Beijing film festival's crown jewel
- By Zhang Rui
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E-mail China.org.cn, April 19, 2018
A lost film was brought back to life at the Eighth Beijing International Film Festival on Wednesday night.
"The Stormy Night," directed by famous novelist Zhu Shouju in 1925, held its first public screening at the China Film Archive after it was lost in history for nearly a century. The film was last seen in Hong Kong in 1932.
A damaged and incomplete copy of the film was discovered in a collection owned by the late Japanese director Teinosuke Kinugasa when his family made a donation to the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo in 2006. The lost part of the film is the first ten minutes, which means that no one knows the film title and film production company, as well as the film credits. Therefore, the copy was left on a shelf at the National Film Center under the national museum.
A descendant of Dan Duyu, one of China's very first filmmakers, later found the mysterious copy in Tokyo and persistently examined it. He believed the film is actually Zhu Shouju's "The Stormy Night."
In 2016, a descendant of Zhu and several Chinese scholars worked together to obtain a copy of the film from the Japanese film center and brought it back to China for several private screenings in academic circles in Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing. The screenings excited Chinese film historians and experts, who believed the film could redefine Chinese film arts and styles in the early 20th century and fill the blanks in Chinese film history as well as world film history.
Last December, representatives from the China Film Archive started to negotiate with the film center, which was promoted to a higher level as the National Film Archive of Japan this April, about the possibility of bringing it back to China for a public viewing at Beijing's film festival. They finally reached an agreement and the Chinese side borrowed a Blu-ray version from Japan.
There were reportedly more than 650 Chinese silent films produced in the 1920s, but most were destroyed and lost because of the war and turbulence. Now no more than 20 such films still exist.
The China Film Archive said they will attempt to negotiate to recover the digital data and copy permanently from Japan, and are working with the National Film Archive of Japan to restore the film in the future.
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