The Taiwan Film Institute’s Central Film Archive is highly vulnerable to fire and lacks funding for a permanent facility or proper preservation equipment, the archive’s preservation section head said.
The archive, which operates out of a rented facility in New Taipei City’s Shulin Industrial Park (樹林工業區), has 15,000 Taiwanese commercial movies in its collection, as well as VHS tapes, vintage movie posters and antique cameras. The total number of films in the collection, including foreign movies, is more than 100,000 titles.
Titles from Taiwanese movie studios, including Central Pictures Corp, Taiwan Film Studio, Central Motion Pictures Corp and Chinese Motion Picture Studios, were painstakingly categorized and stored at the facility.
However, archivists have warned that the archive’s funding has fallen short of its targets, which is impeding their work of preserving the cultural treasures.
Central Film Archive preservation section head Chung Kuo-hua (鍾國華) said that although the Taiwan Film Institute is a national public corporation, it is not a central administrative agency that receives funding from the national budget, like the National Palace Museum or municipal museums of art.
Instead, the Taiwan Film Institute relies on the Ministry of Culture for its budget, resulting in “comparatively unstable” finances that lead to many difficulties, Chung said, adding that its current budget is barely enough to operate and maintain the facility.
“The current level of the archive’s funding does not permit us to fully perform any of the four functions of a museum: collection, research, exhibition and education,” Chung said. “Moreover, we are simply not keeping up with the rate of the films’ decay.”
To explain the archive’s difficulties, Chung said that reels need to be stored at low temperatures, and that for every 6°C in temperature reduction, the life of a film is increased by a factor of one.
Most of the Central Film Archive’s collection is in “cool storage” at 18oC, which means that the films are preserved for just 60 to 80 years, he said.
The archive does have a “freezer” storage room that can preserve films in minus-5oC for 250 years, but it is only 6 ping (1.81m2) in size and therefore houses only the reels of the most fragile 120 color films, Chung said.
In comparison, foreign national film archives have the capacity to preserve films for 1,000 years, Chung said, adding that restoring a poorly preserved film could cost as much as NT$3 million (US$91,625).
The archive’s budget is only enough to repair less than nine films per year, Chung said.
The archive also lacks security and safety features, making it vulnerable to fire hazards, he said, adding that the total loss of the collection in the event of a fire is a real risk.
“The government is neglecting the archive’s film collection, which is fundamental to the nation’s cultural and creative industries,” Chung said.
He said he has called on the central government to provide a direct source of funding so that the Taiwan Film Institute can own and operate a permanent film archive.
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