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Dina Iordanova. 'Treading in Little Steps: My Asian Dina Iordanova. ‘Treading in Little Steps: My Asian Cinema Jigsaw.’ In Nick Deocampo (Ed.), Keeping Memories: Cinema and Archiving in Asia-Pacific (pp. --), Singapore: SEAPAVAA and Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press. TREADING IN LITTLE STEPS: MY ASIAN CINEMA JIGSAW Dina IORDANOVA ‘. all these little steps that took me away from my usual life and that led me on to the thread of another one’ Tiziano Terzani When I hit my mid-fifties, I realised that the discovery of Asia, which took place in equal degrees through travel and through viewing films, since my first visit in 1994, had been a defining moment in my life. It could easily not have happened and yet it did. And it is growing in importance as I journey further through the years. Unlike most of those who specialise in the cinema of Asia, I come from Eastern Europe and not from Asia. My background is in Western culture and not in Asian culture or film; I wrote a doctoral thesis on German Romanticism and later on worked on the cinema of Europe. I have never had the chance to live and work in Asia for a prolonged period of time, as many of my academic friends have; my longest stays in any Asian contexts were less than three months in duration. And, similar to my comings and goings to Asian destinations, my journey to the cinema of Asia feels like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. It consists of many little, seemingly unrelated steps, that do come together and start making sense, and form an emerging picture, only over time. Each one of the steps in this journey takes me away from my previous intellectual territory, Europe, and relentlessly brings me closer to Asia. My personal ‘Asian 1 archive’ is formed, over time, through opportune travels and fleeting encounters, rather than through systematic exploration and studious perseverance. This is the way it also happened to the man who authored the motto of my essay, the celebrated Italian journalist and travel writer who dedicated his oeuvre to Asia, Tiziano Terzani.i In this heartfelt piece, I will try to share some of the little steps that led me on to the thread of Asian film-–a thread of new knowledge and understanding–and some of the little steps which contributed to the understanding of this cinema that I have felt empowered to take. THE CINEFILE FROM GANSU There was a young man, shy and nondescript, who took the podium at the Film Archives conference I attended at Xiamen University in the summer of 2019. Through a translator, I was able to follow his presentation, illustrated with pictures he had taken and that now helped him tell the story. It started with his childhood visits to cinema in the 1980s, reminiscences of what was showing, and of his feelings and reactions to the films he saw. It all sounded like the stories I had read in the accounts provided by famous Western film critics, and pretty much like my own reminiscences of a cinephile childhood in 1970s Bulgaria; or, like the experiences of Chinese director Wu Tianming whose accidental early exposure to the work of Aleksander Dovzhenko, Julia Solntseva and Alberto Cavalcanti set him on the path toward becoming a filmmaker.ii Then, the story continued and rose to an emotional crescendo, as it moved into more recent times; the cinephile from Gansu was now depicting the destruction of the cinema, along with all his memories. He showed photos of reels of his favourite films, wallowing in the rubble. Then, photos of him trying to salvage all these reels, but of course not being able 2 to play them. He shared the emotional build-up of having to confront destructive forces that impose new patterns while deleting the old ones in a destructive swipe; his shiver in the face of a new wave that locks away the old images, ideas, and lives, and makes them obsolete with its relentless headway. What this young man was describing, essentially, was the genesis of his wistful personal archive of cinephilia. It is a nostalgic enterprise, to archive; and this is what had led the young cinephile from Gansu to places like the Film Collector’s Museum and to the event in Xiamen. To archive is to respect what mattered to others who were part of one’s life, to attempt keeping those others in memory and in image. To archive is to try changing perception against the onslaught of the changing mainstream. It is to seek to unlock the locked images. It is to preserve an old projector so that one can see what is on the slides in that mouldy box in the corner, on the dusty windowsill, under that bookshelf. It was the cinephile from Gansu talking, but