Sun, May 31, 2026 page8

• The hunt for Taiwan’s lost movies

  • By Tseng Ghi-hsien 曾吉賢
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  I first met Professor Ray Jiing (井迎瑞) as a film and documentary student at Shih Hsin University’s (SHU) Department of Radio Television and Film in 1988. The following year, he went on to become the director of the Chinese Taipei Film Archive — forerunner of the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute (TFAI). Over his eight-year tenure, Jiing rescued and restored over 200 classic Taiwanese films. In 1997, he established the Graduate Institute of Studies in Documentary and Film Archiving at Tainan National University of the Arts (TNNUA), and I joined the program in his third cohort of students.

  Beyond a simple appreciation of documentaries, what Jiing imparted to me was the importance of preserving and maintaining historical audiovisual media as part of the cultural identity of Taiwanese cinema.

  I went on to become involved in the tracking down and restoration efforts of old Taiwanese movies, finding old film reels for TNNUA, thanks to tips from friends or at city recycling centers since 2003.

  In 2012 and 2013, I spent time researching the history of Hsinchu County’s local film industry and doing field research on closed-down movie theaters. I also helped to design and implement the Hsinchu County Cultural Office’s plan to use the historic New Tile House Hakka Cultural District as a site for outdoor movie screenings and a Community Film Cooperative.

  At that time, the movie theater industry in Taiwan was undergoing a digital revolution, which saw many of the old-style theaters without the capacity to cover the transition costs going under in a wave of closures.

  I remember visiting Jhubei City’s Jinbao Theater, an old-style theater, right after it shut down in 2013. The boss — torch in hand, because the power had already been cut — offered me leftover movie posters as he told me that this was the last theater he had rented in his name. At that point, there wasn’t a single movie theater left in all of Hsinchu’s 13 townships and cities.

  Having been scouring online buy and sell groups for local theater equipment, soon to be relics of a bygone era, I came across a listing for a portable carbon arc projector.

  I immediately drove to meet the seller, Chang Huan-yu (張環裕), who had first delved into screening movies at the age of 14, and went on to make a career out of open-air movie theaters.

  In fact, there were many local theater bosses who were forced to close up shop in the mid to late 1980s that made the switch to running open-air movie screenings in the courtyards of local temples.

  This meant that although the physical theaters disappeared, the films didn’t. With the extra appeal of temple pastimes such as making traditional offerings to the gods and illicit gambling, these open-air theaters flourished. Before long, they became widespread across the Taiwanese countryside, replacing puppetry and Taiwanese opera as the main form of popular entertainment.

  The movies’ film reels were sourced from a number of Taipei-based companies that bought up reel duplicates after a film’s release tour around Taiwan, and then offered them for sale or lease. Distributors across the country then developed further duplicates of the more popular Mandarin or Taiwanese-language movies. Some local open-air theater bosses would even make their own copies to save on longer-term rental fees — it was an entire cultural ecosystem of film distribution that existed outside of traditional theaters.

  Between the late 1970s and early 1980s, among the huge number of 35mm social-realist, Hong Kong crime and thriller, Taiwanese military, and neorealist movies, a smaller number of late-1970s Taiwanese-language movies were also being shown across temples, at festival celebrations, and even in cemeteries. Consequently, something of a cultural reserve of lost films remains scattered across the countryside.

  No longer able to lift the projector that had seen him through decades of business, Chang had decided that it was time to sell it. When I travelled to Miaoli to see if it worked, he showed me exactly how to handle and operate the machine, walking me through each step until its beam of white light appeared.

  I bought it, but what was most valuable to me were my discussions with Chang about how the world of Taiwan’s 35 mm films could be brought back for people to see.

  The projector in hand, what I needed next was film reels, and Chang became my field guide. Together, we revisited his old distributors and past competitors, and I discovered the goldmine of an old tin warehouse in the Taichung countryside that still houses the film reels of more than 1,000 old movies.

  One day in March of 2013, Chang sent word that someone from the industry had discarded a stack of old films affected by vinegar syndrome or otherwise stuck together film reels, and the collection included early black-and-white features. I drove over immediately and was met with a small mountain of recycling waste close to two stories high.

  The site supervisor agreed to help us with the use of a forklift, and a group of us started examining the dredged-out piles of recycling. We searched from morning until the afternoon when the first roll of film was pulled out, followed by more than ten others in quick succession. After five days in the recycling heap, they suffered deformation and severe water damage from the rain. We took them first to the Community Film Cooperative in Hsinchu to dry out, and then to TNNUA’s Multimedia Center to be salvaged. Among them turned out to be the classic Taiwanese-language film For You, Mum (媽媽為著妳), starring Bai Hung (白虹) and Hung Ming-li (洪明麗) — which had until then been registered as lost. If Professor Jiing had unearthed and restored 200 Taiwanese-language films during his time at the Chinese Taipei Film Archive, then this was the 201st.

