Film Industry

In 2007, Madhushree Dutta, director of the cultural centre Majlis, started work on a project exploring the relationship between cinema and Mumbai. Five years later, Project Cinema City turned out to be a sprawling exhibition that managed seemingly-impossible feats like turning Gulshan Grover into a work of high art (courtesy Atul Dodiya). One of the exhibits was a set of maps of Mumbai drawn on translucent paper. Each map showed the location of film studios in Mumbai in a particular decade. Place the sheets one upon the other, and you could see how the business of making films had spread all over the city from the 1920s till the present,. It’s worth wondering, however, if the relationship between Mumbai and movies is changing.
While other parts of the country have been featured in films, Mumbai has been synonymous with cinema. Not too long ago, spotting a shooting in progress wasn’t difficult, particularly if one went to photogenic stretches, like Marine Drive, early in the morning or at sunset. There would be reflectors, vanity vans, lights and a crescent-shaped crowd behind the camera. But in recent times, film shoots are harder to spot. This is because Mumbai is steadily gaining a reputation of being problematic rather than convenient for filming. “There are lots of things in terms of permissions and logistics,” said Raj Kumar Gupta, who worked on acclaimed Mumbai-based films like Black Friday and later directed Aamir, shot mostly around the Dongri area. “I always say if you want to shoot in the city, it’s not about what you want, but what you get.”
“If you want to shoot in Mumbai, shoot indoor,” advises an industry insider who spoke to DNA upon the condition of anonymity. “Managing crowds when you have even a starlet on your shoot is a nightmare. Then there’re the stars, who come with their own set of issues. Take Salman Khan, who will come late and only show up on set when he’s ready. Even Rahul Bose makes the unit sit around because he’s getting into character. You can’t do that in an outdoor location.”
There are a few cities in the world that you can recognise because they’ve been filmed so frequently and lovingly; Mumbai is one of them. Mumbai’s famous dhobi ghat has been the backdrop for the unabashed pulp blockbuster, Rajkumar Hirani’s Munnabhai MBBS, and also the meditative Dhobi Ghat by Kiran Rao. Gateway of India, the steps of the Asiatic Library, the glitter of Marine Drive by night, the basketball court in St Xavier’s College, the blurry crowds at local train stations, the stretch of Worli Seaface — these are just a few of the places that we’ve seen repeatedly on celluloid, whether it’s a blockbuster or a critical favourite.
Dev Benegal, who set Split Wide Open in Mumbai and whose next film will be shot entirely in the city, describes Mumbai as “cinematic heaven”. “Mumbai is a modern city. I’d go as far to say it is the only city this country has. It’s got a crazy energy, a visceral feel mixed with the warmth of its people which make it so special,” he said.
Warmth, however, is perhaps not what came to Rohan Sippy’s mind when the sets of his upcoming film, Nautanki Saala, were vandalised. Sippy has a fondness for shooting in Mumbai and his Bluffmaster is one of the more memorable examples of Mumbai in a film. He chose to set Nautanki Saala in the city, even if this meant late-night shoots (to avoid crowds) and other hassles. However, things got unexpectedly violent when men affiliated to the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena stormed in and attacked his unit’s cars while they were shooting on location in the western suburbs.
Few are willing to speak openly about the difficulties of shooting in Mumbai because they fear the repercussions. An employee at a production house said, on condition of anonymity, that the official permits don’t facilitate the process of shooting much. Film units have to organise their own security and hire people to manage crowds. One filmmaker, who wished to remain anonymous, said that as far as state machinery goes, states like Rajasthan and Kerala were more cooperative and welcoming than the Mumbai administration. Other options for the film industry include Gujarat, which has apparently been wooing the multi-billion dollar film industry to shift base from Maharashtra. For filmmakers, cities like Hyderabad, New Delhi and Kolkata have proved to be easier to negotiate.
The threat of disrupting film sets is not a new problem and to prevent it, there exists an established but unspoken system of unofficial payments, in addition to the numerous official permits, that guarantee a film unit’s security. Even if the payments have been made, shoots are often disrupted by local political workers demanding payments they are not authorised to accept. Last year, MNS workers barged into the sets of Murder 2 and demanded to see work permits of the crew even though, legally speaking, the party has no authority to do so. In 2010, MNS workers were arrested on two separate occasions for attempting to extort money from producer Riteish Sidhwani during a shoot and vandalising the sets of a Ganesh Acharya film.

The Third Man is a 1949 film directed by Carol Reed. The story is set in post-World War II Vienna. Holly Martins, a pulp fiction writer, arrives in Vienna at the invitation of his friend Harry Lime. Upon his arrival, Martins learns that Lime has been killed in an accident. However, in his talks with Lime’s fellow army officers and a mysterious porter, Martins discovers that his friend may have been murdered. The film ends with an interesting twist. The American version of the movie had 11min cut from its footage. This was added back to the movie during its restoration.

The King Kong movie of 1933, told the story of a film crew from New York which sets out for an uncharted island, known for a dreaded creature called Kong. The island’s natives kidnap the film’s actress and offer her as sacrifice to Kong who falls in love with her. The crew rescue the actress and take Kong captive back to New York. Many scenes were censored by the US government after its first release — such as Kong undressing the actress and sniffing his fingers. Some of these scenes were found in 1969. A six-year restoration effort finally put together all known footage of the film

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Based on the Margaret Mitchell novel of the same name, this 1939 movie starred Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh playing Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara. The film is set during the American civil war, and gives glimpses into the Southern American society during the upheaval. However, the real draw of the film is its characters. The film was converted to widescreen format in 1954, which compromised the original aspect ratio. The re-issue in 1998, both in theatres and DVDs, restored the film to its original format. In 2009, the film was converted into high-definition format for Blu-Ray discs.

Metropolis, which released in 1927, is a futuristic German film set far ahead of its time. It shows a classist society where the rich stay in towers, whereas the workers stay underground. The story follows the workers’ revolt, a robot which impersonates one of the workers and ends with a truce that is forged by the son of the city’s ruler. Numerous attempts have been made to restore the film. It is believed that 1/4th of the film has forever been lost. Various prints of the film have been found in museums and private collections across the world. The latest re-issue was released in 2010.

Directed by Sergio Leone, Once Upon A Time In America (1984) is about the rise of organised crime in America. It spans the period between 1920s to 1960s, following a bunch of boys from Jewish ghettos who eventually become gangsters. The original film was 269min, but Leone cut it down to 229min for release in Europe. However, in the US, the producers edited the film down to 139min. In 2012, the film foundation set up by Martin Scorsese restored the film to its full length under the supervision of Leone’s children and the film’s sound editor.

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. “