But did 25 years of the Thai National Film Archive actually fly? To me, I feel like time simply crawled, inching forward as if in slow-motion. Twenty five years have felt like 100 years to me. Or even longer. That’s probably because the film archive has become inseparable from my life. I’m with it everyday, from the time I wake up until I go to bed, breathing with it and living with it. Was it really 25 years? That’s only 550 weeks, or 9,000 days, or 200,000-plus hours! That’s nothing! If I were an old-time movie dubbing pro and I saw a shot of myself on screen – skinny, with a wild black beard and hair, rewinding a roll of film at a work desk, then the shot dissolves to show the current version of me – an old, rotund man not unlike a tanned Santa Claus, with white beard and hair – seeing that, I would have narrated the scene: “25 years are so slow like a bad TV show.”
Time waits for no one. Time swallows everything. Every day of the past 25 years became a blur of memories, some fading, some already gone.
What I remember clearly, however, is that the Thai National Film Archive was born due to a stroke of good luck just like that enjoyed by the hero of Choke Song Chan (Double Luck), the first film made by a Thai person in 1927. In the film, the hero is a provincial sheriff who pursues a criminal who has run away to Bangkok. The sheriff captures the guy – and gets a girl. As a young man I set out with the intention to write a book on the history of Thai cinema, but I realised that I would never be able to do a good job if I hadn’t seen all the Thai films from the past. So I began hunting for old movies, starting with Nang Sao Suwan, the legendary Thai film made by American producer Henry McRae in 1923. Instead of Nang Sao Suwan, I stumbled upon old documentary footage shot by the Department of News of the Royal Thai State Railway between 1926 to 1943. They were nitrate films that were decaying fast, and their discovery prompted me to campaign for the establishment of the Thai Film Archive in 1984.
Even though I still haven’t written the book on the history of Thai cinema, and even though I haven’t found the negative of Nang Sao Suwan, I have over the past two decades found many old films that are now filling the shelves of the film archive. The most exciting incident – I will never forget it – was when I found the surviving fragment of the film Choke Song Chan. The fragment contains just one minute of the entire movie, but its existence has an enormous historical value not unlike the unearthing of a tiny bone of a dinosaur that allows an archeologist to imagine the extinct creature in its entirety.
At the beginning, the film archive struck me as more than just double luck – we had multiple luck!
Sometimes I also felt like the hero of the first Thai “talking” movie, Long Than (Going Astray) in 1932. The hero is a rural farmer who comes to the city to buy farming equipment. He falls prey to the colourful temptations of the city, forgetting his wife and child. Penniless after a bar girl rips him off, the man realises his mistake and returns home. In 1992, when our office was still in the old quarters of Bangkok, a huge throng of people came out to demonstrate against a military dictator that had recently taken power. They camped on the street right beside our office. My staff and I couldn’t resist the temptation that comes with the usually futile attempt to fight for freedom; we were seduced by the colourful spirit of anti-dictatorship and decided to camp out with them on the street until, against the odds, the people won. Only then did we return to work at the archive.
But we weren’t lucky enough to find the footage of Long Thang.
The National Film Archive is a state agency, but we’re just a small unit in the National Archive. We receive such a paltry budget each year that we’re like a cripple struggling to shoulder the huge responsibility of preserving a part of our national heritage. In 1994, some friends and I decided to set up Thai Film Foundation, an NGO that functions to support the film archive. As a non-governmental organisation, the Thai Film Foundation has less financial constraints and more flexibility. Over the years, the archive and Thai Film Foundation have worked together so closely that it’s almost impossible to distinguish one from the other. This reminds me of the hero ofThongpoon Khokpo Rasadorn Tem Kan (The Citizen). In this film from 1977, a thief robs a taxi driver of his vehicle. The taxi driver goes to the police, but he realises that they are unwilling or unable to help him retrieve his car – his livelihood. To save himself, he starts looking for the car, doing everything he can. Not only does he not find the taxi, but he is soon arrested and jailed by the police. I hoped that the National Film Archive wouldn’t suffer the same fate. The driver cannot find his taxi. But we found the negative of The Citizen in 1990, as part of the project ‘Thai Movies Come Home’, which involved the transport of the negative prints of over 500 Thai films from a laboratory in Hong Kong back to Thailand.
In 1997, we were evicted from the downtown office to a place in the Bangkok suburbs. It was practically a rural setting surrounded by paddy fields and swamps that were home to various species of snakes and reptiles, especially the vile hia (monitor lizard). Maybe the sight of the sunbathing lizards inspired us to come up with an idea: the film archive should be upgraded to the status of a public autonomous organisation, a special breed of state agency that enjoys greater managerial freedom. I never thought the campaign to make the archive a public organisation would be as exhausting as a colonised nation’s struggle for independence. We began the campaign in 2001, but today we’re still fighting for our freedom. This time, I feel like the hero from the film Look Bah Tiew Lah Sood, from 1993, in which a salary-man is informed that the god of death is coming to take his life. Knowing that his days are numbered, the man decides to do all the heroic deeds that he’s long dreamt of doing but never had the courage to pull off until then.
Another fond memory of mine is the friendship that we have formed with international film archives and film festivals. I’m very glad and honoured that the Singapore International Film Festival has recognised the significance of our work and initiated this special programme to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Thai Film Archive.
I believe that one of the most important tasks of a film archive anywhere in the world is to preserve human memories before passing them on to the next generation. These memories are coiled and conserved in several thousand cans that must be kept in frozen storage, always at the temperature of 4 degrees Celsius and the humidity of 30 percent. Under this condition, these memories can last for centuries, and they’re always ready to come alive again once they’re screened. What’s not on film doesn’t exist, as they say, and to that I’d like to add: In Film We Trust.
But memories, as we all know, are filtered through personal prisms, or through collective mindsets, or through the masses, the passing years, through beliefs, dreams, lies, fears, anger, love or hatred.
Lord Buddha taught us in kalamasutra about what to believe and what not to believe. There are 10 rules warning us against what we shouldn’t believe: for example, don’t believe something only because it’s always been believed before; don’t believe something told by others; don’t believe something because it corresponds to your preconception; don’t believe something because the speaker seems trustworthy; don’t believe something because the speaker is your teacher. I think if Lord Buddha were to add another rule, he would teach us not to believe something because you see it in a movie.
Believe it or not, the memories preserved by film archives around the world are the basis that will contribute to the future of the human race. We came, we saw, we conserved. That’s because for me, movies beget wisdom. I sincerely hope that it will be the same for everybody.
by Dome Sukvong