Dina Iordanova. 'Treading in Little Steps: My Asian

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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.

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. My friend, Peter Yam, taking me to the Milky Way building in Kwun Tong and showing me the staircase where chases of Johnny To’s classics were shot. My friend Zhen Zhang telling me of her thesis project on early cinema in Shanghai, while we enjoy the sun on a bench in the courtyard at the University of Chicago. My friend,

David Neo, talking about the legacy of P. Ramlee, while on visit to the Peranakan quarters in

Melaka. My friend, Hing Chao, giving me copies of the meticulously researched books on

Hakka martial arts at the faculty club in Hong Kong University. My friend, Wanna

Navigamune, elaborating on the legend of ghost-bride Nang Nak, while we visit the Thai popular culture museum that she runs on the outskirts of Bangkok. My friend, Michael Raine, advising me on how to find a subtitled copy of the Japanese-German pre-WWII co-production,

The New Earth (1937). My friend, Soyoung Kim, talking about her research into the Koryo filmmakers who emigrated to the Soviet Union after the war, while we eat spicy stew on a side street near Garosu-gil.This list, describing the zig-zag trajectory of my little steps into Asian cinema, can be much, much longer.

It is all rhizomatic, open and connectible in multiple dimensions, and deeply personal.

STEPPING INTO THE ASIAN ARCHIVE THROUGH THE DOCUMENTARY

The many educational, compendium films that I saw over the years have been special steps for me; as many have given me a contextual understanding that I could not have received directly from watching the films. I regard them as special, anchor pieces, in compiling my

Asian cinema jigsaw.

Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s Celluloid Man (2012) is a titanic film exploring the ups and downs in the epic struggles of P.K. Nair, the dedicated founder of India’s National Film

Archive in Pune, to gather and organise the country’s massive and diverse film legacy. It goes beyond a simple chronicle and shows the specific type of personality that one needs to possess to create archives in the multicultural environment of nascent India. I know of at least one new

Indian film history scholar whose career decision, to study the intricate winding history of film archiving in India, was made after seeing this inspirational film. There may be more.

Then, there is New Zealander Pietra Bretkelly’s fascinating documentary, A Flickering

Truth (2015), who goes to Kabul to chronicle the work of Ibrahim Arify. He is a skilled archivist who has returned from exile in Germany to go through the 8,000 hours of film material held in the Afghan Film Archive from before the rise of the Taliban and select some for restoration. The faded images that emerge, one after another, in the course of his work when the films are taken out of mouldy and dusty cans, tell a story that looks very different from the stereotypical images that are usually associated with Afghanistan nowadays. There are many scenes of laughing and celebrating, of women and men together, of a society that is convivial and differs sharply from the violent and fearful reality of the country as it has come to be known for the past two decades. It is a flickering truth of an obliterated past, one that is fragile and delicate, and may vanish again, forever, after having sat in hiding for a long time. The team manages to showcase the restored footage at improvised screenings in traveling cinemas around the regions that are not immediately controlled by the Taliban. It is a risky undertaking, yet worthwhile just for the moments when the spectators gasp at what they see on the screen.

The work of archivists in Kabul is as perilous as it can get.

Then, there is the thirty-minute long Thai documentary that chronicles the amazing story behind the Thai Film Archive and the dogged perseverance of its patriarch, Dome

Sukwong. I have used this film in my teaching on global film cultures in the past; yet now I can no longer find it. It used to be on YouTube, but at the time of this writing, it is not. Instead, we have gotten many of the materials that the archive in Bangkok has now made available online. A stepping-stone that is no longer there, I have used it by stepping on it; but now it has been withdrawn. Others may not be able to follow the same path; instead, they will find a great range of restored material that the archive in Bangkok have since made available online.

