FESTIVALS AWARDS EVENTS NEWS

A treasure trove of film

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 12:59

shots from Chinese Taipei Film Archive

The Chinese Taipei Film Archive plays a vitally important role in the Taiwanese industry, preserving a wealth of films dating back to 1931.

Starting life as a film library in 1978, the facility was officially upgraded to archive status in 1989.

“We’ve done lots of work with films from the 1950s to the 1980s, re-doing subtitles and making copies,” said the archive’s Teresa Huang during a visit by the international tour group in late November.

In 1991 the archive achieved independent status as a foundation to safeguard and preserve the moving image heritage of Taiwan. It is now a member of the International Federation of Film Archives.

“Our storage vault is in Shulin, Taipei County – an area of 3 289 square metres. The total number of films in the archive is 14 440. We also have 5 149 posters, 1 302 stills and over 13 835 film books.

“Part of our duty is to organise film festivals such as this year’s Chinese Musical Film Festival and to hold screenings – in 2010 we had 476. The archive also publishes the Taiwan Cinema Year Book. We loan films to international organisations and festivals. At the moment we’re working on the National Film Culture Centre,” explained Huang.

Unlike South Africa, there is no legal deposit system in Taiwan where filmmakers are required by law to submit a copy to the archive of every film they make. Only films that receive government grants are required to do this.

Huang revealed that her team has been working on a digitsation project for the past four years. “We transfer newsreels to digital formats. One has to be careful about formats when digitising because technology changes so quickly. Researchers are free to come here and access archival material but they are not allowed to remove anything. We preserve celluloid prints as best we can but our budget is really tight.”

Only newsreels have been uploaded to the Internet thus far as there are copyright issues with many films.

According to Huang early Taiwanese films mimicked Hollywood films such as the Laurel and Hardy series. Since then Taiwan cinema has seen melodrama, comedy and Taiwanese opera.

“From 1963 to1969 there was a genre called ‘healthy realism’, followed by melodrama in the 1970s.The next decade saw the wave known as new Taiwanese cinema, a group of filmmakers who wanted to make different films. Following 2008 there’s been another renaissance with the new generation of directors making more commercial films,” stated Huang.

Every three months the archive organises a programme for a specific reason – in November there was a retrospective in honour of an actor who had passed away.

In 2012 the archive will hold a 30th anniversary celebration for new Taiwanse cinema where some precious previously unseen stills will be exhibited.

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