Norway returns lost Chinese film
- By Zhang Rui
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E-mail China.org.cn, April 16, 2014
Norway handed over a rare copy of an early Chinese silent film yesterday and premiered it in Beijing just before the opening of the annual Beijing International Film Festival.
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| Still of early Chinese silent film "Pan Si Dong" (The Cave of the Silken Web), an adaptation of the Chinese classic novel "Journey to the West" by Wu Cheng'en. [File photo] |
The copy of "Pan Si Dong" (The Cave of the Silken Web), an adaptation of the Chinese classic novel "Journey to the West" by Wu Cheng'en, was long thought to be lost. It was directed by Dan Duyu in 1927 and was very popular at the time. But all the copies of it had been destroyed and lost.
In the film, the pilgrim monk Xuanzang entrusted by a Tang Dynasty emperor to find sacred Buddhist texts ends up trapped in the Cave of the Seven Spiders, who want to eat his flesh to become immortal.
After going through its stock of around 9,000 old films in 2011, the National Library of Norway found a nitrocellulose copy of "Pan Si Dong." It was the first film from China to be screened in Oslo in 1929, and is the only existing copy.
The silent film was restored, before being delivered to the China Film Archive in Beijing on Tuesday. Then it was shown at the China Film Archive after more than eight decades, with live piano played by Jin Ye, a professor from the China Conservatory of Music. However, audiences found the copy was not intact and only ran for about one hour, with some scenes lost.
Nevertheless, the old film still made people laugh after so many years.
"The translator took quite a few liberties and added his own comments in brackets when it suited him. This gives the film a comical twist," said Tina Anckarman, film archivist at the National Library of Norway, "There are also sequences where the Chinese text is upside down or inverted."
The restored film was shown in Oslo on Oct. 13 last year as part of the Films from the South Festival.
The film was the highest grossing Chinese film in 1927. Film historian Li Zhen called it "one of the most significant early films in China." It took advantages of groundbreaking filming techniques including underwater shooting and trained animal participation, and started a wave of fantasy films.
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