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10
FILM & TV TECHNICIAN
January 1957
on the six stages. We are aiming to double this and eventually to step the figure up to thirty films a year— before very long," they told me.
tures, running time about ten minutes. I saw some of these. They were, in the main, comedies based on traditional stories.
In Shanghai the studio has six
ys*^
chiefly screen presentations of the traditional Peking operas. It is these operas that are usually done in full colour and very good the colour is too, for they use Agfa colour, which is obtained from the Soviet Union.
Attached to each of these studios there are training schools for technicians, a big scenario department, a panel of script readers, and groups of welfare workers to keep a close and watchful eye on working conditions.
Plans were ready while I was in China for the building of five further studios — at Canton, Chungking, Kunming, Sian and Urumchi. Two of these will be in operation this year. The Chinese are very fond of films. There are large, modern, well-equipped cinemas in all the towns with swarms of people going in all the time. The finished product from these studios is good; in many instances I found the standard very high. With the great fillip being given to film production it would not surprise me if the Chinese film industry captured before long the entire film market in Asia.
They have two theatres at Chiang-chun. Both were being used for dubbing when I was there. They dub about eighty imported films each year. Most of these are from Czechoslovakia and Poland. Only a handful come in from France and Italy, and occasionally there is one from Japan, for the restriction that keeps the Americans from sending in their films applies apparently to some extent to Japanese films too.
Four Small Stages
The Peking studio, which has only four small stages, does not take quite as long to make films. The average time there is much nearer our own and approximates to about thirteen weeks for a feature length picture. The working hours here, as at the other studios, is from 8 a.m. to 12 noon, then two hours off, and from 2 o'clock until five — a seven-hour day. On Saturdays they finish at four and work only six hours, making a total of forty-one hours per week, for Sunday is a holiday. There are two additional studios in Peking — one for Newsreels and the other for Documentaries. At the latter they make their comedy cartoon pic
stages, as at Chiang-chun, but the stages are somewhat smaller. Both here and in Peking they have made films in colour, but at their chief studio they were only just preparing to make their first colour film.
Their feature films are of two types — straight dramas or comedies (and the Chinese have a rich sense of humour, very akin to our own) and musicals, which are
COVER STILL
The cover still and pictures on pages 9 and 10 are shots from a film being made during R. J. Minnev's visit to China.