Cover Tilda Swinton at M+ (Photo: courtesy of M+)
Tilda Swinton at M+ (Photo: courtesy of M+)
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At M+ for a discussion on preserving films, Oscar-winning actor Tilda Swinton shares how Hong Kong director T’ang Shu Shuen impacted her relationship with cinema
Tilda Swinton has made her mark in nearly every genre of films, from fantasy and superhero (think Marvel) to historical and experimental. Even now, she is pushing the boundaries of filmmaking with each new avant-garde project that she takes up.
Yet, she also believes in the need to restore old films. During her visit to Hong Kong this week, she spoke at M+’s talk “Why Restoration Matters?” on January 21. The other speaker in the session was T’ang Shushuen, one of Hong Kong’s earliest women auteurs whose unconventional ways of film editing in the 1960s inspired a new wave of storytelling.
The two sat down in a dialogue moderated by Silke Schmickl, the Chanel lead curator of moving image at M+, and delved into their careers, love of cinema and shared their thoughts on the industry in the future.
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Above From left: Silke Schmickl, T’ang Shu Shuen and Tilda Swinton at M+ (Photo: courtesy of M+)
From left: Silke Schmickl, T’ang Shu Shuen and Tilda Swinton at M+ (Photo: courtesy of M+)
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“One of the most magical tricks of cinema is that there is no such thing as an old film. You start to unspool The Arch from 1968 and you’re right there. The screen is like a cleansing board, and time evaporates,” says Swinton of T’ang’s representative movie that portrays a widow in 17th-century China who suppresses her amorous feelings for a soldier for the sake of her daughter. The film, which was submitted to run in the foreign language category of the Academy Awards (though finally not nominated), was celebrated for its techniques of cross-fading, cross-cutting and freeze frames that depicted the protagonist’s inner longing. These techniques that T’ang used were ahead of their times in the local film industry which emphasised straightforward storytelling.
Swinton first saw The Arch when she was a student at Cambridge, where she also acted in school plays. “I remember my friend [Joanna Hogg] and I reeling out of this because it was so modern. There’s something so dedicated about the experiential flavour of it. I remember thinking it’s not really narrative. It’s all about experience and feeling, and it’s not even about thinking,” she recalls. “That, for me at the time, was particularly potent, because you want work that is about that.”
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Above ‘The Arch’ (Image: courtesy of Hong Kong Film Archive)
‘The Arch’ (Image: courtesy of Hong Kong Film Archive)
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Hong Kong and England may be miles apart geographically, but Swinton found her cinephile spark for art films, surprisingly, from this Hong Kong movie. “[Art films] felt very hidden for me. There was one patch of experimentalism, which was founded and hosted by the British Film Institute, where I found Derek Jarman, who was the first practising filmmaker I [have] ever met, and I was fortunate that he took me under his wing. And it was moments like seeing your film that gave me an idea of what I might want to follow in my life: cinema,” she says to T’ang.
Having benefited from watching such period-defining movies herself, she feels strongly about preserving them. “One of my ancestors was pioneering a photographer, and I remember looking at his very early photographic plates from the late19th to early 20th centuries and being absolutely spellbound, because [it was like being transported to another realm of the] present. I was very young when I got this. We all [need to] continue to try and inspire this realisation in the young , but I think it’s [like] a wonderful spell by which you can visualise a richer future based on the seedbed [of the past].”
Above Tilda Swinton and Silke Schmickl at the backstage in M+ (Photo: courtesy of M+)
Tilda Swinton and Silke Schmickl at the backstage in M+ (Photo: courtesy of M+)
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Her views match with M+, which initiated a project of restoring nine Hong Kong films, such as The Arch, Peter Young’s The System (1979) and Patrick Tam’s Love Massacre (1981), as part of the museum’s three-year partnership with Chanel since July 2023.
At the event, M+’s museum director Suhanya Raffel said in her opening speech why they want to “build an important avant-garde cinema library. It is about increasing the visibility of Hong Kong’s rich cinematic heritage by presenting and leading the restoration of these feature films.”
Swinton adds, “A film in a canister in an archival vault is only half the story, but you’re not going to get it to the screen unless it is diligently preserved. It’s the energy exchange [between the screen and the audience] that a film springs to life.”
To the actor, who has been acting since her first role in Caravaggio and Caprice in 1985—which will be screened this week at M+—the longevity of a film also comes from how conversations evolve from it. “[Caravaggio] was 40 years ago, but these films are, for the most part, continuing,” she says. “I love that the conversation with the audience goes on and on. Sally Potter and I have been talking about Orlando for over 30 years, and we’ll go on,” she says. “It’s one of the beautiful things about that milieu of curated art cinema that there is consistently a search for a new context, a new generation and there’s always a reason for another projection.”
Zabrina is the Senior Editor, Arts and Culture of Tatler Hong Kong. She specialises in performing arts, visual art and film. Her wanderlust was first fuelled by the Mighty Rovers Antarctica Expedition 2010. Over the years, she has interviewed A-list artists and filmmakers, including Oscar winners Chlóe Zhao and Tim Yip, Golden Horse winner Sylvia Chang, In the Mood for Love cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Pachinko author Min Jin Lee, and Coachella’s first Chinese solo singer Jackson Wang. She won gold at the WAN-IFRA Asian Media Awards for her 2021 feature on the waves of hate crimes targeting Asian Americans.
