WW2-ANNIVERSARY/CHINA-ARCHIVE Amidst propaganda drive, China delves through its film archives to bring WW2 history back to life

Record ID: 142335

  • Title: WW2-ANNIVERSARY/CHINA-ARCHIVE Amidst propaganda drive, China delves through its film archives to bring WW2 history back to life
  • Date: 27th August 2015
  • Summary: BEIJING, CHINA (AUGUST 24, 2015) (REUTERS) FILM RESTORERS IN OFFICE
  • Embargoed: 11th September 2015 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: China
  • Country: China
  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVA8EELAP9JS1PPY4NCKRMAE0YXY
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: As China gears up to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Asia on Wednesday (September 3), the conflict itself is being brought back to life through a meticulous restoration project at the country's film archive.
    The project is part of a stream of movies, concerts, performances and exhibitions that are being organised to commemorate the anniversary, in what officials have called an effort to strengthen "nationalism and culture".
    The centrepiece of the events is a military parade through central Beijing on September 3, although few top Western officials will be in attendance for fear of sending the wrong signal in a region fraught with territorial disputes and bitter war memories.
    More than 800 films, many of them never before seen by the public, have been digitised and restored by the state-run China Film Archive as part of the project.
    Of the 800, 282 of them have then been further restored frame-by-frame and cut into a final documentary which will be aired in cinemas as part of plans to mark the anniversary, and China's fight against Japan.
    "Because some of the films are quite old and have been sitting around for a long time, some of them get a bit dirty or ripped or they'll split, the film has already broken in two. If they've broken in two we'll give them a simple fix, we'll clean them then we'll use a film converter, if they have split we will use professional tools to stick them together. After they've been stuck together we'll run them through a professional digitisation machine where we do some simple fixing of the framing or focus," said Jiao Xiang, one of the team of restorers who has been going through the footage.
    Once the films were scanned and a digital copy made, a second team of restorers then set to work digitally cleaning up the marks for inclusion in the documentary.
    "At the moment we're fixing a war film about landmines, the main problem in this film is that there's a lot of dirty spots and scratches so at the moment we're manually getting rid of the dirt," said restorer Zhang Qingyue, taking a break from removing white specks using a photoshop-like tool.
    The film archive's director, Sun Xianghui, said restoring the archive and producing the documentary has been an eight-month undertaking, with many of the films being first viewed by historians, who then try and determine the time and context within which they were shot.
    According to Sun, the finished product has stirred up a sense of outrage in the majority of those who watch it, but she added that the main aim of the film is to foster a sense of national pride.
    "Everyone who's seen this film feels a really strong sense of grief and indignation, but there's also our fighters bravely resisting, and a lot of our people bravely resisting as well. So when completed this kind of film really arouses the spirit of patriotism for all of us Chinese," she said.
    A before and after segment at the end of the film means that viewers will be able to see the painstaking work the restorers have done, said Sun.
    "At the very end of the film we have chosen a portion (of the footage) to do a comparison, in the comparison video you can see that this part has not been restored, while this part has. Why did we choose this part to do comparisons? Because we wanted everyone to know that the film they are watching has been restored and that if they watched the original one it would be really hard to sit and watch it in the cinema," she added.
    In addition to the documentary, at least five new films will be screened at major cinemas beginning in early September. Many of the works will highlight the efforts of China's ruling Communist Party in the war against Japan, despite the fact that the Nationalists, who subsequently fled to the island of Taiwan, were in power during the war and led most of the fighting.
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