  A few days later, Chang called me again to say that he had come across a three-part set of film reels labeled “The Jade Sword (玉寶劍), black-and-white, Hakka-language” amongst a whole array of 30-year-old movies in Miaoli, and asked if I was interested. Curious about this film I had never heard anything about, and wondering if it could be a piece of alternative or paracinema, I took around 10 of the film reels back with me to Hsinchu.

  One afternoon, a couple of weeks later, I was staring absent-mindedly at the stack of rusted film canisters and decided to open up the one labelled as part two of The Jade Sword to examine its reel. Holding up the end against the light of the window, I could make out the words “box office hit” set against a palace period backdrop.

  My hands began to tremble as I realized what I was holding.

  After bringing it into TNNUA Multi-Media Center’s film restoration room, I could further make out the names of the Taiwanese opera troupe Mailiao Music Society (麥寮拱樂社) and pioneering director Ho Chi-ming (拱樂社) in the opening credits. It was an extraordinary moment. Up until then, Xue Pinggui and Wang Baochuan (薛平貴與王寶釧), the first locally produced 35mm Taiwanese-language feature film that launched Taiwanese cinema in 1956, had been presumed lost.

  Jiing used to tell me about the time he had spent with director Ho before his passing, saying that “one of his final regrets was always that not a single one of the movies he had directed remained, so all that could be said of how good they were was whatever reviewers had written.” Indeed, when the movie was finally brought back to life for the screen, a number of misconceptions were quickly dispelled, including those that said the entire movie was a single continuous shot of an opera stage performance, or that the battle scene featured only a handful of horses circling the camera.

  Because the picture’s audio had been replaced with Hakka language, I was put in touch with the Hakka Affairs Council to report on and seek funding for a digital restoration proposal. The committee members were in agreement that the project represented an exciting intersection of Taiwanese-language cinema and Hakka linguistic heritage but, in the end, no remaining audio signal was able to be recovered.

  “It is a great gift to be able to restore this film on our own. It is an opportunity for us to set the bar,” I remember Professor Jiing saying with firm resolve.

  The entire process, from physical handling, repair, and cleaning to digital scanning and restoration, was thus undertaken by the team at TNNUA without a cent of government support.

  Funds to support the restoration efforts were instead cobbled together from the likes of donations from then-TNNUA president Lee Chao-hsui’s (李肇修) violin performances, and later assistance from the Fubon Cultural and Educational Foundation. The process also served to train up a new generation of digital restoration talent, and the graduate students who were involved with the project went straight into work for TFAI after graduation.

  Part one of the Hakka language version of Xue Pinggui and Wang Baochuan has been shown 35 times all across the country in free screenings with post-screening discussions.

  Around 1,200 Taiwanese-language films were thought to have been produced between the 1950s and 80s, but, if one counts Xue Pinggui and Wang Baochuan and For You, Mum, only 202 survived or have otherwise been salvaged.

  If we are unable to pull together a broad, comprehensive framework for evaluating cinema as a form of cultural heritage, and cannot mobilize greater grassroots participation to rescue it, these archives will remain incomplete.

  Without any legal or institutional basis for the recovery of Taiwanese cinema, the archiving of nationally significant works beyond what is already digitally available relies solely on the work of photochemical film laboratories like at TNNUA.

  We are responsible for producing new talent capable of preserving and safeguarding these pieces of cultural heritage, and, even without government funding, are willing to do this important work. Can state institutions say the same?

  Earlier this year, our team under Jiing’s leadership held the premiere of the digitally restored Hakka language version of part two of Xue Pinggui and Wang Baochuan in Miaoli City, the site of the work’s initial rediscovery — and we intend to continue to visit locations around Taiwan for screening invitations. 70 years on from the birth of Taiwanese-language cinema, TNNUA’s historical film rescue team continues to pop up all over the country in pursuit of film reels and old videotapes, scouring recycling yards, abandoned buildings, corrugated iron warehouses and disused old movie theaters.

  Alongside our students, we go into the field and do our bit for the preservation of Taiwan’s audiovisual history, hoping to capture another piece of the Taiwanese collective memory.

  Tseng Ghi-hsien is a director and associate professor at Tainan National University of the Arts’ Graduate Institute of Documentary and Film Archiving.

  Translated by Gilda Knox Streader
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