A different type of film, yet again an ‘archival’ one for me, sui generis, is Yang Li-

Chou’s The Moment: 50 Years of the Golden Horse (2014). It chronicles five decades of

7 sustaining and growing the Golden Horse in Taiwan, which started as a Taiwanese national showcase and then evolved into the definitive institution for Sinophone film. This chronicle does not deal with the history of a specific archive nor with the story of a particular archivist.

But it shows, nonetheless, the same perseverance and dedication, as building an event over the years is, in a way, creating a parallel archive, a history of cinema.

Some of the films I am talking about here are celebrated, yet remain little known and seen. They have been screened at large festivals, have earned nominations, and have won awards. Some are available on streaming platforms, big or small (Netflix, Amazon Prime,

MUBI, even YouTube). Yet they remain somewhat scattered, even in my mind. And I wonder why? My feeling is that they are all, in one way or another, modelled after films we know of

European archives and archivists. The best example would be the documentaries about Henri

Langlois, a flamboyant and revered figure, the archetypal archivist. There does not seem to be one single and centrally recognised Asian repository or institution that unites the archivists, like the cinematheque Langlois led in Paris did in the West. Or perhaps, I simply do not know of it.

Could it be that the feeling of scattered legacy is fuelled by the intricate and delicate political balances of the region? It may well be that this is the case; yet, we can also point at some emerging and solid evidence of transnational collaborations across film archives, as provided, for example, by Sanchai Chottirosseranee, who has shown in his writing how archivists from the Beijing Film Archive and Gosfilmofond in Moscow worked alongside Thai researchers and BFI staff in London to discover the lost classic, Santi-Vina (1954).iv

By watching these films, however, I intensely weave together the impressions and memories I am left with from watching the actual features; and I start making linkages and connections that may not necessarily be obvious to others. These films help me build my own

8 picture of Asian cinema, my own private archive of it. I learn more each and every time; and

I make a new step in the direction now taken. Each and every time more people involved in archival work across Asia come to mind, like Chalida Uabumrungjit in Bangkok, Prof Li Xun of the China Film Archive in Beijing, Prof Li Xiaohong of the film archive at Xiamen

University in Fujian Province, Karen Chan of the Asian Film Archive in Singapore, Nick

Deocampo, this book’s editor and a Philippine film historian who became my main link to this volume, and others. All these encounters empower me to start making pronouncements on a fascinating universe that I now start to feel at home in.

THE FILM FESTIVAL AS ARCHIVE AND AS PERSONAL ARCHIVE

Some of the most important little steps, and bigger ones, take place in the universe of film festivals. Take Cinema Ritrovato, for example, the festival of restored films that has taken place in Bologna every summer since 1986; it is recognised world-wide as the most important event of this kind. I believe this recognition is due to its immediate affiliation with

Cineteca di Bologna, an institution that is engaged in extensive film restoration work internationally, including its Asian branch, L’Immagine Ritrovata Asia.v Integrating the film digitalisation branch of the operation with a film festival has proven to be a successful business model, where restoration projects come along with an implicit opportunity to be shown at the festival, visited by the widest international community of archivists and cinephiles. Many other institutions are engaged with restoration, but do not have a festival that works alongside for the purpose of showcasing the restored material. And many other festivals show restored films but are not immediately linked with a restoration branch.

It is not only the specialised festivals that show restored films. In Europe such important Asian restorations are shown at a number of festivals: Rotterdam, Udine,

Pordenone, Vesoul. And there are all these festivals in Asia, dynamic and exciting, that have done amazing work in the past two decades, and sometimes longer. On my travels and in my research, I often come across instances where film festivals showcase restored works.

Examples include: the large panorama of films from the Korean war held at the Jeonju Film

Festival in South Korea in 2001: the retrospective of King Hu’s work at the Udine Far East

Festival in 2013, which came along with the special book by Roger Garcia of HKIFF fame; the tribute to Matsumoto Toshio at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival in

2017, just after the passing of this groundbreakingly versatile director; and, HKIFF and other festivals across Asia showcasing the restored version of Lino Brocka’s Manila in the Claws of Night (1975), in 2014.

