We talk to the director of the China Film Archive about their important work restoring classic Chinese films…

Sun Xianghui, the director of the China Film Archive, and Zhang Lan, who acted as interpreter, and who also deals with international distributors amongst other things for the China Film Archive (she helped coordinate with the BFI on their upcoming release of Spring in a Small Town), were both incredibly generous with their time when it came to our interview with them. They’d had a whirlwind two days in London, on their first day attending the screening of the newly restored The Goddess, and on the second, visiting the BFI’s conservation centre. They’d got back into central London late and so we re-arranged to hold the interview in a restaurant at 10pm but when we got there found it was far too noisy, so they suggested we go back to their hotel, the two of them having not even eaten yet (and we feeling a little guilty about this), and answered our questions for about 45 minutes before inviting us to back to the restaurant with them, to finally enjoy a long-awaited meal! Our interview mainly focused on questions about China Film Archive’s activities, to get an idea of what their general aims are.

Before films are selected to be restored, where do these films come from? Are they all held by your archive or do you also have people who actively search for older Chinese films?
Basically all of the old Chinese films are stored in the China Film Archive. There are two locations where we store the films, one is in the Eastern suburbs of Beijing and the other is in Xi’an, Shanxi, near the Terracotta Warriors. Very few old films are collected by individuals in China

How much government support do you get in restoring films?
The Chinese government take preserving films very seriously. All of our funding comes from the government. Especially since the beginning of the 21st century, the government has really supported us which allowed us to open two new storage sites, the ones in Beijing and Shanxi. The government gives us 35 million Yuan every year to restore films.

Where and how is the original copy stored? (Is there a trend of digitalisation, in terms of storing film? If yes, what are the difficulties?)
We are gradually digitalising all of the films in our archive, and each year we also acquire 500 to 600 new films shot digitally. When the production company donates us their new film to be added to our collection, we give them a small fee for this as an incentive, and the government pays for this. This fee ensures that the production companies keep on give us their films, before they are released to the public.

Is this so you can build a big collection of Chinese films?
Yes, so we can acquire almost all of the films released with the Dragon Logo in front of the film (all the films which have passed censorship in China have this Dragon logo).

How did the China Film Archive react at the discovery of the shengguai genre(神怪片, a loose translation being “Gods and Monsters” movies) film Cave of the Silken Web (Pansidong, 盘丝洞，dir Dan Duyu, 1927) in Norway? With this discovery, do you think there could be a chance of ever discovering anymore wuxia or shengguai films from the silent period made in the 1920s?
We first heard this film existed in 2012 and we have been tracking it ever since. With the support of the Norwegian National Library, this film came back to China in April this year (2014). Because of the chaotic period in the thirties and forties in China, there was no way to preserve films at that time and many were lost, but it is also our hope that we can now retrieve other old Chinese films from abroad. We are hoping that with now having Cave of the Silken Web back in China this will be easier. We would also like to start promotional activities to let the world know we are trying to, and that we very much want to, get our Chinese films back. Apart from being an example of the “shengguai” or “gods and monsters” genre, it’s also the earliest film that exists of Sun Wukong (The Monkey King).

I was also wondering, since this film was sent back to China, has it been screened publicly for people to see there?
Yes it has.

And do people have to pay to see it or are there free screenings?
Yes, we did sell tickets for the screening when this film first came back to China, but the price was very low, because when we show Chinese films in the China Film Archive, we only charge 10 Yuan (roughly £1) per screening.

And was it screened silently or with live music?
It was screened with piano accompaniment.

When it was screened in Kings College London, one of my teachers played the pipa as accompaniment to it. It seems that showing silent films with live music is not common in China. How did you come up with the idea? How is the audience reception? Smaller or more specialist cinemas often screen silent films in UK, can you see this happening more with silent Chinese films in the future in China?
Silent film screenings with musical accompaniment are popular internationally, but on the other hand, in China these types of screenings might be quite challenging for people without a knowledge of cinema history or who are not a Chinese film researcher. From around two years ago we started screening  older silent animation films that were made in China that the archive holds, with musical accompaniment.

The Hong Kong film archive has long been releasing very informative books on Hong Kong film history and specific directors, and they translate all their books into English. Do the China film archive also publish books on Chinese film history/genre/specific directors etc and if you do, would you ever think of having them translated into English? Given the immense popularity of Chinese cinema both inside and outside academia now it would prove useful to researchers and cinephiles/film fans who lack Chinese language skills but who are interested in researching earlier periods of Chinese cinema history.
It is a very important question. We haven’t yet started translating our Chinese film history books into English. I studied in UC Berkeley university last year for a few months. When I was studying in there I found that it was difficult for the students to understand some of the Chinese films because I discovered that there were not so many Chinese films which had been translated into English, which had English subtitles. Due to this, the teacher sometimes had to simultaneously translate the films into English for the students but this would influence the way the film was viewed. So this is a very important question which has attracted our attention and we want to pay more attention to it but at this point we haven’t figured out what we should do next.

