Final Report on the Volunteering Project at the National Film Archive of Thailand (NFA)
November 10, 2005 | admin | trackbackWeekly Diary
Week One: May 9 to 13
Even though I had planned to spend the first week on rehousing and rewinding the nitrate collection at the National Film Archive (NFA), two things changed the plans right away.Firstly the fact that a lot of new films had come into the archive within the past 12 months so that the backlog problem had increased tremendously. This immediately became my number one task for my stay there.
Secondly a new staff member started working the same day and Dome Sukvong asked me to give her some basic training for film inspection & handling. Chao was a film student who just graduated and showed interested in working at the archive. As her knowledge of English was better than that of most other staff members it was decided that she would help out as a translator. I am sorry to say that she could not stay with me throughout my entire period there as I think this would have helped a lot in exchanging knowledge with the other staff members. For example: the plan to work in the laboratory of the archive we had to drop due to the fact that we couldn’t find anybody to help with translation.
So our first task was to set up & find a proper work space for the two of us. Space is scarce as in most archives – it gets used up by incoming films. There is no designated workspace for vinegar or mold infested films so that we were looking for a space that can hold more than two people and can be ventilated well.
Week 2: May 16 to 20
At the Public Relation Department Archive and Museum (PRD).
The Archive and Museum was started by Ms Kannika 5 years ago. With incredible energy she managed to convince the Department of the importance of keeping its history. There are 83 Radio stations and 11 TV channels to be taken care of, some of which have started their own archives, some haven’t.Whether the PRD Archive and Museum will become the central archive of all stations or remain a smaller unit remains to be seen.
I was invited there to give some basic training for film inspection & handling and make suggestions for the future of the filmarchive. The situation is that material has been collected and kept, but nothing has been done with it. There are some preliminary inventory lists, but they have not been kept up to date so that one has a collection but no archive yet. The filmcollection represents a relatively small part of the entire colllections, the biggest part currently being vinyl LPs, Umatic tapes and slides. The challenge is to start the archival work so that parts of it can be made accessible within the next two years. Work on a database has been started by anotehr volunteer, and towards the end of my time in Thailand we had another meeting on databases and cataloguing, which I hope was also helpful. No doubt fostering access will make the visibility of the institution bigger and therefore strengthen the position of the Archive & Museum.
We spent the first day looking at equipment and what would be needed. Shopping was the next thing on the list and the afternoon was spent cleaning and setting up work spaces. On Tuesday I gave an overview on film preservation and handling. On Wednesday and Thursday we started winding through films. Three staff members were participating, plus Chao who helped by translating. None of them has any background in working with AV material. I did suggest that at least one of them should get more and ongoing training either by spending time at the NFA or possibly through SEAPAVAA.
Week 3: May 23 to 27
My translator Chao had to return to an unfinished project at the documentation department of the NFA in Bangkok, so that I concentrated on the backlog. Dome and Tong (another filmtechnician) picked emergency films in very bad condition for me. I worked on a 35mm print of a feature film from the 70s in extremely damaged condition and heavily color faded. It is the only 35mm material surviving of this title. This is a short week, as the 23rd is a holdiday. On the weekend it was decided to hold a workshop towards the end of my stay over two days, explicitly for people who want to help/volunteer in the archive.
Week 4: May 30 to June 3
I moved from the __vinegar workplace__ that I set up with Chao to the general inspection room. One table is almost always free due to other duties of the film inspecting staff so that I actually had a work table. This had the benefit of me working in the same room as everybody else. I started with the inspection of more 16mm films. On Tuesday, I started working on a 1997 film called THE KING OF MUSIC of which the archive received 34 prints. As it is an important film concerning the Royalty, it did get priority. And since space is scarce it was decided to only keep the 3 best copies. The first reel I checked I already encountered problems I have never seen before:
The film was printed on Agfa polyester stock, which broke apart when winding through it. So as my job consisted of finding the 3 best prints I decided to wind through one reel of each rpint fairly quickly and put the prints in better condition aside for later checking. But besides 3 prints all have the same problems. Those 3 are printed onto Kodak plyester stock from 1997. None of them shows any of the decomposition signs that the other ones have: the pink layer developing on the emulsion side (the prints are also lacquered, but I don__t know what with) and on other parts red spots. All prints have been kept under the same storage conditions, in what I would describe as accelerated age testing conditions. A storage building in Bangkok, with lots of windows and no airconditioning, in which temperature and humidity were extremely high. We are still trying to find out what happened but it might be a case of cyan dye fade. I did send some samples to the archive in Australia where Mick Newnham is performing some tests.
Related Posts