Arresting the Moving Image

Yesterday's Mirror column: 

The Film Heritage Foundation and the painstaking work of storing and restoring India's cinematic past.

Dhundhiraj Govind (Dadasaheb) Phalke, maker of the first Indian film, examines a strip of celluloid

On May 3,1913, when Raja Harishchandra first opened to an excited Bombay public at Coronation Cinema in Girgaon, Dhundiraj Govind Phalke established his claim to the title 'Father of Indian Cinema'. Over the next 36 years, some 1700 silent films were made in India. Of these, only five to six complete films and 10-12 film fragments survive in the National Film Archive of India (NFAI). Even Raja Harishchandra itself doesn't survive in toto. What we have are the first and last reels of a four-reel film -- and that, too, Phalke's 1917 remake of his original 1913 effort. 

The Madras film industry contributed 124 fiction films and 38 documentaries to the Indian silent era. Only one survives. In a darkened auditorium in Jawaharlal Nehru University's School of Arts and Aesthetics yesterday, I watched a couple of minutes of it. The audience was full of people who study and write about cinema, but the unabashed lovers' kiss in that 84-year-old clip still caught many by surprise. 

The fact that you can now watch the whole of Marthanda Varma (1931) online for free is the spectacular result of two allied processes of film archiving. One is the gathering, restoration and conservation of actual celluloid negatives. The other is the archiving of films in the digital medium: public-access online archives like the marvellous indiancine.ma, which aims to be the largest collectively annotated archive of Indian films: an encyclopaedic resource for researchers and film fans. And while the digital may seem like the future, it is not our most permanent record of the past. But more on that later. 

Both these processes are, unfortunately, still in their early stages in India. Filmmaker and archivist Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, whose documentary Celluloid Man (2013) was a deeply affectionate portrait of the octogenarian NFAI archivist PK Nair, estimates that by 1950, "India had already lost 70 to 80 per cent of our films, including our first sound film, Alam Ara." Dungarpur now runs the Film Heritage Foundation, acquiring as many film prints as he can from a country-wide network of antique-dealers he laughingly calls "refined kabadiwallahs". 

Theatrical prints he acquires are checked, cleaned, played and then stored in the Foundation's climate-controlled vault. But ideally, a film should be restored not from a print, but from an original camera negative (the film on which the original camera image is captured), a master positive (the first positive print made from the original camera negative), or a dupe negative (created from an original master positive). 

These, however, are hard to come by. And for many Indian films, may have been lost forever. Dungarpur's presentation at JNU was studded with anecdotes about the work of an archivist in India - some happy discoveries, but most of them heartbreaking losses. 

The causes of our present situation are multiple. There is the inflammability of the older nitrate film, leading to many infamous fires in film warehouses and labs: as far back as the Ranjit Movietone fire in the 1940s and as recent as the FTII fire in 2002. There is the general Indian apathy towards preservation of anything. For years, people in possession of old, unsuccessful or rusting cans of film knew only one way to make any money from them, which was to sell them to scrap dealers, who would strip the film reel for the silver content. There is the oft-repeated tale of filmmakers' descendants destroying pieces of our common heritage, if not wilfully, then under financial pressure. If PK Nair recounts how Ardeshir Irani's son Shapurji confessed to selling three reels of Alam Ara's camera negative for the silver, Dungarpur has his story of filmmaker Debaki Bose's son in Kolkata, who 'explained' to him that he had left the original camera negatives of his father's Ratnadeep (1951) out in the wind and weather for thirty years because he "didn't have space". 

Among Dungerpur's pet peeves is the fact that the move to the digital has blinded people to the fact that a CD or DVD has a life of 3-5 years, while celluloid, as a format, has a proven "life of 126 years and counting". "But no Indian labs engaged in restoration have photochemical facilities," he says ruefully. "Basic digital scanning and cleaning, done cheaply, is seen as the restoration!" 

Dungarpur's Film Heritage Foundation (FHF) is the second Indian film archive (after the NFAI) to be a member of La Federation Internationale des Archives du Film (FIAF): an international network of archives which can be approached for versions of a film under restoration, if any are stored in another country. 

At one level, FHF could be seen as a rival to NFAI. But a private initiative like Dungarpur's, while less hamstrung by the lack of autonomy and funding issues that afflict NFAI, will take time to earn the trust of India's film fraternity. Dungarpur admits there have been instances when film families who have been in talks with him have eventually donated their collections to the NFAI. 

While the state may not be, as film scholar Ashish Rajadhyaksha pointed out, either the best equipped or the most interested agency for the preservation of popular cinema (given its anti-cinema history), it is still the go-to place for many. Dungarpur is clear that he wants to collaborate rather than compete with the NFAI, and he is right. But in a country still far from understanding that film is an irreplaceable part of our cultural history, may a million archives bloom.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Sep 2015.

