CINEMAWALLAH Celluloid Man, a documentary about PK Nair, a film archivist who struggled against the odds to preserve our cinematic heritage, highlights the government’s lackadaisical approach towards restoration,

CINEMAWALLAH

Celluloid Man, a documentary about PK Nair, a film archivist who struggled against the odds to preserve our cinematic heritage, highlights the government’s lackadaisical approach towards restoration,

During the making of Kabuliwala (1961), Gulzar, then an assistant to Bimal Roy, met Wazir Mohammad Khan, one of the film’s actors. Khan would often speak about having sung the first ever song in the history of Indian cinema in Ardeshir Irani’s Alam Ara (1931), India’s first talkie. “Unfortunately, nothing remains of the song except the story,” says the voiceover of Celluloid Man, a documentary by Shivendra Singh about PK Nair, the founder and director of National Film Archives of India, who spent a career spanning three decades working tirelessly to amass prints of forgotten Indian films. The story of Alam Ara’s misfortunes continues in Celluloid Man. The camera follows the aged PK Nair, taking slow, careful steps while leaning on his walking stick, as he enters Jyoti Studios, where Alam Ara was filmed. Nair, 79, is India’s first and perhaps only bona fide film archivist. He remembers the time he went to meet Irani about the restoration of Alam Ara when the historic film was 36 years old. Irani was sitting at a big table, with his son Sapurji standing nearby and he told Nair that “a couple of reels might by lying somewhere here, though not the whole film.” Sapurji was told to hand them over to Nair. Later, Sapurji confessed to Nair , “I myself have disposed off three reels after extracting silver from it.” That film restoration in India is pitiably done is well known, but what Celluloid Man primarily brings to the fore is the appalling disregard for the historical significance of cinema in a country that is known to be fanatic about films. In the documentary, Nair speaks eloquently about his relationship with cinema and how it evolved. When he was eight, he would run to the only cinema hall in Trivandrum after his family went to sleep, so that he could catch the second half of the film being screened. “As a result, I watched the second half of many films first, the first half later,” Nair recounts. Years later, he joined the NFAI because of his passion for cinema and a natural leaning towards restoration and archiving. “Even as a school kid, I would never want to throw anything away,” he says. MOULDING GREAT MINDS In Celluloid Man, Singh interviews some of Indian cinema’s most acclaimed filmmakers, including Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Mrinal Sen, Balu Mahendra, Kundan Shah, Jahnu Barua, Shaji Karun, Girish Kasaravalli and Rajkumar Hirani among others. All of them talk about the influence Nair had upon their appreciation of cinema. Many were studying at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) when Nair was heading NFAI — the two institutes share premises — and credit him for having introduced them to world cinema. “I saw [Russian filmmaker Andrei] Tarkovsky for the first time at a screening arranged by Nair saab,” Karun remembers. Kasaravalli remembers how Nair would lend films to students looking to understand finer points of filmmaking during their time at the institute, a generosity to which filmmaker and producer Vidhu Vinod Chopra also attests. In the documentary, Chopra talks of the occasion when he first saw Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) and was amazed by the film’s editing pattern. As a student of cinema, he found the editing cuts to be smoother than usual and wanted to understand how Godard achieved them. Chopra approached Nair and asked him if he could study the film closely. However, since reels can’t be shared like DVDs, Nair told Chopra he would have to do his research during off-hours. “I can never forget the moment I held the 16mm print in my hands; I went into the editing room at 6 in the morning and figured out the cuts. Nair saab loved his prints and didn’t want anything happening to them but when he found a student who is inquisitive, he was forthcoming,” says Chopra. Naseeruddin Shah remembers the time he saw Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) at FTII, again courtesy Nair. “I could not believe what I was seeing. It was a complete enigma to me how this director had been able to get real people to behave real because, as everybody knows, it’s not easy to play yourself in front of the camera. It was at Nair saab’s insistence that we were shown Bicycle Thieves as actors. Otherwise, the acting course didn’t think it important for us to see films like Bicycle Thieves or Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) or other films like that.” FIRE IN THE BUILDING In addition to depicting Nair’s life, Celluloid Man gives a 70mm view of Indian cinema from its inception. Interspersed with footage from some of our earliest films — Raja Harishchandra (1913), Kaliya Mardan (1917), Amrit Manthan (1934), Sant Tukaram (1936) and others — the documentary indulges in nostalgia fondly. Much like The Artist and Hugo, Celluloid Man revels in its love of cinema, even though the tale that is told is ultimately bleak. On January 8, 2000, a fire broke out in NFAI, in the vault where reels of films painstakingly collected by Nair and his team had been kept for preservation. Film prints from the pre-1950s’ era had a nitrate base, which is a highly inflammable substance, and there should have been special precautions to ensure their safety. Several theories abound as to what caused the fire, but what is obvious is the government’s lack of interest towards its own archives (both NFAI and FTII are publicly-funded institutions). Incidentally, Nair seemed to have rubbed up many bureaucrats the wrong way during his tenure and felt he was largely alienated from NFAI after retirement. In a heart-wrenching scene in Celluloid Man, Nair enters the room that would house all the prints he had once so meticulously restored. It has been converted into a gym within the institute. In the end, all of Nair’s efforts seem like a lost cause. Of the 1200-odd Indians films that were released in the silent era between 1912 and 1931, Nair could only restore 12 and that too partially. Most of those were reduced to ashes in the fire of 2000. But there are also a few victories. Generations of students who were at the institute during Nair’s time, and whose cinematic horizons were widened because of the films he showed them, remain grateful to him. Also, incomplete as they may be, the archives do offer the chance to enjoy some of the legendary films. As Gulzar points out in the documentary, “Dada Phalke was perhaps the beginner, but Dada Phalke is collected by Nair and made into history. “