Do you have any association with international universities in which you send them Chinese films with English subtitles?
Actually most of DVDs available on the market do not have English subtitles but when I went to America, I brought some DVDs of older Chinese films with English subtitles and the teachers were all very surprised to see these types of Chinese films with subtitles and thought that they should be more widely released so more people can take advantage of them.

The HK Film Archive also interview Hong Kong film people including actors and directors from all periods, to gather information on Hong Kong film history. Does the China Film Archive also do this?
Yes we do, we have our own Oral history series.

Who for instance have you interviewed?
A lot of people!

From which period?
We have started our Chinese oral history series years ago so we have already interviewed many people/Chinese film-related workers, including actors and directors. We started interviewing the senior or older film people first as the older they get, the weaker their memories become. And these interviews are collected and published. into books.

What is the audience reception like for silent films in China?
Great! We do screenings with and without musical accompaniment but those with music attract a bigger audience. For example, when we screened The Goddess with a symphony orchestra twice in Beijing it was very moving.

In an interview with Easternkicks, Xie Fei said: “I would love to see films made by the first three generations of Chinese filmmakers digitized in an HD format, so that more people could get an insight into the history of Chinese cinema. A few years ago they had a Chinese film festival in Edinburgh. They could only show the ones which had been digitized. Now they are showing countless Pan-Asian films at BFI, in Edinburgh and Toronto… everywhere around the world but China. I am happy that they have gained such high exposure, yet I really want to see them screened in Shanghai or Beijing. The youth there has not seen the films you have had access to. In the future I would like to work on the preservation of Chinese cinema.” Is this happening and what sort of screenings does the China Film Archive organise in China? Does the China Film Archive have its own cinema to regularly screen Chinese films like the Hong Kong Film Archive does?
In our China Film Archive, we have three separate screens and the biggest one has around 600 seats and we regularly screen Chinese films from all periods, both old and new. We are currently cooperating with other cinemas in Beijing so that by the end of the year we hope to set up an alliance so that there will be 8 art-house cinemas in Beijing, a kind of art-house cinema chain, so that there are more places to screen Chinese films from all periods more regularly.

Are Foreign and Chinese film researchers all allowed complete access to your collection of films for any research they may be doing? Or are there any restrictions?
All researchers, including both foreign and Chinese, should be able to access the collections but right now, because we haven’t yet been able to digitalise all of the Chinese films in our collection, we don’t have the provisions to provide this kind of service.

Some archival films have been screened overseas recently, for example, at this years Chinese film season at the BFI. How does China Film Archive cooperate with overseas film festivals and art/film institutions? Does China Film Archive promote these archival films to these institutes?
(Zhang Lan answers here since this is part of her job): I coordinate with international film festivals and film institutes, and sometimes with Fiaf (Federation of International Film Archives) members. We have close relationships with all of these types of film institutions and so we provide our films for different screenings, especially the recent Chinese cinema season (the one at Toronto and BFI) where we provided around 30 or 40 films.

Is it usually the international film institutes/festivals which come to you or is it you who try to sell them to the foreign film festivals?
Actually most of the time they come to us (laughs).

Because it’s the only source they can get it from.
The massive Chinese cinema season that screened at BFI had already screened in Toronto. Because the Toronto screenings were so successful, the BFI wanted to have the same screenings here in London and so the BFI approached us to see whether they could have the same screenings. It took us three years to organise the season with Toronto International Film Festival, so it involved a lot of preparation.

London Film Festival selected another Chinese-language archival film along with The Goddess this year, Dragon Inn, which the Chinese Taipei Film Archive restored. Does the China Film Archive have any connection/collaborations with the Chinese Taipei Film Archive and/or the HK Film Archive?
We don’t have a plan to have a kind of Pan-Chinese film archive, maybe never (laughs), but we do have a very close relationship with the Chinese Taipei Film Archive and the Hong Kong Film Archive. We have already lent the Chinese Taipei Film Archive a series of opera films to screen as a season and we will also lend these films to the HK Film Archive too. We also have numerous exchanges between staff of the three different archives. For example there are nine films which star the famous actress Ruan Lingyu still in existence and the China Film Archive has eight of them, and the Chinese Taipei Film Archive has one of them (this is Love and Obligation (1931), so we borrowed that film from there so that we could hold a complete retrospective of the existing Ruan Lingyu films in Beijing. Afterwards we lent the Chinese Taipei Film Archive our 8 films so that they could screen the complete retrospective too.

