Second Screening: How We’re Preserving Glorious Old Cinema

Vintage movie reels and posters are getting a second life, thanks to the Film Heritage Foundation.

The 1920s were the golden years of silent films in India.

But did you know that nearly 80 per cent of all the silent films made during that time have been lost forever? And that there is no copy available of India’s first talkie Alam Ara? Or that only two reels remain of India’s first feature film, Raja Harishchandra (1913)?

“We have lost so much of our heritage because the producers never cared to conserve and preserve these films,” rues Shivendra Singh Dungarpur.

It is to prevent further loss of India’s cinematic heritage that he founded the Film Heritage Foundation in 2014 and held its first workshop on film conservation last year. Backed by Viacom 18, the foundation has furthered the scope of its activities this year by starting a first-of-its kind film preservation and restoration workshop.

How Martin Scorsese and Amitabh Bachchan are Helping Out

This 10-day advanced course is being held at the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) till March 6 and has some of the biggest names in the field conducting sessions – such as Paolo Cherchi Usai of the George Eastman Museum, Davide Pozzi from L’Immagine Ritrovata, David Walsh, head (technical commission), FIAF, and Thelma Ross from the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

I would really like to thank Scorsese, who has been the backbone of this project. He motivated me to start the foundation. Also, the support of Amitabh Bachchan has been invaluable – be it with sending us statements, generating the support within the industry, and more.

Shivendra Singh Dungarpur

Of Preserving Vintage Posters and Old Cinema

Last year, the National Film Heritage Mission had announced a budget of Rs 597.41 crore to restore and digitise 1,300 films and this workshop is the first step towards helping the government build infrastructure and train personnel for this project.

Little wonder then that students from film institutes across the country are making a beeline for this workshop.

We have chosen 48 participants, who have been divided into eight groups. They will get to work on films, see how they can be restored and digitised. There’s a big course on film projection, which is an art in itself.

Shivendra Singh Dungarpur

The participants will get a rare opportunity to work with a team from George Eastman Museum on how to preserve precious cinema-related material such as vintage posters, lobby cards and more.

Behind Every Old Reel, is a Bit of History

Dungarpur, who has made award-winning documentaries such as Celluloid Man and collaborated with Martin Scorsese on restoring key films, shudders at the decades gone by when peons used to clean reels and negatives with a cleaning rag!

“Every second day, I have kabadiwalas walking in with old reels mostly in dilapidated old cans, sometimes wrapped in a newspaper! Imagine my dismay!” he had said in a recent media interview.

On the foundation’s website, legendary Indian archivist, P K Nair, lists India’s top 10 lost films: Bhakta Vidur (1921), Bilet Pherat (1921), Balidan (1927), Savkari Pash (1925), Alam Ara (1931), Sairandhri (1933), Seeta (1934), Mill (1934), Khoon ka Khoon (1935) and Zindagi (1940).

Several unfortunate incidents over the years have also led to a loss of valuable prints.

For instance, the 1940 fire in B N Sircar’s New Theatre vaults destroyed several prints of films produced by the studio in the 1930s. Another terrible fire blazed in the vaults of the erstwhile Prabhat Studios at the Film and Television Institute of India in 2002, which gutted original camera negatives and prints of 45 films. These included some of the original nitrate material collected by Nair from the Dadasaheb Phalke family.

Hence, when award-winning filmmaker Bardroy Barretto came to his office in March 2015 with the reel of the first Konkani film ever made – Mogacho Aunddo (1950) – Dungarpur couldn’t hide his joy. The film was significant as it had been made by Jerry Braganza, considered the father of Konkani cinema. Dungarpur, on realising that the reel had become hardened, sent it immediately to L’Immagine Ritrovata’s lab in Bologna, Italy.

“The reel is stuck, warped, dry and fragile,” said the first report by Pozzi of Ritrovata.

In the next couple of months, the team undertook a manual unrolling operation –followed by dehydration, rehydration and scanning. The work is still under progress.

The foundation is also working on archival projects related to the work of Abdur Rashid Kardar, Kidar Sharma and Saeed Mirza.

ENDNOTE: The Film Preservation and Restoration Workshop 2016 will be held at the National Film Archive of India, Pune, till March 6.

(Avantika Bhuyan is a freelance journalist who loves to uncover the invisible India hiding in nooks and crannies across the country.)