it felt as if it was me. I intensely related to this young man. In recent years, mainly in the course of many trips to Asia, I had turned into an idiosyncratic archivist myself, trying to preserve my personal finds and experiences, while respectfully seeking a way to reconcile with the course of time. ALL THESE LITTLE STEPS I never formally studied Asian culture nor film. Whatever knowledge and understanding I may have acquired has come by taking little steps, one step at a time. Each step comes with yet another memory image; and if I were the cinephile from Gansu, I would be telling a very long story indeed. First, for me it is watching films rather than reading about them, that is the key in the process of learning to understand a cinematic tradition. So, most of my ‘steps’ are identical with the days when I come in contact with important films. 3 So, I will not be talking of the books I read. They have been major stepping-stones in this journey, providing a grid and a grounding, where necessary. I am eternally grateful to the specialist friends who made this knowledge available for a non-specialist like myself and guided me on the journey. The journey itself, however, is seeing the films. The little steps are finding the jigsaw pieces of cinematic history and putting them together in a picture that I compile myself, one that transcends Asian borders; and, while incomplete, the picture is fascinating and diverse. Let us name some of these steps, often disorderly, often out of chronology, a zig-zag of sorts that make up the pebbles that cover the yard of my personal Asian film archive. I offer the following as examples: attending a screening of the 1948 Chinese film, Wanja Denghuo/ Lights of Ten Thousand Homes, at the Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna in 2018; watching Louisa Wei’s Golden Gate Girls (2013), about film pioneer Esther Eng, in my studio in Wan Chai while visiting Hong Kong in 2017; seeing early leftist films by Nagisa Oshima in 2014, at Reflet Medicis in Paris, on the small rue Champolion that is perhaps the densest cinema street in the capital of film; viewing 1950s ethnographic cinema from Yunnan at a clandestine screening; or the Japanese animated war propaganda, Momotaro: Umi No Shinpei (1945), on YouTube; finding and watching restored early Soviet Central Asian classics, like Victor Yerofeyev’s Pamir: Roof of the World (1928), and Victor Turin’s Turksib (1929), set across Turkmenistan and Siberia; and, discovering early footage of the expeditions of the Russian mystic, Nikolay Roerich, in the Himalayas. Or finding myself somewhere and realising I am standing at a place that is in the annals of Asian cinema history. How many times this has happened to me? It is like passing by the Clearwater Bay remnants of Golden Harvest studios in Hong Kong’s New Territories and imagining how Run Run Shaw may show up with a bouncy walk from around the corner. Like criss-crossing Nathan Road in Kowloon in search of Bruce Lee’s birthplace; or descending the 4 historical 40 steps in Busan’s Jung District, the site of Nowhere to Hide (1999). And like visiting the China Film Archive in Beijing and seeing the massive digital restoration work that is going on there. And, of course, all these trips to archives in Asia: the outskirts of Bangkok, the Heritage Museum in Sha Tin in Hong Kong’s New Territories, the archival holdings in Xiamen, and many visits to the Hong Kong Film Archive in Sai Wan Ho.iii Or various other little steps. Like going to the Glasgow Film Theatre to see Tuition (1940), the Korean classic from the time of the Japanese occupation. Or going to a screening of Eros and Massacre (1969) and a talk by Yoshishige Yoshiga and Mariko Okada at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Or attending a cramped event on the premises of the Asia Arts Archive on Hollywood Road in Hong Kong to see a cracked and damaged copy of Curtis Choy’s The Fall of the I-Hotel (1983), and throughout the screening, thinking of Wayne Wang’s Chan Is Missing (1982) Or sitting through Noriaki Tsushimoto’s chronicles of the lives and times of Minamata victims (1971). And all these other little steps that involved meeting new people and making friends. It would be a long report if I were to be exhaustive here. So, let me just touch the surface, as even this produces an avalanche of memories, since people have been truly generous in sharing their knowledge with me. My friend, Bjorn Sorenssen, telling me the story of the discovery of the silent Chinese adaptation of the Cave of the Silken Web (1927) at a provincial archive in Norway, while we eat dinner in Italy.
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