Rescuing the Legacy of Indian Cinema
By Shivendra Singh Dungarpur
I was invited for the 19th edition of the Play-Doc International Film Festival in 2023 to present two of Film Heritage Foundation’s restorations – “Thamp” and “Kummatty” directed by Aravindan Govindan – a poet of cinema – whose work, like the original camera negatives of his films, was in danger of disappearing. It was a pleasure to introduce Aravindan Govindan to the cinephiles in Tui, perched on the border of Spain and Portugal, watching Indian films for the first time, reaffirming our purpose of restoring classic films to give them a new life. This year at Play-Doc Film Heritage Foundation will be showcasing films in four languages – Hindi, Kannada, Manipuri and Odia from different regions of India.
My first brush with film restoration was when I worked with Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation on the restoration of Uday Shankar’s Hindi film ‘Kalpana’ (1948) in 2012. I learnt for the first time how beautifully and respectfully films could be restored and given a new life. It made me think back to my student days at the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune and I wondered about the fate of all those beautiful films on celluloid projected on film that we had watched and loved and learned from and hoped they were safe.
I went to meet P.K. Nair, the former director of the National Film Archive of India (NFAI), hoping to find answers. I took Mr. Nair to see the vault at the Archive and realized that the archive had been orphaned post his retirement. I saw rusting cans lying in the grass, thick cobwebs hanging from the shelves, vaults where the temperatures were awry. It was heart-breaking to see a life’s work reduced to this, a legacy forgotten. That was the beginning of my film Celluloid Man a tribute to Mr. Nair’s life’s work as well as a chronicle of the early history of Indian cinema and its tragic loss. The making of the film was a journey of discovery for me. It was over the hours and days of conversations with Mr. Nair and my travels all over the country that the devastating loss of our film heritage slowly revealed itself.
Celluloid Man gave birth to Film Heritage Foundation took birth in 2014. At that point, we had no trained film archivists and our record of film preservation was so abysmal, that restoration seemed a distant dream. I realized that if you don’t preserve, you will have nothing to restore.
We began collecting every bit of film heritage that we could get our hands on. We found films in flea markets, under beds and in cupboards, abandoned in labs, studios and warehouses. We didn’t stop at just films. In a scenario where the films itself have vanished, often all that remains are artefacts like posters, photographs, lobby cards, scripts, etc. that are integral to the fabric of our cinematic heritage. Today, Film Heritage Foundation has a collection of about 700 films on celluloid and about 200,000 objects which includes over 70,000 documents, 2,200 books, 62,000 photographs, 21,000 photo negatives, 21,600 posters, 10,200 lobby cards, 37,000 newspaper articles, 6,600 song booklets and 340 objects 3-D objects like cameras, projectors, props and costumes.In response to the fact that India has a dearth of film archivists and no degree or diploma courses in the field, Film Heritage Foundation has been conducting week-long intensive annual film preservation and restoration workshops in collaboration with the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) in different cities around the country since 2015 that has trained close to 500 people over a decade.
Through these annual workshops we built our own team of conservators from scratch and also learn about the entire gamut of preservation activities ranging from collection, preservation and restoration of analogue and digital material and ephemera to curation, exhibition and public access which put into practice under the aegis of Film Heritage Foundation. Through our curated festivals screening classic films, celebrating the work of both Indian and international film luminaries, on a massive scale across the country, we have built an audience for watching classic cinema that was completely absent from the big screen. We partnered with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (AMPAS) for a pioneering visual history program to record, collect and preserve audio and video interviews with the aim of building a digital archive for public access that will be invaluable for film students, researchers, academics and film lovers going forward. We have published two books: From Darkness Into Light: Perspectives on Film Preservation and Restoration– the first ever book dedicated to the topic of film preservation and restoration to have been published in India and Yesterday’s Films For Tomorrow by PK Nair that is a compilation of the writings of India’s foremost film archivist. We have also developed a five-chapter module called Do You Speak Cinema designed to introduce children to various facets of cinema from the evolution of cinema in the celluloid format to film history to the appreciation of its visual language. Over the years we have hosted retrospectives, master classes and special events with leading international filmmakers including Christopher Nolan, Wim Wenders and Giuseppe Tornatore and our policy has been to open these events to the public free of cost so that cost does not become an exclusionary factor and we can reach out to the maximum number of people as possible. Film Heritage Foundation has been presenting awards to unsung heroes of Indian cinema including film projectionists, film historians and champions of film heritage.
