In a dimly lit red-brick house in central Taiwan, film hunter Wang Wei and his team dig out outdated film reels, salvaging the fragile remains of a cinema boom that almost disappeared from history.
Rare Taiwanese-language films – known locally as “taiyupian” – briefly flourished in the mid-1950s to late 1960s under the Kuomintang (KMT) government, which fled to Taiwan after its defeat by the Chinese Communist Party.
Until it lifted martial law in the late 1980s, the KMT promoted Mandarin as Taiwan’s official language and sidelined Taiwanese Hokkien, but independent and private producers still made widely viewed black-and-white films.
Taiwan is now scrambling to restore the decades-old reels to preserve a chapter of its culture, with film conservators having saved less than a sixth of the estimated 1,200 films produced.
Their value lies in their existence for “such a short period”, Arthur Chu, chairman of the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute (TFAI), told AFP, adding that they represent “an almost silent post-war generation”.
Wang said it is “significant” if the films can be rediscovered, a tribute to those “who worked so hard to make them and captured images of Taiwan at that time”.
If the rare vintage reels are thrown away or deteriorate, “there’s no way to get them back,” he said as he led a team wearing torches to recover the reels.
“They are gone forever.”
‘Beyond saving’
Finding Taiwanese-language films is “extremely difficult,” said Wang, who has been chasing vintage movies for 10 years and once discovered rare celluloids in an old theater in Los Angeles.
He works with the government-funded TFAI, which has spent nearly two decades tracking down the surviving coils, many of which were lost or deteriorated in the island’s hot, humid climate.
Aging cellulose acetate films are at risk of developing “vinegar syndrome,” a chemical breakdown that can make the film brittle, warped, or sticky.
Films must be kept in cold storage before being manually repaired, scanned and then put through digital cleaning and correction.
Among those helping to preserve the films is 86-year-old supplier Wang Chin-ting, who started working in the film business in 1984 and bought a film company 12 years later.
Of the hundreds of scrolls he collected, only a handful are in Taiwanese, now stored in his ancestral home in Changhua in central Taiwan, a brick house that provides naturally cool and dry storage conditions.
Wang Chin-ting lifts each reel from its flat circular metal box and runs it through a winding machine, a process that helps prevent old films from deteriorating.
At TFAI’s restoration center in New Taipei City, film restorer Wu Long-hao painstakingly repairs damaged reels by hand using tape, a scalpel and eucalyptus oil.
“Some reels are in such bad shape that we have to assume they can only survive a single pass through the scanner,” he said.
“If they snap, they’re beyond saving.”
Touching hearts
Ranging from popular operas, thrillers, comedies and romantic dramas – even Taiwanese versions of international blockbusters such as James Bond and Tarzan – the films resonated with many Taiwanese who had been educated during Japan’s colonial rule and had limited Mandarin skills.
Produced quickly on limited budgets to meet growing demand, many Taiupians were “crude” or even “absurd,” TFAI’s Chu said, but they provide a rare, visual record of daily life in Taiwan at the time.
They also captured old Taiwanese dialogue and slang and have become a valuable record for film scholars and linguists.
Although the last such film was made in 1981, the introduction of television stations and the rise of Taiwanese and Mandarin-language television dramas in the late 1960s caused a sharp decline in the industry.
But the films gave the postwar generation that could neither understand nor read Mandarin Chinese “a deep sense of comfort and an emotional outlet,” Chu said.
People were willing to buy a ticket because the movies spoke to them during the years of oppression and hardship, he said.
“Stories of joy, sorrow, love and loss touched their hearts.”
