John Ogunwomoju ’27 is part of a Bucknell student team digitizing rare Japenese films.

nearly forgotten piece of cinematic history has been brought back to life, thanks to the research of Professor Eric Faden, film/media studies, and a team of Bucknell students. Their work has revived a rare set of Japanese short films from the 1930s while taking them across the globe in search of even more lost media.

Faden found the films by fluke in 2017 during a teaching fellowship in Kyoto. While researching another project at the Toy Film Museum, he discovered a set of reels made from paper, a medium rarely used in filmmaking. “The only other films made on paper were copies of early American ones for copyright deposit,” Faden says. “The Japanese paper films are very different in that they were meant to be projected from the get-go.”

However, due to the films’ fragility, museums were hesitant to project them.

Determined to preserve the films digitally, Faden began meticulously photographing each frame with the intention of stitching them together as a video. The task proved to be far from simple. Although each film only lasts between two and 12 minutes, it could take Faden up to four and a half hours to photograph one. Even then, the result didn’t achieve the desired effect of watching a continuous movie.

Recognizing the need for a new preservation method, Faden recruited the expertise of professors and students across disciplines. Alina Arko ’23, who studied mechanical engineering, designed a scanner delicate enough to handle the fragile paper reels while capturing them as a continuous video. Then, computer science students Yuhan Chen ’23 and Jackson Rubiano ’27 developed software to recognize frames and stabilize the images, ensuring the films could be projected in a fluid sequence.

The films represent a fascinating mix of genres, including wartime propaganda, instructional exercise reels, early anime and mythological stories featuring ninjas and samurai.

From the beginning, Faden’s goal was preservation, not restoration. “We wanted to show the films — warts and all — with their inconsistencies and the over-scanning so the audience could see how the film is working. A restoration project would remove all that.”

Professor Eric Faden, film/media studies, recruited students for help designing a special scanner delicate enough to handle the fragile paper reels while capturing them as a continuous video.

In summer 2024, Faden and a group of Bucknell students traveled to Japan in search of more paper films. Between visits to museums, shrines and temples, they examined additional reels, deepening their understanding of Japan’s cinematic past.

“It gave me perspective about the history and culture of Japan, which helped me understand the films I had been working on,” Rubiano says.

In August, the digitally preserved films were screened at a Brooklyn theatre. “I thought we would have six people, aside from my family,” Faden joked. Instead, the event was packed — 75 people were turned away once the venue hit capacity.

For his dedication to preserving these films, Faden was awarded the 2025 Sumie Jones Prize for Project Leadership in Japan-centered Humanities by the Association for Asian Studies.

This video includes clips from a variety of Japanese paper films that have been supplied by the Kyoto Toy Film Museum, collector Natsuki Matsumoto, and Tsuyoshi Yamabata of the Itabashi Science and Education Museum.