The engagement of film festivals with archival research and publication is of equal importance. For many years, the Hong Kong International Festival led the way by facilitating film history projects that resulted in special sidebars; as well as research publications that one could purchase in the bookshops at the Arts Centre and at the HK Film Archive. In 2015, the

Busan IFF organised the first international poll on 100 Best Asian Films, and published a book featuring images and brief reviews of the films that made up the list. I was privileged to be the author for this edition of pieces on Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala (1975), Zhang

Yimou’s Ju Dou (1990) and Wong Kar-wai’s Chunking Express (1994). More recently, in

2020, they run the poll again, this time adding new categories, such as 100 Best Asian Films

Made by Women. I cannot wait to see the results of this last poll made public.

During the festival crisis triggered by COVID-19, we saw many amazing examples of festivals moving online and showcasing archival work, such as the continuous online festival organised by the Federation of Film Societies of India, which showcased works by many important yet lesser known Indian and Bangladeshi directors (e.g. Aparna Sen, Morshedul

Islam). As a rare treat they featured a special week on the work of Indian women-directors,

10 including films by my friend Bobby Sharma Baruah, an Assamese filmmaker whom I met at the 14th Dhaka International Film Festival. Or, the South Korean classic films series curated and presented by KOFIC in online events throughout the period of COVID-19 pandemics.

More recently, the Taiwan Film Festival launched in Edinburgh (a virtual and thus symbolic spin-off of the eponymous London event), featured Taiwanese classics, such as The

Husband’s Secret (1960) and Where the Seagull Flies (1974).

As I travel to festivals, I see the amazing results of these efforts. Yet I cannot help noticing that even though many festivals in Asia contribute to a similar project, there seems to be no festival in Asia that would fulfil the function that Cinema Ritrovato plays in the

European festival scene. In the past decade, the MEMORY! Festival in Yangoon, Myanmar had stepped on to the stage to provide a forum for this type of work. It is run by an international body, MEMORY! Cinema Association and holds conferences and workshops.

In 2020 the festival was affected, like everybody else, by the COVID-19 crisis. Could

MEMORY! be the event that has the potential to evolve into an equivalent of Cinema

Ritrovato for Asia?

INTEGRATING IN LITTLE STEPS

And so it all gradually comes together, over time, referencing the films I have seen and the things I have learned from them. My confidence grows, in little steps, through further viewing and making connections that take the shape of my own narrative thread of Asian cinema. It may be facetious but it is also my personal archive of traveling through this new universe. It is a jigsaw journey, different from accepted trajectories; and it is undertaken with an imaginary beneficiary in mind, someone who, like myself, has come in from the cold but who has found the climate in Asian culture nourishing. And it works, as I favour this rhizomatic

11 and non-hierarchical, multi-planar history of cinema, where newly restored Asian classics can be integrated with the canonical examples of my original cinematic framework.

The past decade brought about the feeling of empowerment in making utterances about the cinema of Asia. At first it came through my participation in international critical polls, for the BFI, Facets, Senses of Cinema, the Busan IFF, where I could plug in references to the occasional Asian film or more, depending on the context. Then, through the episodical contributions to edited collections, such as the entries I did for the first 100 Best Asian Films initiative (2015); and, more recently, a short piece on Naomi Kawase’s Suzaku (1997), forthcoming in the book that will accompany the pioneering poll of the best 100 Asian films made by women, organised by the Busan IFF in 2020.

