VINTAGE is the new sexy — and not only in the fashion industry. On Feb. 24, a restored version of Hong Kong director Tsui Hark’s 1992 film “Dragon Inn” hit theaters. In 2009, another Hong Kong filmmaker, Wong Kar-wai, had his 1994 film “Ashes of Time” restored and screened.

    But not all old films have been so lucky, as restoration is sometimes more difficult than creating an original.

    Several years ago, China Film Archive decided to restore “Bridge,” the first feature film after the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949.

    Zuo Ying, vice director of the archive’s technical department, found almost every scene of the movie to have a shaky image. He and his colleagues could not tell whether the original release was like that or if the damage had been done since.

    They could not start the restoration until they found the film’s cinematographer, who was more than 80 years old, in a Beijing Film Studio dormitory. He told them the original images were stable and suggested the problem could be that the film stock had been badly preserved.

    The archive tries to make restored versions as faithful to the original as possible.

    Therefore, the restoration of old films is never simply technical. It requires a team with awareness and sensitivity to film history.

    Most of the archive restoration team members are experts in either computer technology or arts, but few excel in both.

    “That’s why I strongly recommended film experts and the original cast and crew members to join the restoration,” said Wu Jueren, a film restoration researcher.

    The problem is, many of the original cast and crew members are too old or have passed away, which makes the repair of their films even more urgent.

    China Film Archive keeps about 27,000 films, one-third of which were made before 1949. The oldest is 1922’s “Laborers’ Love” by Zhang Shichuan.

    Films made after 1958 are in better condition, because the archive’s two temperature-controlled vaults were built that year. Film stock from before 1958 are in urgent need of restoration, as the film shrinks, scratches and tears.

    China started to restore old films in the 1970s. Since the 1990s, the film archive has focused mainly on digital restoration.

    According to Sun Xianghui, vice president of the archive, the institution has completely restored 106 films over the past five years.

    The average cost of restoring a film is 300,000 yuan (US$46,000). This is a low figure compared to the restoration of classics in Europe and the United States. For example, the 1937 U.S. film “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” cost about US$3 million to restore.

    In China, the money for reviving old films comes mainly from the government, while in Western countries, various nongovernmental sources help. For example, Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation is supported by fashion and wine enterprises, which love connecting their brands to the concept of preserving the classics.

    Sun has been working to find more funding. In 2011, the archive and Swiss watchmaker Jaeger LeCoultre decided to repair 10 Chinese films over three years.

    Wu, the researcher, believes classic films deserve the effort. “Just like Shakespeare’s works and Mozart’s music, classic films are the fruits of human creativity and civilization,” he said. “They change people’s way of looking at the world.”

    Film restoration is a continuous process. A film may have different versions, due to censorship and the director’s changing opinion, among other factors.

    It takes great effort to find enough information about a film, such as the original script, stills, posters and old reviews, to really restore it.

    A famous example is the restoration of German director Fritz Lang’s 1927 film “Metropolis,” which took decades.

    After its German premiere, much footage was lost. Discoveries of lost footage and efforts to restore the film continued over the decades. A 2001 reconstruction of the film was shown at the Berlin Film Festival and considered a refined version, but seven years later, a copy of the film 30 minutes longer than any other known surviving version was found in Argentina.

    New material was reinserted into the movie by restoration experts who compared every frame to adjacent frames, according to their understanding of the film.

    “You can never say you have finished the restoration of a film. It is always being restored for a better version,” Wu said.

    There has been controversy about which is the best way to preserve the classic films — to physically repair the film stock or to turn it into a digital format.

    Zuo, of China Film Archive, believes it is not time yet to give up on traditional film stock.

    “We have seen film stock made more than 100 years ago, but we have never seen computers made 100 years ago,” he said. “We still need time to prove digital media is truly archival.”

    Preserving a film in the digital format makes it easier to copy and transport — and delete and tamper with — Wu said.

    “At present, the most agreed upon way to preserve a film, if it was shot with film stock, is to preserve the original negative well,” he said.

    All three experts agree that a film lives on when people see it on the big screen.

    China Film Archive showed some of the restored flicks at its theater in 2011, said Sun, the vice president. Screenings have continued in 2012.

    The Shanghai International Film Festival also showed old films last year. In 2014, 10 restored Chinese classics will be screened during the festival.

    “Classics are not restored to be locked in vaults,” Wu said. “They deserve to be appreciated by future generations.”

(SD-Agencies)