In 2024, our 10th anniversary year, we began work on the first phase of our vision to build India’s first-ever Centre of the Moving Image that will be a hub for film covering every aspect of moving image including a training and research centre, a library, film archives, a film conservation and restoration lab, projection facilities and exhibition galleries.
But it took us six years before we felt we were ready to take up the challenge of our first restorations – Aravindan Govindan Malayalam films “Thamp” and “Kummatty” from the southern state of Kerala. We had no original camera negatives to work with; the film elements available were in poor condition; the film scans looked daunting and we began the process in the middle of a pandemic. But when the restoration of “Thamp” was selected for a red-carpet world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival and we saw the response of the audience, it spurred us on to take on more restoration projects. Since then we have worked on several restoration, selecting hidden gems in danger of being forgotten or lost. India makes over 2000 films a year in 55 languages so we were also keen to restore films that showcased the incredible linguistic, geographical and cultural diversity of India.
We decided to restore the film “Ishanou” not just for the beauty of the film by an acclaimed filmmaker that documented the unique culture of the Maibi which forms the backdrop against which a tragic human story plays out but also because it was a film from Manipur, a state in the northeast of India whose films were not well known even in India.
The first time I saw “Ishanou” was in April 2021 when I watched a 35 mm screening of the film “Ishanou”. When the film began, I could see the print was not in the best of conditions with scratches and flicker and uneven colours that disturbed the eye. Yet the beauty of the film and the simple yet powerful narrative, transcended the distortions that marred the images playing out on the big screen. The restoration was a challenging process that took a year, but it was with great pride that we returned to Cannes for the premiere of “Ishanou” in 2023, thirty one years after the film was first screened there in 1991.
The restoration of a Shyam Benegal film has been on Film Heritage Foundation’s wish list for years as he is one of India’s most venerated filmmakers whose early films were iconic in India’s Parallel Cinema movement. “Manthan” is not only one of his finest films from that time, but also the story behind it was so unique – that 500,000 farmers contributed Rs. 2/- towards the making of the film that told the story of the birth of the milk cooperative movement while touching on so many issues like caste, class, gender and economic discrimination. The film was integral to spreading the message of the benefits of the cooperative movement to farmers across the country and a vital part of building the movement and the storied brand Amul. The restoration process was an incredible experience, especially working so closely with Shyam Benegal and the cinematographer Govind Nihalani to painstakingly bring the film back to life. Almost half a century later, the power of the narrative and the compelling performances of the actors, especially Smita Patil, remains undiminished. I was so happy that we were able to premiere the restoration at the Cannes Film Festival and release the restored “Manthan” in 50 cities and over 100 cinemas across India
Nirad Mohapatra’s requiem to the joint family “Maya Miriga” has been referred to as the most feted film in the history of Odia cinema that propelled a lesser known regional cinema into national and international recognition at the time it was made. However, since that time both the film and the filmmaker faded away from the landscape of feature films in India. Noted film critic Maithili Rao termed the vanishing of Nirad Mohapatra from the movie making scene after such an ‘exquisitely elegiac, immensely moving first film’ as one of Indian cinema’s greater unanswered questions.
Restoring “Maya Miriga” took us three years, but it gave us immense satisfaction as we literally raised the film from the grave having found the negative in a very poor condition abandoned in a warehouse. The restored film was premiered at the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna in June 2024 and accolades poured in with one viewer even describing Nirad Mohapatra as “an Indian Ozu with Visconti’s eye”.
Girish Kasaravalli is a celebrated filmmaker and one of the leading lights of the Indian New Wave from the state of Karnataka in South India who makes films in the Kannada language. “Ghatashraddha” was his debut film. I have had a close association with Girish since I shot with him for my film “Celluloid Man” and he has also donated his material to the foundation for preservation.
I was aware that the “Ghatashraddha” negative was not in great condition and I was concerned that it would deteriorate further if we did not restore the film soon. I had already begun the paperwork and had got the negative at our archive to begin work, when I broached the subject with The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project if they would collaborate with us to restore the film. I was delighted when they agreed and informed me that they had secured funding for the restoration from the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. It was wonderful to premiere the restoration and present the film with Girish Kasaravalli at the Venice Film Festival 2024, and to have new audiences discover this remarkable film 47 years after its release.
We have several interesting restoration projects in the pipeline this year and we hope that the restoration road will lead us back to Play-Doc so we can share these gems of Indian cinema once again with audience in Tui.
Shivendra Singh Dungarpur is a filmmaker, film archivist and the Founder Director of Film Heritage Foundation.