Film researcher to the rescue
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E-mail Shanghai Daily, January 4, 2016
Film buffs in Shanghai were recently treated to eight rare Chinese movies filmed more than half a century ago. For that, they can thank Marie-Claire Kuo Quiquemelle.
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Dedicated French Sinologist has leading role in saving rare Chinese movies from oblivion. |
Quiquemelle, 78, is a French expert in China studies. She has collected more than 100 old movies, many of them not aired on the mainland for decades due to scarcity of copies. Among them was "The Barber Takes a Wife," the first Chinese film dubbed in English and screened in Europe and the US after World War II.
She and her husband, Kuo Kwan Leung, have been hailed as guardians of vintage Chinese film culture for their efforts in tracking down and preserving old movies.
Quiquemelle never actually worked in the film industry. She was studying history at university in 1964, when France became the first Western country to establish formal diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China.
After that thaw in relations, French travel organizations began to organize tour groups to visit China, and Quiquemelle joined one of them. She spent about three weeks in Beijing, Shanghai and Hangzhou. The trip stirred her interest in Chinese history and culture.
She studied at the School of Oriental Studies in Paris and began immersing herself in all things Chinese, adopting the name Ji Kemei, based on pronunciation of her surname. The "cultural revolution" (1966-76) froze relations between China and France. Cultural exchanges ceased. Quiquemelle's university also lost contact with Chinese schools. Availability of books and research documents from the mainland dried up.
Nevertheless, she finished her studies and continued her research. In 1970, she began work in the Chinese Cultural Study Institute at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.
"In the early 1970s, young students were very interested in China, and many went to French universities to learn Chinese," Quiquemelle told Shanghai Daily. "But because of the cultural revolution, there were no more books or documents available."
Quiquemelle and several colleagues turned to film as a way of giving students a taste of Chinese culture. A search was initiated in Hong Kong and Taiwan for Chinese-language films since so few were available from the mainland.
"I remember there were only five propaganda films about Chairman Mao and his revolution, also known as yang ban xi in Chinese," she said. "They included ‘The Story of the Red Lantern' and the ‘Red Detachment of Women.' The films depicted part of Chinese history, but we couldn't let students watch them over and over, waiting for other Chinese movies to be available in France."
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