PRIZE-WINNING DIRECTOR HERE FOR FILM EVENT

Huang Jianxin, director of the dynamic, controversial and prize-winning film “Black Cannon Incident,” received his visa to come to the United States on Friday--the very day that reform-minded Hu Yaobang, China’s Communist Party chief, resigned because of “mistakes on major issues of political principles.”

The irony of that situation was not lost on those who have seen Huang’s film, which had reportedly been banned in China. Yet Huang, when asked if he thought the appointment of Hu’s replacement, conservative premier Zhao Ziyang, would affect freedom of expression, said, “I don’t think so”--an answer that might be regarded as optimistic by most China watchers.

Huang has come to Los Angeles as part of a Chinese film delegation for “Discovering the New Chinese Film: The Revolution of Style,” a series of seven films being presented by the UCLA Film and Television Archive in association with the China Film Export and Import Corp. of Peking.

A diminutive, smiling man, Huang spoke through an interpreter at Universal Studios during a banquet hosted by the UCLA Archive and Universal, Paramount and MGM/UA.

“The Black Cannon Incident,” which attacks old-line, paranoid bureaucratic mentality, launches the series Saturday at 7:30 p.m. in UCLA’s Melnitz Theater.

Huang said his film, the recipient of several major Chinese prizes, had in fact been released last summer and had since been shown on television. (However, director George Schaefer, recently appointed head of UCLA’s Motion Picture and Television Division and a guest at the luncheon, said that when he was in Peking last July, the film opened to rave reviews and was enthusiastically received by Chinese intellectuals and students but was then yanked after only one week.)

Huang, 33, explained that the government censorship board had twice held up release of the film, which was completed in late November, 1985. The film, which marked Huang’s directorial debut, takes its title from a missing chess piece referred to by a Chinese translator in a cable to a German engineer, a reference misunderstood by snooping Party committee members as a strong indication of the translator’s possible involvement in foreign espionage.

Huang said the initial point of controversy was a scene, near the end, in which the hero, who had been raised as a Catholic, pauses by a church while a service is in progress. Some members of the censorship board, which in general felt the film’s attack on the bureaucratic mentality was too tough, demanded that much of the religious service be deleted.

According to Huang, they then became bothered by the film’s final line, in which the hero asks the Party committee member who had been his primary antagonist, “Why can’t I make a decision to send a telegram on my own?” Huang, who, incidentally, has already completed a sequel to his film, said he was not unduly upset over having to make these cuts.

During a panel discussion following lunch, Xie Fei, head of the Peking Film Academy and co-director of “A Girl From Hunan” (which screens next Thursday), seemed less optimistic than Huang, admitting the possibility that in the future censorship could become codified. The panel members included UCLA Film and Television Archive Director Bob Rosen, novelist Zhang Manling (whose “Such a Beautiful Place” was adapted to the screen as “Sacrificed Youth” and is also part of the series) and officials of the China Film Export and Import Corp. All expressed the hope that more Chinese films could be seen in America and that, in turn, more American films might reach China.

Janet Yang, director of Far East Operations for MCA/Universal, said “Love Story” will be the first commercial Hollywood film to receive general release in China since the Communist Revolution in 1949. It will be followed by “Spartacus” and “Roman Holiday.” In turn, she said that Cineplex Odeon is among the distributors expressing interest in picking up “The Black Cannon Incident.”