MUMBAI: Amitabh Bachchan and India’s battle to preserve its film heritage

MUMBAI: Five years ago, the Bollywood
superstar handed over the prints to a temperature-controlled film archive run
by a city-based non-profit, which had begun restoring and preserving Indian
films. Led by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, an award-winning filmmaker, archivist
and restorer, the Film Heritage Foundation
has been at the forefront of these efforts. It has “built an international
reputation for excellence”, according to director Christopher Nolan, and
Bachchan is its brand ambassador.

For years
he has been tirelessly advocating and actively helping in trying to preserve
India’s fast-decaying film heritage.

And on
Friday, Bachchan will be feted for this little-known facet of his work. The
78-year-old actor will be conferred this year’s International
Federation of Film Archives award. Nolan and fellow filmmaker Martin
Scorsese will give away the award, whose stellar past recipients include the
two acclaimed directors themselves and such auteurs as Ingmar Bergman, Agnes
Varda and Jean-Luc-Godard.

Bachchan,
Dungarpur says, has “always been deeply invested” in the idea of
preserving and archiving cinema. During a conversation, the star once agonised
over the fact that he couldn’t watch some of the earlier films of the thespian
Dilip Kumar because “they were simply lost”.

India has
10 major film industries – including Bollywood, the world’s largest – and
produces close to 2,000 films a year in some 36 languages.

But it
has only two film archives – a state-run one in the western city of Pune and
the non-profit, run by Dungarpur. “This is woefully inadequate given our
rich and prolific film history,” Dungarpur says.

Not
surprisingly, much of India’s storied film heritage has been lost and damaged
because of spotty conservation and preservation of film.

India’s
first talkie Alam Ara (1931) and its
first locally-made colour film Kisan Kanya
(1937) are untraceable. Newer films have fared no better. Original footage of a
documentary on freedom heroine Lakhshmi Sahgal made by Sai Paranjpye (1977) and
Shyam Benegal’s Bharat Ek Khoj (1988) no longer exists. The negative of a 2009
film called Magadheera made by SS
Rajamouli “disappeared in just six years”, according to the director.

As
Dungarpur tells the grim story, only 29 of 1,138 silent films made in India
survive. Some 80% of the more than 2,000 films made in Mumbai – then Bombay –
between 1931 and 1950 are unavailable for viewing.

Last
year, Dungarpur and his team found 200 films languishing in sacks in a
warehouse in Mumbai. “They were prints and negatives, and someone had just
dumped them,” he says.

That’s
not all. According to government auditors 31,000
reels of film held by the state-run film archives have been lost or
destroyed.

In 2003,
more than 600 films were reportedly damaged in a
fire in the state-run archive – among them were original prints of
the last few existing reels of the 1913 classic Raja
Harishchandra, India’s first silent film. “You have to respect
your past. To respect your past you need to preserve and restore your
films,” says director Gautam Ghosh.

Before
digital arrived, films were usually preserved as original negatives, duplicates
of those negatives and prints that were released for viewing. After most Indian
filmmakers stopped shooting on film in 2014, Dungarpur says, many film labs
digitised their stock, and threw away the negatives, thinking that they had no
use for them. “The original camera negative has a much higher resolution
than digital today. That’s what they didn’t know.”

Now,
preservationists in India mainly work on prints.

“It’s
a complete disaster. We had to try create a completely new awareness about
celluloid film and its history”.

Over the
last six years, Dungarpur and a faculty comprising of experts from leading film
archives and museums around the world have held workshops all over India and
trained over 300 people in restoration and preservation of film.

The
foundation has collected and preserved more than 500 films of top Indian
filmmakers, footage of the independence movement and Indian home movies in its
facility in Mumbai. Its collection includes such rarities as two 16mm reels of
Oscar-winning director Satyajit Ray in conversation with legendary
Italian-American director Frank Capra. Dungarpur also has an impressive
collection of Indian film memorabilia: tens of thousands of old photographs,
photo negatives and film posters.

Bachchan
has always been outspoken about the need to take charge of India’s crumbling
film heritage. Two years ago, at an international film festival in Kolkta, he
said: “Our generation recognises the immense contribution of the legends
of Indian cinema, but sadly most of their films have gone up in flames or have
been discarded on the scrap heap”.

“Very
little of our film heritage survives and if we do not take urgent steps to save
what remains, in another 100 years there will be no memory of all those who
came before us and captured our lives through the moving image.”