But there are also many other varied steps. Like discovering how a Glasgow-based film festival in the early 1930s helped the engineering student, Rattana Pestonji, become Thailand’s foremost filmmaker, an important episode in Asia’s film history I wrote about in my preface to a film festival book (Iordanova 2016a). Or through my participation, over several years, in the Chinese Film Festivals network, which evolved in the footsteps of a book I had initiated earlier (Iordanova and Cheung, 2011) and allowed me to develop ideas on stakeholder configurations as they played out in the space of Chinese diasporic film festivals (2016b). And, differently yet, serving on the juries of major films festivals in Asia – I will only mention here the New Currents jury at the Busan IFF in 2014 and the international competition jury at the

Yamagata IDFF in 2017, among others. Differently again, putting together playlists of important Asian films that are now easily available to see online – as I did in the lockdown

COVID-19 summer of 2020 – dedicated to Restored Classics from Asiavi to the documentaries of Naomi Kawasevii and to Hybrid Genre Classics of the Soviet Empire of the 1930s.viii

I have gradually started interweaving my Asian knowledge in other work I do, as I believe in transnational approaches, so that Asian references were now popping up in all my talks and teaching, in all my writing and academic interactions. Thus, in the past decade I have been integrating Asian material in whatever I teach, from Film Cultures (covering Asian cultural institutions dedicated to film as well as Asian film festivals), to War and Cinema (using films by Kon Ichikawa and Isao Takahata), to Film and Fashion (using documentaries from

China, South Korea, India, and Indonesia). I first dared to offer an honours module on Asian cinema some years ago, built around films by Ann Hui, Clara Law, Mani Kaul, and Im Kwon- taek. Most recently, I developed and delivered special sessions on the Japanese documentary tradition, on Documentary in China, and one on Asia’s foremost current auteur-filmmaker, Jia

Zhang-ke. Even more importantly, I felt knowledgeable enough to supervise doctoral work on

Asian cinema; and, at this point, I have helped a range of young scholars from several countries in Asia launch their careers after working on a doctoral degree with me at the University of St

Andrews. I was blessed to have these wonderful doctoral students, as well as a constellation of visiting scholars; and together we were able to organise important events that took us steps further into Asian cinema, events dedicated to the memory of such magisterial figures like

Setsuko Hara, Om Puri, Wu Tianming. And in 2019, through my affiliation with the University of Hong Kong, I was able to set up a workshop on the Asian films from the Ten Years franchise

(Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, in addition to the original Hong Kong classic, 2015) and then publish the material that was created.ix

Attending the forum on Asian archives at the University of Xiamen last year, and, listening and identifying with the cinephile from Gansu, pushed me to new steps and into a new thread. The result was to summarize, in my mind, the multiple scattered experiences of archival encounters with Asian archives and archivists; and to discuss them in a piece (another step) I wrote for the IAMHIST blog. Later on, in another step, with assistance from responsive

13 archivist-friends and doctoral students, I commissioned and edited the materials for the dossier on transnational archiving in Asia, which appeared in July in Frames Cinema Journal (2020).x

It was this new thread that, most likely, led to the invitation to contribute to this book, an honour that I deeply cherish, and one that validates all the little steps…

Looking back, these little steps have changed over time. At first it was all about exposing myself and absorbing new information and later on also about making my own contributions. Each and every year has brought in new knowledge, but it has also resulted in producing new knowledge about Asian cinema. And, like Terzani some decades ago, all these little steps took me away from my usual life; but they also led me on to the thread of another one, one that I hope to further travel into.

REFERENCES

100 Best Asian Films. (2015). Busan IFF.

Chotirosseranee, Sanchai. (2020, Summer). Rediscovery and Restoration of a ‘Lost’ Thai Classic: Santi-Vina. Frames Cinema Journal, Issue 17. Accessed 5 October 2020. http://www.framescinemajournal.com/article/rediscovery-and-restoration-of-a-lost-thai- classic-Santi-Vinas.

Gelardi, Andrea. (2020, Summer). Keeping Cinema’s Memory Alive in Hong Kong: An Interview with Bede Cheng, Managing Director at L’Immagine Ritrovata Asia. Frames Cinema Journal, Issue 17. Accessed 5 October 2020. http://www.framescinemajournal.com/article/keeping-cinemas-memory-alive-in-hong-kongs

Iordanova, Dina and Cheung, Ruby (Eds.). (2011). Film Festival Yearbook 3: Film Festivals and East Asia. St Andrews Film Studies.

