Films locked in time capsule

Classics revisited

Films are not only entertainers, but also holders of archival and historical value. Hence, when a print goes into oblivion, something of that history is lost. Today, there are efforts to restore and preserve old prints by those dedicated to films.

The foremost among them is the World Cinema Foundation set up by the internationally renowned film director, Martin Scorsese. “He stopped making films altogether to concentrate on the restoration of old, damaged and lost film prints. Organisations across the world are contributing to this movement,” informs filmmaker Mrinal Sen. Sen was invited to attend the screening of a restored version of his film Khandhar, in 2010.

This movement has caught on in India with the establishment of Film Heritage Foundation, a non-profit organisation in Mumbai, last year. The brain behind it is Film and Television Institute of India alumnus Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, whose documentary, The Celluloid Man, on film archivist P K Nair, has caught international attention.

He is a patron of the British Film Institute and a donor for the restoration of Hitchcock’s silent classic, The Lodger. He also facilitated the restoration of the Indian classic, Uday Shankar’s Kalpana, (1948), undertaken by World Cinema Foundation. It premiered at the Cannes film festival’s ‘classic section’ in 2012.

“I realised the need to preserve India’s cinematic heritage, which has been severely neglected for years. We have lost a significant part of our cinematic history. It will continue if we don’t take steps immediately to save the legacy,” says Dungarpur.

The foundation is dedicated to support the conservation, preservation and restoration of the moving image, and to develop interdisciplinary educational programmes that would employ films as an educational tool to highlight the language of cinema.

The Film Preservation and Restoration School’s duties will officially commence by the end of February with the screening of archived films at Liberty Cinema, Mumbai.

As one of the first initiatives, the foundation curated a package of Indian films and newsreels entitled ‘The Golden 50s: India’s Endangered Classics’, and screened them at II Cinema Ritrovato Festival in Bologna, Italy, in 2014, in collaboration with the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) and the Films Division of India. II Cinema Ritrovato is an institution dedicated to the preservation and restoration of film classics.

The festival takes place in one of Italy’s most beautiful cities, Bologna, home of the world’s oldest university (established in 1088). The festival screens silent films and displays a high level of energy, both in its programming and in the critics, historians and theorists invited to speak.

Besides eight newsreels from the FD Archive, also showcased were vignettes of history like the meeting of Gandhi and Chaplin, and Mountbatten’s last day as Viceroy of India. Among the Indian classics screened were Chandralekha (1948), Raj Kapoor’s Awara (1951), Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zamin (1953) and Madhumati (1957), Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa (1957) and Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959), Mehboob’s Mother India (1957) and Ritwik Ghatak’s Ajantrik (1957). This was the 28th edition of II Cinema Ritrovito Festival dedicated to film restoration and film history.

Restoring a film means finding a copy of the film that is as clean, sharp and clear as possible. Although the film’s original negative is the ideal source to begin restoration, more often than not they are either not available or in such poor condition that they cannot be used anymore.

This is because commercial films were shot on nitrate film stock before the early 1950s, which is highly flammable and often decomposes quickly if not stored properly. Moreover, early film negatives were often discarded by production companies after the film had gone through the distribution cycle, since it was felt there was no longer a market for them. The acetate “safety film” used from the early 1950s until recently has also been found to be unstable, and it has a tendency to fade rapidly.

As a rule of thumb, the more generations the chosen film source is from the camera negative, the grainier the image on that film source will appear. This grain causes the film’s image to lose sharpness and clarity. A positive print can only be made from a negative print, and a negative print can only be made from a positive print. Every time a film print is duplicated from a negative print to a positive print, or vice versa, it loses some of its quality.

Dungarpur travels all over the world to meet and interview on camera great masters of cinema for his personal archive. He has spent time with Manoel de Oliveira in Porto and shot documentaries on Jiri Menzel and Raoul Coutard. He has also shot in-depth interviews with Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Zanussi in Warsaw, Miklós Jancsó and István Szabó in Budapest and Věra Chytilová, Juraj Herz and Jan Nemec in Prague.

“Films are a part of our cultural history. I was shocked to discover that of the 1,700 silent films made in India, only nine have survived, thanks to the efforts of Nair. He travelled to remote parts of India to collect and save cans of rare films. The fact that Dadasaheb Phalke is recognised today as the father of Indian cinema is Nair’s doing. He was democratic as an archivist, trying to save any film that he could get his hands on, be it world cinema, Hindi films or regional Indian cinema,” salutes Dungarpur.

Trans World Features