GUARDIAN OF MOVING IMAGES
Dome Sukvong pioneered film preservation and archiving nearly four decades ago. His tenure as director of the Thai Film Archive ends today
The man with the beard has collected film for 37 years. Today, July 31, Dome Sukvong’s duty as director of the Thai Film Archive will come to an end, though it’s clear to everyone in the Thai cultural community that the work he has pioneered nearly four decades ago — and there’s still so much work to be done — will continue.
With a devotion verging on religious belief, Dome fought hard to establish the office of film preservation and archiving in Thailand in the 1980s. Then and now, he believes that to preserve audiovisual materials — newsreels, historical records, forgotten reels, vintage home movies and latest blockbusters — is to preserve memories of the nation themselves. To him, archival work is about digging up the past, but it’s also a cultural service that informs the present and prepares society for the future.
Dome spent his early years trying to prove that to the authorities, and now that the Thai Film Archive has stood firmly on its legs as a leading institution of its kind in Southeast Asia with its new cinematheque in Salaya set to open later this year, the man who started it all will pass on the torch as his official tenure ends today.
“I never thought that I would one day run a film archive, never thought it would become my job. In the beginning I just wanted to be a customer — I wanted to use the services of an archive, to look for things and information,” said Dome, 67.
“I found out, back then, that there was no film archive in Thailand, and that was when I thought we should have one.”
With the look of an old-world hermit, or a guardian of an apocryphal treasure in a picture book, Dome, without intending to, has developed an aura of a classical archivist over the long years of his professional life. When he speaks, he likes to sprinkle his speeches with religious allegories — a cinema is “a temple”, to watch a movie is “to pray” — the most famous among them having found its way to become the official motto of the Thai Film Archive. “Cinema enlightens”, pappayon yang haikerdpanya, a sombre adage resembling a monk’s sermonic punchline.
Dome was born in Phuket in 1951, then moved to Narathiwat with his family, and ended up in Bangkok when he was 10. His love for movies came early and it kept growing; he remembers that, after two years of not having had a chance to see a film in a cinema due to his constant moving, Dome cried tears of joy seeing an Elvis film on the big screen in Bangkok’s Phrakanong movie theatre, after stealing his mother’s money to pay for a ticket.
In 1970 he entered the school of journalism and broadcasting at Chulalongkorn University’s Faculty of Communication Arts (which would soon grow to become a premier breeding ground for Thai filmmakers and scholars). Back then the young man, like most communication arts students, wanted to make movies, but it was as hard then as it is now to get a break in the industry. Dome turned his interest to writing a book on the history of Thai cinema, which didn’t exist then, and that was when he ran into a problem: there was no recorded history of Thai cinema.
“When I looked at foreign film magazines or text books, there would be photos from movies, and the captions would say ‘photos courtesy of so-and-so film archive’,” Dome said. “So I wondered, where is our film archive?”
Thai cinema from the 1950s to 1980s was huge. It was a popular form of entertainment that reached every corner of the country, with stars who commanded deep loyalty and influence, and big cinema halls — some seating over 2,000 — dotted every major neighbourhood in the capital and the provinces. At the same time, movies were perceived then — and also now — as trivial and fleeting, a lowly distraction unworthy of serious historical inventory and scholarship. The term “picture” and “culture” couldn’t share the same sentence in those days.
Dome believed otherwise. Film, like books, manuscripts and other artefacts that make up an identity of a people, deserves protection and enshrinement. In 1981, while teaching film at Bangkok Technical College, he began building a collection. He would go around to cinemas, distribution companies and producers in Bangkok and the provinces to ask for film rolls. In 1983, serendipity played a role in the formation of the Thai Film Archive: that year, Dome was invited to attend a congress of the International Federation of Film Archives in Sweden. He recalled that King Rama V had visited the country in 1897, so while there, he attempted to track down newsreel footage of that royal visit.
He didn’t find it then and returned to Bangkok. After a few months — with his hope waning — a letter came from the Swedish Film Institute informing him about the existence of a film reel showing King Rama V on his trip. The Swedes made a copy of that historic footage and shipped it to Dome.
That discovery was a validation of what Dome had been saying: film and moving images hold significant historical value, and the need for a proper film preservation body was long overdue.
In September 1984, the Ministry of Education, through the Fine Arts Department, signed a paper to establish a national film archive. It was a small and paltry affair, with only four staff members including Dome, and they were given an abandoned mint factory in the compound of the National Gallery as an office. Film is a chemical composition and needs to be kept in a cold environment; the archive’s first air-con was a second-hand one donated by the filmmaker Piak Poster, and it could go down to 15C, though the rule book says the ideal condition for film storage is 4C.
The gathering of film materials continued however, and the collection kept growing. In 1995, Dome discovered fragments of the first Thai feature film in history, a two-minute remnant of Choke Song
Chan (Double Luck) made in 1927. Two years later, the Film Archive was moved to a new location in Salaya — back then a rural, remote district on the edge of Bangkok and Nakhon Pathom. The good news was that the area was spacious, and over the years, despite various administrative and financial constraints, the archive has slowly expanded into an attractive compound that includes a Thai Film Museum, a photogenic mock-up of historic buildings in world cinema history, and soon a modern cinematheque complete with permanent exhibition space and screening rooms.
In 2009, the Film Archive was granted public organisation status — a special administrative model that allows greater autonomy and managerial freedom — after Dome’s tenacious push that took him eight years of waiting at the doors of various ministers and handing them letters and proposals. It paid off.
“Film archives in many countries are modern and technologically advanced,” he said. “But I also saw a film archive in Pune, India, which was just a modest brick structure standing on a bare plot of earth, with one air-con running. And I thought, an archive can be something like that, too, as long as it serves the purpose of keeping film.”
The big question is not too hard to guess, though: in the age of streaming, in the times of phone screen and digital images that are available at a click, what is the role of analogue film, and of cinemas, when visual materials have come to mean something different from a few decades ago?
“We work with new technology and we don’t reject anything — we now keep film as well as digital materials, we have to keep them all,” Dome said.
“We have a cinema, and a cinema is like a sermon hall. You can pray at home, you can pray alone, and you can have an amulet that you carry around with you — like you have a screen in your pocket and you can watch a film alone — but every week you should come to hear a sermon at the temple along with other people. A film archive is a temple and we have to open our doors for everyone.”
As he bows out, Dome’s staff will continue to collect film, preserve film, restore film, and make them available to the public — in cinemas, at its library, on a YouTube channel (last year before the cremation of King Rama IX, the Archive uploaded a historical clip of King Rama VII’s cremation and became a huge online hit). And while film may sound like an object from the past, Dome believes that as long as there’s image, an archive is an indispensable cultural institution.
His ongoing project is to introduce a film class in primary schools. For many years the archive has organised “School Cinema”, where young students are brought to watch film in its cinema followed by a discussion or activity, but the project to include basic film study in primary school textbooks is at once ambitious and natural. If young Thai students have to study traditional dance, he believes, why shouldn’t they also study a contemporary art form like film?
“When we were born, we couldn’t speak. We have to be taught to speak. Moving image is the same, we have to be taught in order to understand it,” said Dome. “In the world where images are everywhere, and where an image has many purposes, it’s important that children are taught to understand it.”
That way, moving images will remain. And though Dome’s mission officially concludes, the light he kindled will continue to shine.
A FILM ARCHIVE IS A TEMPLE AND WE HAVE TO OPEN OUR DOORS FOR EVERYONE