It’s yesterday once more

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: Recycling is great, right? Would it surprise you to know that the bangle you are wearing was a film just a few years ago? Yes, you read right, for the nitrate silver from already screened films were taken and sold to those making bangles and handbags by more than one Indian filmmaker in the last half century!

That has happened to a significant number of Indian films, including those from the golden era of the 1950s and 1960s. Should Indians regret the fact that of the 1,300 silent films made in India, including landmark ones like Raja Harishchandra (1913) or Savkari Pash (1925) just about a dozen survive, not one of them complete? And even after ‘sound’ came in, only a minor proportion of our pre-independence films can be found today. Guru Dutt’s original films, which were on acetate bases rather than the longer-lasting nitrate, only survive in parts. So who is responsible for a film after it has had its run at the box office? Does anyone need to save it at all?

“Cinema is an art and has to be preserved,” is how Jean-François Rauger, programme director, Cinémathèque Française, and a leading expert on film restoration sees it. “We started organised collection of films only in the 1960s,” says PK Nair, former director of the National Film Archives of India (NFAI). “By then 70-80% of Indian cinema had already vanished and we had to grab whatever was available,” he reveals. Of late sporadic efforts at film preservation have been made to save the legacy. Much has been made of the American Film Institute’s (AFI) project to save Satyajit Ray’s masterpieces. But for hundreds of other filmmakers who have not been so lucky, their works can no longer be had, either for love or for money.