Post Facto -- Celluloid Man: PK Nair & the future of our cinematic past

My Sunday Guardian column:

At one point in Shivendra Singh Dungarpur's affecting documentary — released on 3rd May to coincide with the centenary of Indian cinema — the octogenarian PK Nair stands in front of one of those old-fashioned weighing machines that you could find at every Indian railway station even until a decade ago. He inserts a coin into the slot, and receives in return the little rectangular piece of cardboard with his weight printed on one side, and a grainy B&W image of Aishwarya Rai on the other. Nair smiles, a smile of pure pleasure. He inserts a fresh coin, and the machine releases another card. As new cards (and actresses) tumble out of the machine, a voiceover has Nair reminiscing about collecting these cards as a boy. He collected cinema ticket stubs, too, he confesses happily. It's one of the moments of Celluloid Man that illuminate just how well-suited India's premier film archivist was to the job that consumed him for 30 years.

Paramesh Krishnan Nair, better known as PK Nair, is the man responsible for founding and managing the National Film Archive of India (NFAI). Having joined the Film and Television Institute in Pune as a Research Assistant in 1961, he did much of the spade work for an autonomous NFAI, which began in 1964. From 1965, when he was appointed Assistant Curator, till 1991, when he retired after nearly a decade as its Director, Nair acquired 12,000 films — 8000 Indian, the rest foreign. The numbers are impressive in themselves, especially for a government archive in a country where government institutions are notorious for their inefficiency and corruption. But if there is a single thing that Celluloid Man manages to convey, it is that that Nair's accomplishments cannot be measured in quantitative terms.

This is a man who lived his work: who legendarily screened and watched films from the late to the wee hours, and was never to be found in the theatre without his small torch and a notebook in which he meticulously recorded, reel by reel, the content and condition of every single film print. He didn't let his personal taste influence his collecting and he wasn't above making quick overnight copies of loaned international prints to serve the larger cause: as he says with a twinkle in his eye, "a true archivist should have the immunity to overcome such legalities". 

Nair combined this indefatigable, almost childlike enthusiasm for the cinema with a seriousness that daunted the frivolous student and unfailingly encouraged the genuinely interested. Jaya Bhaduri, for instance, proudly remembers being the only girl at Nair Saab's late-night screenings because he had told the hostel matron she wasn't using them as an excuse to "gallivant" around an almost-wholly male campus. Vidhu Vinod Chopra recounts the thrilling privilege of being allowed a few hours' access to the institute's print of Breathless so as to figure out how Godard achieved the "smoothness" of his cuts. Then there's the tale of how John Abraham — the late Malayali filmmaker — walked into Mr. Nair's house at 3 am and demanded to watch Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Mathew, and how Nair not just agreed but watched it with him. They then discussed John's plans for Amma Ariyan (it was to be his most remembered film), had breakfast together, and only then parted company.

These anecdotes craft a portrait of a man so in love with the cinema that he could imagine nothing better than to be able to share that love with young people just starting to discover its treasures, as well as with various different publics: the areca nut farmers and peons of Heggodu's Ninasam, and Pune residents whom Nair drew to his weekly NFAI public screenings by mailing invitations to addresses picked at random from the directory. But Dungarpur's film is also a portrait of an era. Perhaps PK Nair's life would be much more solitary if he were an archivist now, when students have digital access to classics that an earlier generation could only watch by Nair's grace.

The other set of stories tell of Nair's memorable acquisitions, with filmmakers and ex-students acting as his eyes and ears all across India. Mrinal Sen describes stumbling upon the reels of Kalipada Das's silent Jamai Babu while shooting Akaler Sandhane; Adoor Gopalakrishnan remembers how the second Malayali film made, Marthanda Varma, was discovered; Nair himself tells us about finding Dadasaheb Phalke's Kalia Mardan, even as he stands outside the unattractive shopping centre that has replaced Phalke's house. The nine Indian silent films now extant were singlehandedly salvaged by him. In a country where 1,700 silents were made in 36 years, nine may seem like nothing. But without Nair Saab, we might not have even those.

The film's best part is when Nair walks through the NFAI vault, glancing at the shelves and listing, with casual ease, his favourite scenes and songs from each — with precise reel numbers. The saddest is that it took Dungarpur eleven attempts to be allowed to shoot with Nair in the archive: the institution he built up "brick by brick", as Shyam Benegal puts it, now refuses him entry. Nair has done more than his due — and received less than it. Perhaps there can never be another PK Nair. But we don't even seem to understand how much we need one.

Published in the Sunday Guardian, May 2013.