The Thai Film Rescue Unit was launched to protect old Thai film. There are already cases where some old classics of Thai film were just thrown away and now there is no proper copy left. When you go for example to the Thai Film Database and go to some older movies you will realize that here are hardly any images or any other info left for some movies. This might sound strange but this sometimes just means that no copy of the movie exists anymore as there was never really any film archive that secured the old film.
On Monday, Thai Film Archive Director Dome Sukvong and Minister of Culture Nipit Inthrasombat launched Thailand's first Film Rescue Unit, a squad of archivists who'll go around the country to retrieve unwanted film rolls and home movies, which are believed to exist in abundance. They will bring those films back to the headquarters in Salaya for preservation and archiving. Later, the films or fragments of films will be shown to the public, and these homemade videos by various citizens will prove to be a visual document that's as important as books and journals in the National Library.
"There are so many films that people want to throw away - something shot by their fathers or grandfathers and locked away somewhere in the houses," said Dome. "We have been campaigning for the people to understand the importance of visual documents that exist in their own homes. They're the cultural heritage of the country.
"Today, we prefer to transfer films to digital storage, but digital devices are not stable and the quality of the picture is incomparable to good old film."
The Film Archive has long sent out teams to hunt for films, but a limited budget meant the operation was not properly sustained. Since the Film Archive gained the status of a public organisation two years ago, it has upgraded its mission preserving, restoring and distributing moving images, historical and contemporary.
You can read the whole article here
No comments:
Post a Comment