Digital film restoration within archives

#DIGITAL FILM RESTORATION WITHIN ARCHIVES ARCHIVE#

More and more I realised the great extent that restoration and preservation work depends on the participation of an archival community beyond the specific countries where the material originates from.

The film had been thought lost, and if it were not for the Norwegian discovery and the willingness to return the copy to China, it would still be listed as no longer available. The discovery of the 1926 Chinese classic film The Cave of the Silken Web (Dan Du Yu) at a small library near the Arctic Circle in Norway in 2012 was another such story that made headlines ( ). ДЄnd so it is with many other noble-minded collaborations. Widely believed lost, it was found in 2003 in Austria and subsequently restored.

Indeed, in the context of the Balkans, archivists in Vienna specifically have helped enormously with locating and restoring films, like in the case of the oldest Serbian feature The Life and Deeds of the Immortal Leader KaraД‘orД‘e / ЕЅivot i dela besmrtnog voЕѕda KaraД‘orД‘a (1911, Ilija StanojeviД‡ which can be viewed at ). Typically, I was acting in a noble-minded way, assisting a transnational project that was for the common preservation of our shared heritage. I then sent the unidentified stills to more knowledgeable friends in Sofia, as well as directing some of the photos to people in Zagreb and Athens what I saw made me suspect that these were stills from Yugoslav and Greek films rather than Bulgarian. I could recognise and name some, but not all. Some years back, colleagues from Filmarchiv Austria sent me a folder that contained about fifty still photographs from films that they thought were Bulgarian they asked me to help them identify what was what. Ray Jiing (Taiwan Film Collectors Museum)ДЇilm Restoration as Noble-minded Transnational Collaboration I am pleased to say that each one of the pieces we include here shows quite naturally the importance of transnational collaborations for the restoration of Asian classics, and each one is authored by a colleague working in the respective source country.ДЇigure 1: The Film Archives Symposium at Xiamen University in China, 2019: Prof. In initiating and commissioning work toward this dossier, these were also the criteria: I wanted to encourage writing that would foreground the transnational dimension of restoration work and to give opportunity to specialists who work in Asia to speak about it. It also made me realise how important it is that the discovery and presentation of this material is led by the people to whom it matters most: archivists and film historians from the respective Asian film cultures.

Then, we attended screenings of several newly released Asian classics and heard the presentations of local archivists who told the complex stories of these restorations.Д®ach talk I listened to displayed two specific features: first, it revealed how the finding, evaluating, rescuing, restoring and archiving of lost Asian classics can meaningfully take place only in the context of well-intended transnational collaboration and with the good will and professionalism of archivists and cinephiles from different countries, small and large.

#DIGITAL FILM RESTORATION WITHIN ARCHIVES ARCHIVE#

We had the chance to view a selection of the material contained in the piled unprocessed holdings of the Fujian archive that the University had received from various sources and was working toward organising and restoring. It was during this event that the idea for the current dossier came about, informed by several factors: we heard presentations by several Chinese visual anthropologists and non-professional film collectors who sought to rescue, restore and archive вЂњorphanedвЂќ material in places like Guangdong, Yunnan, and Gansu.

More importantly, however, they had agreed to feature a parallel programme of screenings dedicated to archival findings and restored films, as well as to take us on a visit to their new campus, where they held the materials of a large regional film archive. The Chinese colleagues had brought important speakers from the USA, such as Jan-Christopher Horak, Dan Streible, and others. In the summer of 2019, I spent a few days at an international symposium of people involved with film preservation and archives at Xiamen University in China.

Digital film restoration within archives