The Cold Blade
The Film Archive helps bring back a classic martial arts flick once thought lost.
When a lone copy of “Cold Blade,” a 1970 film directed by legendary Hong Kong director Chor Yuen, quietly surfaced in Hong Kong a few years ago, local cinephiles were caught off guard. Here was a martial arts flick they had long given up on as a casualty lost to the ravages of time. For “Cold Blade” heralds a landmark turning point in Chor’s lengthy career. It’s the first of his Putonghua martial art films, after a string of trendy Cantonese features during the ‘50s and ‘60s, and sets the distinct tone and flavor of his later, more renowned sword classics like “Killer Clans” and “Magic Blade.” The unique stylishness and elegance that richly suffuses the swordfights in the latter films first takes root in this seminal predecessor.
Yet the initial ecstasy over the rediscovery soon subsided. For no sooner had a team of celluloid specialists at the Hong Kong Film Archive finished slaving away to restore the film to its original state then they realized that they were one whole reel short of a complete soundtrack. Moreover, the missing reel was integral to the entire film.
Any film restorer will tell you that no restoration job can do absolute justice to the quality of a film in its original, pristine glory, but a gaping caesura of sound right in the middle was more than your average glitch. Yet nothing could be done, as the print of “Cold Blade” at hand was the lone survivor after years of neglect.
Since 1996, the Film Archive has been a member of the International Federation of Film Archives, which is a vast web of archivists around the world. But the people resurrecting “Cold Blade” had never thought of sending any distress signals through the tentacles of this sprawling global network despite the significance of the film with respect to Chor’s overall career. At the end of the day, its rediscovery was thought to be something of a fortunate aberration, a lucky flash in the dark - and lightning doesn’t strike twice.
Nonetheless, there’s no stopping the rumor mill, and soon enough word about the appearance of this obscure gem began working its way through the relevant channels at a feverish pace.
And maybe lightning does strike twice – enter the French connection, Marie-Claire Quiquemelle. Quiquemelle, a Sinologist and passionate follower of Chinese films, runs Centre de Documentation sur le Cinema Chinois in Paris. The center has a massive archive dedicated to collecting and preserving Hong Kong films – established, no less, before Hong Kong had anything resembling an archive center of its own.
When Quiquemelle got wind that a recently restored masterpiece was itching to be completed with a crucial reel, she eagerly trawled through her treasure trove for the missing piece of the puzzle. Once again, the pessimists relished in how wrong they were. Hidden in her private collection was a complete copy of a little-known film called “Cold Blade.”
Now it’s a matter of extracting the missing soundtrack in Quiquemelle’s copy and putting it onto the archive’s copy. It might sound simple enough but the fact is, it’s not. Film restoration is a grueling, torturous activity. It involves painstaking measurements of scene after scene, even frame after frame. Buckle-figured restorers around the world spend many a sleepless night scouring thin lines of plastic for dirt, dust, scratches, tears, blotches, faded colors, excessive graininess before laboring away to fix them.
Let’s not forget that restorers inevitably need to work against the clock, looking to save as many films as possible from falling into oblivion. When we caught up with Edward Tse, who heads the film archive’s conservation unit, he was visibly fatigued after staying up all night at the lab.
“That’s one thing you need to know about [film restoration]. It’s very labor-intensive and very time-consuming,” he says. Labor-intensive indeed, especially when Tse and his four bleary-eyed colleagues comprise the archive’s entire restoration team. He only barely manages to pry himself away from the lab to spend a few minutes with us, sweating to meet multiple deadlines that very day.
Yet despite the pressure, he and his team diligently work through their material with cautious, laser-like precision. Why? Tse was originally trained as an archaeological conservationist, and then a painting restorer, before moving onto films. “In all conservation, there’s an overriding principle of patience, a certain code of ethics that you simply have to stick to,” he says.
Enough said. But what motivates the meticulous adherence to said code? For Tse, although he is no film buff and cannot even remember most of the films he has restored, he no doubt knows why his job is important. “I think film plays a vital role in the preservation of any culture,” he says. “It allows us to see people who might otherwise end up as no more than marks on a page, if even that. It records them as moving, breathing, living individuals in history - that’s the magic of film.”
Go digital?
Digital re-mastering is ubiquitous in all fields of recording now. An obvious question, then, is why go through all the fuss restoring and preserving cumbersome reels of film when one can simply transfer everything to digital? Restoration expert Edward Tse cites two reasons.
The first is quality. “There’s a common misconception about digital technology,” says Tse. “When you transfer something from analog to digital, there’s an inherent loss of information, no matter how good the scanning process is. You go from high quality to pixel.” Color would also be lost in the transition.
The second case for original preservation is an obligation to posterity as far as historical accuracy is concerned: “As archivists, it’s our duty to preserve all the basic information for future generations. That includes the actual format itself, which is an important part of what we call ‘documentary evidence.’”