Iordanova, Dina. (2016). The Film Festival and Film Culture’s Transnational Essence. In De Valck, Marijke, Kredell, Brendan and Loist. Skadi (Eds.), Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice (pp. 1-8). Routledge.

Iordanova, Dina. (2016). Yingying, Zhenzhen and Fenfen? China at the Festivals. In Berry, Chris and Robinson, Luke (Eds.). Chinese Film Festivals: Sites of Translation (pp. 217-237).

Iordanova, Dina. (2020, May 15). Asian Archives and Archivists: Travels and Revelations. IAMHIST Blog. Accessed 5 October 2020. http://iamhist.net/2020/05/asian-archives- archivists-travels-revelations/

Iordanova, Dina (Ed.). (2020, Summer). Dossier: Preserving and Restoring Asian Cinema – The Transnational Dimension. In: Frames Cinema Journal, Issue 17. Accessed 5 October 2020. http://framescinemajournal.com/article/archiving-and-film-restoration-the-view-from- asia/

Liu, September (Quan). (2018, December). In Memorial of Wu Tianming: An Anecdote and Some Notes. In Frames Cinema Journal, Issue 14. Accessed 5 October 2020. http://www.framescinemajournal.com/article/in-memorial-of-wu-tianming-an-anecdote-and- some-notes.

Terzani, Tiziano. (2010). Un Mondo che non esiste piu. Milano: Longanesi.

FILMOGRAPHY

Atarashiki tsuchi The New Earth/The Daughter of the Samurai, Japan-Germany, 1937, Arnold Franck and Mansaku Itami

Celluloid Man, India, 2012, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur

Chan Is Missing, USA, 1982, Wayne Wang

Chung Hing sam lam/Chunking Express, Hong Kong, 1994, Wong Kar-wai

Dersu Uzala/Derosu Uzara, Soviet Union/Japan, 1975, Akira Kurosawa

Erosu purasu gyakusatsu/Eros and Massacre, Japan, 1969, Kiju Yoshida

The Fall of the I-Hotel, USA, 1983, Curtis Choy

A Flickering Truth, 2016, New Zealand. Pietra Bretkelly

Golden Gate Girls, Hong Kong/USA, 2013, Louisa Wei

Hai ou fei chu/Where the Seagull Flies, Taiwan, 1974, Li Hsing

Ju Dou, China/Japan, 1990, Zhang Yimou

Manyila sa mga kuko ng liwanag/Manila in the Claws of Light, 1975, Philippines, Lino Brocka

Minamata: Kanja-san to sono sekai/Minamata: The Victims and Their World, Japan, 1971, Noriaki Tsichimoto

The Moment: 50 Years of Golden Horse, 2014, Taiwan, dir. Yang Li-Chou

Moe No Suzaku/Suzaku, Japan, 1997, Naomi Kawase

Momotaro: Umi No Shinpei/ Momotaro, Sacred Sailors, Japan, 1945, Mitsuyo Seo

Nasake yosha nashi/Nowhere to Hide, South Korea, 1999, Lee Myung-se

Pamir: Roof of the World, USSR, 1928, Victor Yerofeyev and Vladimir Shneyderov

Pan si dong/Cave of the Silken Web, China, 1927, Dan Du-yu

Santi-Vina, Thailand, 1954, Khru Marut

Su-eop-ryo/ Tuition, Korea, 1940, Choy In-gyu and Bang Han-joon.

