts and you know Steven Show Comedies and you know, you name it right, category three films, and you know, slowly, you know, the Chinatown theaters started closing and there was only one left, Full Music Palace. You know, there was a group of us about ten or fifteen who kind of trying to see how is any way to save the theater. There was a lot of interest in local community, and it's like, well, the next bext thing we can do is like maybe we just show these movies ourselves.

And okay, so the next meeting we all have you know, we want to kind of bring their checkbook and you know, let's let's get going. And then five of us came to the next meeting and we all kind of check for thousand dollars and how that tells up started and our first event was a Johnny to a retrospective Adology from Archive in the full of two thousand and it just kind of grew from there. You know, we all just learned things by doing you know, none of us we're doing any of this professionally before, and we had other jobs and there was like a hobby they kind of got out of control. Then we ended up launching the Uccation From Festival in two thousand and two, which grew into really the leading North American festival to Asian popular cinema.

Now we're no all little Ucasian Film Festival ourselves, because you know, we just reached a point where once again, you know, day jobs always so much work you can do, so we kind of scale back and now the core Subway Cinema, it's just kind of the three of us remaining of the original founders. And what we do now is our focuses on retrospective programs, just kind of smaller film series, special screenings, just kind of having fun with it and sharing that sense of fun with the audiences. And you know the focus on retrospective programming is because we want to introduce these great classics of the Asian show cinema to to new generations and younger audiences. Right. So here at the old school kung fu series that you have gone on, you're concentrating on sword play.

Now, the sword play is that necessary for a film to be called considered wushia? Yes, I mean it's really the cult of swords, you know, it's it's very important to the wushia. And now wushia is both a literary and cinematic tradition, right, it's really the oldest cinematic genre in Chinese language cinema. But prior to that, you know, you have a very long tradition of literature, right, stories about night errants. Right.

And I think that's probably the easiest way to describe it because the word whushhia's kind of very difficult to translate from Chinese. It's really no equivalent work the captured meanings in it. But the term that we usually use is kind of a female or male knight errant. Essentially, the Bushia movies they started being made in like nineteen twenties, and that was you know, when Shanghai was the center of the film industry, you know, before you all moved to Hong Kong right after the war. But yes, I mean sword is very important components, so there's usually lot of sword fighting, and it's also about you know, the virtue and righteousness, and some of the wushia gets into the areas of fantastic and mythical and you know, heroes that seem to have supernatural powers.

So you know, you have you have different strains of whushia. You know, we did wushia, you know, over the decades. It has also evolved and developed. When we talk about the modern wushia or so called new new school wushia, that really was kicked over by Shaw Brothers in nineteen sixties, right, So the two pivotal works for that, it's The King Who's Come Drink with Me and Chang Chess the One Our Swordsman, which was also like a you know, probably like it was the biggest box office hit at that time, right, smashed all all the records. And so the King Who and Shangha sort of kind of the fathers of the new school cinematic bushia would junk kind of focusing more on on the masculine archetype, while King Who focused more on the female archetype of Knight Errant and developing those characters.

I'm really excited to see that you are showing the documentary about King Who and the King of Wussia. That looks like it's going to be an amazing Yes, I know it's very long, but we are going to If you're going to come to the theater to see it, there's gonna be any intermission, so don't worry. They're basically two movies like in one. So the first part talks more about you know, King Who's movies, and you know, we hear from critics and scholars, we hear from his collaborators. We hear from people like John Woo and Joey Hark and Samuelhan.

They'll talk how you know, influential King Who was on them and their careers. Later and at the second part, it's more about King Who as a person and his life and all the challenges that he's had and even in terms of his own kind, where's his home or identity right because he lived you know, he lived in Beijang, he was in Hong Kong, he was in Taiwan, and get into the US and he tried to make a movie about the Chinese workers, you know, working on the railroad, right, building railroad. So that was that was the last project that he was trying to make, but unfortunately, you know, he passed away before they could materialize. So yeah, so it's it's really a great documentary, and it really you gained appreciation for how much of a of an artist he was in a visionary.

He really lived for his movies, you know, every every detail. I mean, you're just born that way. It's not something that you can you know, go to school for. Right. So I think three and a half hours for a documentary about King who is very appropriate because I seem to remember trying to watch Raining in the Mountain and it was about that long as well.

