Lending a Helping Hand
25/09/05 (By: Robert Williamson)
Despite the popular notion that old films are outdated, irrelevant or just plain boring, there is a wealth of historical and cultural detail to be found in old film footage, without which our understanding of national heritage would be so much weaker. However, like most countries in Asia, Thailand’s cinematic legacy is in rather poor condition. The hot, wet climate, lack of money and resources, and a lack of understanding of the preciousness and fragility of film have meant that much of the country’s movie output has been lost, burnt, thrown away or left to rot. In some respects the situation is improving: Thailand’s film repository, the National Film Archive of Thailand (NFAT), under the stewardship of veteran film historian Dome Sukvong, has now been operating for over twenty years. But in others it is not: even though the NFAT is part of the Fine Arts Department, the government has persistently failed to provide enough financial support to enable the archive to do an effective job. The under-staffed, under-resourced archive has often been treated as a dumping ground for old film, much of which has to be painstakingly identified and repaired. It’s a time-consuming process and at any one time Dome will have hundreds, if not thousands, of cans of film piling up waiting to be evaluated and patched up. But this is largely an issue of time, and donations of time by volunteers can help. Other areas, however, cannot be resolved so conveniently. In particular, the restoration of frail, decomposing film has been all but impossible as the archive has never had the money to purchase the relevant equipment and local commercial labs have had neither the technology nor the expertise. Without restoration projects to save the archive’s crumbling treasures and return them to the public eye, the archive’s work goes unappreciated and its difficulties remain behind closed doors. But with a total annual budget of only three million baht (around US$70,000) and only three staff working on restoration, Dome doesn’t have the resources to carry out these potentially very expensive projects.
http://www.thaifilm.com/articleDetail_en.asp?id=68