Restored Classics

As film restoration efforts continue their rapid expansion and cleaned-up classics become an integral part of film buffs’ viewing schedules, Udine Far East Film Festival is continuing to showcase major new projects. This year, Udine is hosting the world premiere of the restored version of Taiwan’s The Wheel of Life (1983), a striking reincarnation triptych helmed by King Hu, Li Hsing and Pai Ching-jui. Also screening is the Philippines’ A Speck in the Water (Nunal sa Tubig, 1976), an unsettling experimental work by Ishmael Bernal covering cycles of life in a waterfront village.

Both works represent the great strides being taken in digital film restoration. In the days of analogue restoration, the process of returning a film as close as possible to its original form involved lengthy manual and photochemical processes, and it could be prohibitively pricy. The advent of digital post-production processes offered new and efficient tools for restoration pros to treat wear and tear, address flickering and fading, stabilise images and more, and top specialist laboratories led the way with high-profile projects.

In recent years access to restoration has broadened, with more movie labs handling projects and film companies and archives acquiring equipment to take up some of the work themselves. In the case of the Taiwan Film Institute, for instance, the archive set up a digital restoration workstation in July 2016. Two years later, the Institute completed restoration of King Hu’s Raining in the Mountain (1979) in a 4K process (using a horizontal resolution of approximately 4,000 pixels) as its first in-house feature-film restoration project. Other institutions in Asia running in-house restoration include the Korean Film Archive and the China Film Archive.

The Taiwan Film Institute also carried out the restoration work for The Wheel of Life, with sponsorship for the project coming from lead actress Peng Hsueh-fen. The Institute commenced the project in December last year by scanning the film elements at the 4K resolution. Restoration was then done in a 2K process, with video shot correction conducted first to detect transitions, followed by stabilisation. Brightness correction and automated dust and scratch removal came next, before the more laborious stages of semi-automated and manual dust and scratch removal and correction of warping. (Films with more damage require additional steps, such as manually fixing breaks and repairing sprocket holes before scanning.) The entire project was completed this March.
Restoration of A Speck in the Water was overseen by the Philippines’ ABS-CBN Film Restoration Project. Established under media group ABS-CBN Corporation, which operates a large film archive, the project has been working with outside labs in the Philippines and abroad to restore films. For A Speck in the Water, ABS-CBN Film Restoration used the sole remaining 35mm print, which was sourced from the Fukuoka City Public Library’s Film Archive and had Japanese subtitles burned in. (The movie had entered the Fukuoka collection in 2002 as one of five Filipino films acquired from the Japan Foundation.)

The movie was in a poor state, with problems ranging from dust, scratches and stains to flickering, fading, bumps, film tears, gate hair and reel changeover marks. A Speck in the Water was first scanned in the 4K resolution at Tokyo Ko-on Co in Japan before 2K digital restoration was carried out at Kantana Post Production in Bangkok in early 2018. Further audio clean-up and colour grading were done by Wildsound in the Philippines. All up, a total of 3,600 restoration hours were recorded by technicians on the project, according to ABS-CBN Film Archives, and the film premiered in the Cinemalaya film festival in Metro Manila last August.

The Wheel of Life will join other classics restored in recent years to play a part in the Taiwan Film Institute’s efforts to boost understanding of Taiwan cinema at home and abroad. Aside from playing festivals, films from the Institute’s restoration programme are also coming out in high-end Blu-ray editions internationally. ABS-CBN is likewise giving A Speck in the Water new life, with special theatrical runs, film festival screenings, TV and video and online services like iTunes all on the cards for its restored pictures. For cinephiles today, this sort of access amid the wave of restoration is a blessing. Whether caught in a theatre or viewed in high-definition at home, restored versions of landmark works are now becoming so common that some may take them for granted – a far cry from how, just a decade ago, many of these pictures could be only seen in sub-par copies or, worse, were simply out of reach.