Turksib, USSR, 1929, Victor Turin

Wanja Denghuo/ Lights of Ten Thousand Homes, China, 1948, Shen Fu

Zhang fu de mi mi/The Husband’s Secret, Taiwan, 1960, Zhang Mei-yao

ENDNOTES ii Terzani’s book about aspects of Asia that no longer exist is published posthumously and only in Italian, by his son (2013). It contains a range of remarkable photographs that Terzani took during the several decades of working across East and South Asia as correspondent for the German popular magazine Der Spiegel. ii As discussed in the essay by September Liu (2018). iii I wrote of these in a blog post for the IAMHIST blog, published in May 2020. iv I commissioned a piece on these experiences and included it in the special dossier on Asian archives, published in the Frames Cinema Journal in the summer of 2020. v This important work is highlighted in Andrea Gelardi’s interview with Bede Cheng, the executive of the Asian operations based in Hong Kong. vi The playlist can be found in the Centre for Screen Cultures web-site at https://screenculture.wp.st- andrews.ac.uk/2020/06/19/themed-playlist-restored-classics-from-asia/ vii The playlist on Naomi Kawase’s documentaries is at https://screenculture.wp.st- andrews.ac.uk/2020/04/03/themed-playlist-women-and-documentary-naomi-kawase-online/ viii Hybrid Genre Classics of the Soviet Empire of the 1930s is accessible at https://screenculture.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/2020/05/15/themed-playlist-hybrid-genre-classics-of-the- soviet-empire-1930s/ ix This important project was run jointly with Prof Gina Marchetti from the University of Hong Kong. It contains our introduction, Dina Iordanova and Gina Marchetti, ‘New Political Cinema, Asia and Beyond: TEN YEARS,’ In: Frames Cinema Journal, Issue 15, May 2019. Available: https://framescinemajournal.com/article/new-political-cinema-asia-and-beyond-ten- years/( as well as featuring videos and writing about the four Asian films by the producers of the Ten

Years series (https://framescinemajournal.com/article/interview-with-the-producers-of-the-ten-years- series-conducted-recorded-edited-and-subtitled-by-leiya-lee/), Clarence Tsui on Ten Years (https://framescinemajournal.com/article/video-essay-clarence-tsui-on-ten-years/), Andrew Choi on Ten Years (https://framescinemajournal.com/article/video-essay-andrew-choi-on-ten-years/), Kwai- Cheung Lo on Ten Years (https://framescinemajournal.com/article/kwai-cheung-lo-on-ten-years/), Vivian Lee on Ten Years (https://framescinemajournal.com/article/video-essay-vivian-lee-on-ten- years/), Felix Tsang on Ten Years (https://framescinemajournal.com/article/video-essay-felix-tsang- on-ten-years/), Laikwan Pang on Ten Years (https://framescinemajournal.com/article/laikwan-pang- on-ten-years/), Jennifer Coates on Ten Years Japan (https://framescinemajournal.com/article/quietly- critical-ten-years-japan-2/), Timmy Chih-Ting Chen on Ten Years Taiwan (https://framescinemajournal.com/article/a-future-without-china-livelihood-issues-in-ten-years- taiwan/), Ruby Cheung on Ten Years Hong Kong (https://framescinemajournal.com/article/ten-years- an-unexpected-watershed-of-twenty-first-century-hong-kong-film-industry/), Anchalee Chaiworaporn on Ten Years Thailand (https://framescinemajournal.com/article/ten-years-thailand-the-future- becoming/) and a bibliography and filmography compiled by Yu Lu (https://framescinemajournal.com/article/ten-years-bibliography-and-filmography/). x Dina Iordanova, ‘Archiving and Film Restoration: The View from Asia,’ Frames Cinema Journal, Issue 17, Summer 2020 https://framescinemajournal.com/article/archiving-and-film-restoration-the-view-from-asia/ Foreword to Dossier: Preserving and Restoring Asian Cinema: The Transnational Dimension, edited by Dina Iordanova. With contributions from Sanchai Chotirosseranee (Bangkok), Karen Chan (Singapore), Andrea Gelardi/Bede Cheng (Hong Kong), Anushrut Ramakrishnan Agrawaal/Nick Deocampo (Manila).