The Search for lost Remnants of Cambodia's Cinema
The Cambodian film industry began in the late 1960s and grew until 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took control of the country. By 1975, there were 73 production companies and 446 films made, but most of these films have been lost. In Remnants of the Past, Dr. Saphan and Nate Hun catalogue the few films that survive. Unfortunately most of them survive in a fragmented state and are in the hands of private collectors who won't allow them to be digitized. A few went to VHS and some of those can be found online.
I was mesmerized by Dr. Saphan's and Nate Hun's presentation at Lala Books in Lowell, which was sponsored by the Cambodian American Literary Arts Association. As soon as I got home I started reading the book and looking for each movie online, hoping to be able to see even a few fragments.
For the first movie listed in the book, Neang Sorb Kror-Ob, I was only able to find a plot summary of the original novel.
I did find a clip of The Snake Girl online. Dr. Saphan showed a clip of the Snake Girl's mother making love with a snake. Her offspring is the girl with live snakes instead of hair that we can see in this clip. Unlike the Medusa of Greek Myth, the snakes on the Snake Girl's head do not turn people to stone. And she is very beautiful and the daughter of an important man so she's not allowed to marry the young man she loves. Like Romeo and Juliet, the couple stay true to each other but end up united only in death.
Thavary Meas Bong, directed by Uong Citta in 1969, can be found in its entirety online here. Although Dr. Saphan mentioned that Uon Citta said that the versions of her films that survive are not really the films she made, as they have been edited by exhibitors beyond recognition.
Still, watching the film, which is in Khmer without subtitles, is fascinating. I don't speak Khmer, but as a filmmaker I see clearly that the film was shot silently, and dialogue was dubbed on after the fact. According to Dr. Saphan, all the 446 films made during this first golden age of Cambodian film production were filmed meant to be talkies, but without sound, then the sound was added later. (Remember how Singing in the Rain made fun of that process?) The results are rough at best. I can see the directors knew that, and used many tricks to lessen the impact of what they knew would be badly synchronized dialogue: for example, having the characters make long speeches with their faces turned away from us.
Watching the clips Dr. Saphan showed brought me a bit of nostalgia; when I went to NYU films school we recorded sound while filming, but we had to synchronize it afterwards in the editing room. I spend long nights trimming the audio track or trimming the picture, as even when we had crystal sync, having picture and sound recorded separately meant adjustments always had to be made.
It also connects Cambodian films of the 60s and early 70s to the early synchronized sound experiments of the early 1900s, such as the Chronophone films Alice Guy made for Gaumont, like this one.
I'm really grateful to Dr. Saphan and Nate Hun for writing this incredible book that describes fifty of the films in depth, including production information. The work is a first step, hopefully, towards saving some of these films.