Facing Santi-Vina (1954); or the Vitality of Film Heritage and the Pitfalls of History
by Jaka Lombar
This contribution may or may not be suitable to opine on the developments in the last decade of Asian cinema: It takes for its focus a film that was released more than half a century ago. On the other hand, the premiere of Santi-Vina’s restoration took place in Cannes in 2016, that is to say, just on the brink of a profound shift in the international order that has been unravelling since that fall in ways that have been sometimes productive, though more often destructive, but certainly significant when considered in the context of the past decade. It is worthwhile considering why the sensation of viewing similarly inaccessible or restored films has come to act as a light yet distinctive counterweight to the debris of the everyday visual culture. The past few years have sporadically brought forth so much sorrow that the global film heritage has become activated less as a shield but rather as a life jacket.
The titular characters Santi (Poonpan Rangkhavorn) and Vina (Rayvadi Sriwilai), whose love story is the central vector of the film, are presented to the audience in their childhood before they grow up and face the institution of marriage in a familiarly melodramatic fashion. Yet the growth of the narrative is anything but organic. Each sequence and each gesture of Santi-Vina espouses the passing of time through a string of decisive moments in a manner that is fateful, deliberate, and ultimately inevitable, yet the overall affective accumulation of this straight-forwardness melts into an amalgamation that is viscerally warm and soft, sometimes bizarre and sometimes soothing. By chance, Vina’s violent suitor keeps tightening his shirt around his waist and thus loosens the dramatic tension. The dialogue, an incision of drama into the otherwise languorous soundtrack, is followed by a respite of breath. Crucial moments transition across images that contain a level of aesthetic independence from the action on screen. Less an organism branching out and more of a solid monolith, the film invites the viewer to encounter what is contained within it.
Viewed from the framework of its origins, Santi-Vina is believed to be the first 35mm Thai film in color, its high-budget 1954 production a case of transnational cooperation and American influence in particular. Freed from the confines of soft politics that superpowers used to perform in the fifties, could it now be taken on its own terms? The problem in such a theorization is that in each viewing context the film does get to be taken on its terms, albeit imbued with the conditions of the viewing. The 2016 restoration is a case in point: There is an ambivalence in appreciating the newness of the rediscovery. While the film was considered lost for more than 60 years, given that the available versions were deemed too deteriorated for screenings, the narratives of rediscovery often obscure the labor of custodians that kept the artefacts in their care. According to Sanchai Chotirosseranee from the Thai Film Archive, the restoration itself required around 1,700 hours of work. The revitalized palette brings forth the grainy textures of the mid-century film stock without overplaying the digital tools that restorers have at their disposal, working carefully to preserve the traces of the material past.
Excitement at the privilege of being able to finally see what was unavailable to past audiences—past generations—could potentially detract from the film itself. Yet must the marvel of discovery be disentangled from some kind of ideal notion of film that has so far remained hidden behind the complexities of its framing? Do the sensations of viewing not count as legitimate experience? Perhaps what is needed is a new vocabulary for the kind of film heritage sensations in the modes of viewing that involve restorations as well as vintage print screenings. Watching the Santi-Vina in 2016 can make one wonder how the film will fare in 2078, were the restoration premiere a midpoint rather than a conclusion of the preservation processes. The last decade has seen a steady continuation of institutional cinephilia, with festivals, preservation labs, and film archives all working towards expanding the state of the field, but it has also seen an almost definitive rollout of the digital. A future release will most likely not be an actual film print, and therein lies the threat of loss recurring once more. Not the loss of a format, though it certainly has its own particular sensibilities, but the potential of inaccessibility for another set of multiple generations, were the file deemed too costly or inconvenient to provide to the public.
As Santi and Vina face the repressive generation of their parents, the watching audience faces the prospect of being in the inverse situation: being the recipients of the kind generosity of access that may be already waning before our eyes. After all, the pitfall of history is its ability to sustain the illusion of stasis and stability, when the constant stream of rediscoveries leads to the conclusion that details can be lost, forgotten, and sometimes permanently erased. And so the encounter with the silver screen ought to be understood not only as a matter of the personal, but also a generational occurrence, necessitating collective repetitions and subtle and sustaining recurrences, even when they become co-opted into the narratives of newness and rediscovery as an overt marketing strategy. Crucially, Santi-Vina teaches its audience how to love perhaps not time itself, but certainly all the senseless ways in which the resistance against the passage of time (narrative time, time of contemplation, affective time) becomes meaningful: Not for the sake of soft power that is sometimes tied to histories, or cultural capital, but for the sake of some kind of common, generational filmic inheritance.
Jaka Lombar writes and resides in Kranj, Slovenia.