It’s yesterday once more

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: other parts of the country, which produce more than 90% of the films in India.

Filmmaker Sudhir Mishra agrees that the filmmaking fraternity does not really care. “A filmmaker has little time to be proactive about posterity, and very few of us actually send a copy of our films to NFAI,” he says. There are exceptions however, reveals K Sasidharan, director NFAI. He names Basu Chatterjee and Madhur Bhandarkar as filmmakers who send prints to the archives. Then of course there are filmmakers like SS Vasan, who is reputed to have said that only three of his films were worth preserving. The malaise is not confined to India, as Pat Doyen of George Eastman House, involved with the preservation of films, including Phantom of the Opera (1925), reveals. “It was found that Universal Studios were destroying old films as they did not see any value in preserving them,” she says. “Studios see hardly any financial incentive in saving the films.”

However, the NFAI in conjunction with the Thomson Foundation has decided to approach preservation of films from the opposite end. They have introduced film preservation as part of the first year course for students at the Film And Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune. “We want to sensitise the public to the richness of archives and to educate the audience on the importance safeguarding film heritage,” says Séverine Wemaere, managing director of Thomson Foundation. She is encouraged by the state of film archives in India as compared to those in countries like Cambodia, where the Foundation has faced a far more challenging task of salvaging celluloid history.

Wemaere also stresses that there is need for the state to play a role. “Memory cannot be privatised,” she says and emphasises the need to prioritise public film archives too. “Various organisations are thinking of what can be done to salvage celluloid heritage, especially on the edge of the digital revolution that threatens to make celluloid obsolete,” says Kaushik Bhowmick, associate reader, Osian’s Archive, among India’s leading privately-held archives. “The general consensus is that the state should declare celluloid a national heritage (as with antiquities) and buy up all existing celluloid. The private sector can be a vital partner in this process to help set up consortiums in partnership with the state to preserve such heritage, as is being done in Europe today.”