Because of the film censorship, are there any restrictions on which films you can or cannot restore?
No.

No? Ok, for instance did you accept Jiang Wen’s Devils on the Doorstep into the archive?
We should have that film. Whether we decide to restore a film or not depends on whether we will use it or not. One of the reasons the Chinese government supports the China Film Archive is because they want the archive to restore and digitalise Chinese films, so that they can be screened in rural areas in China. We have a kind of screening team, under the sponsorship of the government. We had a policy which is “1 month, 1 village, 1 film” in which there will be one film screening per month in a village. This happens in a large amount of villages around China. However, now we screen more films per month in villages and so due to this huge amount of films which will be needed to cater to this policy of screening films in rural areas, we try to restore the films which will fit their needs (the people living in rural areas/villages).

In these rural areas are there cinemas or are they outdoor screenings?
No, they are all outdoor screenings, there are no cinemas in these rural areas. One member of the screening team takes a digital projector with him and drives around to different villages and sets up the big screen outside for the film projection.

I noticed that China Film Archive is sending Chinese archival films to overseas audiences on the one hand, and introducing classic non-Chinese/international films to Chinese audiences on the other (e.g. Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Dr. Strangelove, The Shining etc. in the ‘Literature and Film’ Series). How do you curate film programmes and select films?
We have a team of programmers who curate film seasons and one of them is a very famous film critic/programmer called Sha Dan, he is a graduate student of the China Film Archive, because we actually offer a Masters degree.

Oh, so you can take a Masters degree at China Film Archive?
Yes, you can come to our archive to study Chinese films. So Sha Dan graduated from the China Film Archive masters programme, and he is a great knowledge of both Chinese and international films. Right now, we are trying to approach foreign film production companies or copyright holders to get permission to screen these films. We will pay for the copyright costs and things like that so we can try and introduce all of these classic foreign films to a Chinese audience, so that a Chinese audience will know and can appreciate classic international films.

Where do the copies of the international films come from? Are there any regulations in screening international films? According to the national film policy, only 34 films from outside of China can be screened in China each year, are the classic international films that the China Film Archive screen not included in this quota?
No, they’re not included in this quota. The 34 films are purchased for commercial distribution to be screened in commercial cinemas.

So these are not for commercial screenings, not to make money?
No, we don’t do commercial screenings at all.

So when you screen these foreign films are the tickets also very cheap?
The tickets for the ones screening at the China Film Archive are cheap.

Just to go back to an earlier point, how long are the Masters programmes you offer? 1 or 2 years?
3 years. (laughs)

So do you learn how to archive films or is about curation/programming?
The major of the China Film Archive graduate students is more about researching film history and they are really lucky because they can watch between 800 and  1000 Chinese films during their studies, not only Chinese films but films from all over.

Wow, sounds like a good course (laughs). How many students take the Masters on average per year?
Around 20.

And have any foreign students ever taken the course or only Chinese students?
Right now it’s only Chinese, maybe you can be the first foreigner to take the course (laughs).

Yeah maybe (laughs). Do you see yourselves as the equivalent of the BFI in China? Are more art-house/specialist cinemas now opening in China?
There are several differences between the BFI and the China Film Archive. For one thing, BFI do a lot of things on the promotional side like distribution and releasing films commercially which the China Film Archive doesn’t do. The China Film Archive also has a separate division which is called the China Film Art Research Centre so we are not only acquiring and restoring films but also doing film research which is another difference when compared to the BFI. There are several commercial cinema chains who tried to screen art cinema before but none of them achieved great success. The China Film Archive is trying to build up our own art cinema chain starting from this year and we will gradually increase the number of our cinemas.

Outside Beijing too?
Yes, outside Beijing too, step by step. Entrusted by the committee of the Beijing Film Festival, the Chinese Film Archive will start to invite foreign films to join the film festival starting from this year too.

Well I think that’s about all of our questions. Thanks so much for taking the time to answer them. 

The Goddess screened with a UK Premiere of Zou Ye’s new orchestral score as pat of the 58th London Film Festival 2014.

The interview was prepared and undertaken by Tom Cunliffe and Pei Yang.

About the author

Tom Cunliffe
A Film Studies MA student who caught the HK film bug from screenings of The Killer, Tsui Hark and Jackie Chan films on British TV... More »
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