And he wasn't one for shorter films too often, no, right, So if you look at a Touch of Zen, right, So that's like three hours. And initially when it was released in Taiwan, they was released as two parts. There was a part twe of release in nineteen seventy and part two nineteen seventy one. And for the Hong Kong release they cut it, they put him together and they cut it to two and a half hours. How did you decide which movie you're going to show?

This year because there are so many you know, even within wushia, like you're saying, there's the masculine, there's the feminine, there's different errors of it, there's different errors of filmmaking. There's just so many different things that you can do. How did you narrow that down into the films that you're showing, which is, by the way, a very very strong program. That's always the challenge. There's so many great films to choose from, right, So, I think our focus this time was more on the kind of Taiwanese wushia.

So King who after making Come Drink with Me for Show Brothers, he wasn't happy with how things went with Twitch Show Brothers. Oh, there are a lot of these stories, right, so he decided to go to Taiwan and he he made Dragon enough for Union Film and Taiwan and Dragon and made so much money. It really built Union Film as a company as a production company, and then they started making a lot of other ushia films with King Fu as chief of production in a way and kind of setting the house style for all these other films that shrugs. So, So, I think at least eight of the films in our lineup are from Union Film, so their old Taiwanese productions, and then and then we threw in a couple of kind of black and white pictures kind of it's a bit of a discovery of some of the earlier examples of Taiwanese ushia.

So and especially the one that a bit of a discovery for us is The Vengeance of the Phoenix Sisters, which is actually a Taiwanese language film. It's not mandrag like all these other films that we're talking about. They're part of the Mandarin language Taiwanese film industry, but there was also a taiwan language film industry that like in the fifties and the sixties, right, so it's not as well known outside of you know, Taiwans as their Mandari language films. That it's something that we're also kind of hoping to dig deeper into and end of the future because they made a lot of different shot or movies there as well. So so yeah, you know that that was sort of like the thought process in terms of kind of trying to give an like a rule overview of the Taiwanese genre traditions of when it comes to rushia, you also have to be careful, like to have a right balance and right number of films, because you don't want to exhaust the audience, right, I mean, it's so we felt that, Okay, if we have fifteen films stops, twelve in theater, three online, two weekends and metrograph, you know that should be good.

And I'm so curious as far as the state of preservation of these films, I mean, how difficult or easy is it defined good prints that these stays. Taiwan Film and Audio Visual Institute formerly known as Chinese Type A Film Archive, has been doing a great job in restoring a lot of these classic films and it's really thanks to their effort that you know, we're able to show some of them, and you know, we're all getting them on DCP because they're a lot of them are digitally restored. You know, a lot of the King Who's stuff is already available and it's successible, right, I mean, you know you have the Critering collection, you know, Blue Rays and it's on their channel, and there's you know, Arrow Video, and the Film Movement has also released a number of King Who's films.

But then what's more interesting is these other Union Film productions that not really easy to see for people, or they wouldn't even know like where to go to to see them. So I hope that people take advantage of the fact that we're showing some of these rarely streamed films to come out and check them out, and they'll have a fun time with it. I have to say, I'm very jealous because I wish I was in New York to be able to go down, sit down in a theater and just watch so many of these movies on the big screen. It's got to be such a treat. And with an audience.

I mean, I can imagine how much fun it would be to watch these movies. These movies are meant to be seen in a fea or with an audience, not sitting at home and just streaming. Right. So curious to see how many people show up, right, because especially after the pandemic, it's really hard for us to say, like, Okay, is there an audience? Are they going to come?

Who is the audience? Right, So it's it's like we're starting from scratch. You know, that doesn't matter that we've been programming films for twenty years. Just a pandemic has has changed all the rules and I think all the all the movie theaters and cultural organizations still trying to figure out how do we get people back right well, giving them something that you can't see normally, I think it's definitely step in the right direction. And yeah, I'm gonna recommend this to everybody I know who's within the side of my voice I can get to the theater to see these, because it's a fantastic program.

Goran, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate this, And thank you, Mike, thank you for the opportunity. The communism and similar unions and sum under semis and similars and and if seminus and similars and similar, similar under seminars and simients and in seminum and simons seminars and similar and sis seminars and similar similar and similar and similars and the similar films and symptoms removed the film similar under similars and the number the number, the number the movie the womb, the number the number four days m found the about them, the woman, the woman, the people, the women, pople