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-Fran?ois Rauger, programme director, Cin?math?que Fran?aise, 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.
Experts point out the state post independence was ambivalent about the place of cinema in the galaxy of arts. And cinema did not find a place when Sahitya Kala Akademi, Lalit Kala Akademi and Sangeet Natak Akademis were set up, perhaps reflective of the then political leadership?s lack of empathy. Gandhi only saw one film in his life, and even Morarji Desai?s dislike for cinema is well documented. And even after the NFAI was established in 1964 in sheds in the compound of the then newly set up Film Institute in Pune, there was no effort to align with the industry in Mumbai and 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 S?verine 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.?
Public or private, or both in tandem, losing irretrievable celluloid heritage is not something we can afford without losing part of us.