Shivendra Singh Dungarpur who made the 2012 documentary on PK Nair, remembers the late film archivist
MUMBAI MIRROR (March 5, 2016)

A 10-day Film Preservation and Restoration Workshop organised by the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) in collaboration with Film Heritage Foundation and International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) kicked off at the NFAI, Pune, on February 26, to provide training to help preserve India's cinematic heritage. In my opening speech, I dedicated the workshop to Nair saab because, for perhaps the first time, he was not attending the programme even though he so wanted to. It would have been his last workshop before he retired and returned to Kerala after influencing a whole generation of filmmakers, from Girish Kasaravalli to Rajkumar Hirani, from Kumar Shahani and Arun Koppikar to Sriram Raghavan, to love and live for films. But a few days before, he had been rushed to the hospital and his son, Bikash, sent me a message saying that when he was in the ICU, unconscious, he was murmuring, "Where is the screen?" perhaps imagining himself in a projection room watching a film.

I remember Nair saab from the '90s when I was a student at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), as a strict disciplinarian, a man of few words who you couldn't imagine befriending, sitting in a theatre watching film after film, jotting down details in a diary with the help of a small torch. It was an almost Hitchcockian image. Starting out as a librarian and a researcher at the Institute he went on to become the founder-director of the NFAI and the only man who knew which can held which scene or song of a film.

He was my spiritual father and inspired me as a filmmaker, but it was only when I was in Bologna for a festival at which I saw some restored black-and-white classics that I realised how big his contribution was. I stepped out of the plane with the idea of making a film on PK Nair, India's Celluloid Man, who lived for the cans of films and was passionate about Prabhat classics, be it Sant Tukaram or Duniya Na Mane. He would watch the latter on Steinbeck and tell me repeatedly to look at the sound. He taught me how to clean a film and how to preserve it. He took Dadasaheb Phalke's 1919 silent movie, Kaliya Mardan, featuring his daughter Mandakini, in bits and pieces, and put it together in the right sequence from the jottings in Phalke's diary. It's thanks to his efforts that Dilip Kumar could watch Mughal-e-Azam decades after its release, having skipped the premiere over a disagreement with K Asif.

He had this habit of randomly dialling a number from a phone directory and introducing himself as the NFAI director, asking the person at the other end if he/she would like to come and watch a movie with him. While many banged the phone on him, thinking he was crazy, some were intrigued enough to show up. After the screening, he'd engage them in a discussion about cinema.

I'd been anxious about his health these last few days, more so since I learnt that they had extracted 700 ml of fluid from his lungs. Yesterday, I was at a workshop when, at 11 am, I learnt that he had suffered a cardiac arrest. I broke down, remembering the screening of Celluloid Man I had held for him at Ad Labs. At the end of it he told me, "It's a very emotional moment for me Shivendra, thank you." I couldn't believe that this man, who has done so much for our cinematic heritage, was thanking me. I wish we could thank him for his lifelong contribution with a national honour, he certainly deserves a Padma Bhushan, even posthumously.


P K NAIR PASSES AWAY

P K Nair, founder-director of the Pune-based National Film Archive of India, passed away on Friday at a private hospital in the city. He was 82.

According to NFAI sources, he was admitted last week. The archivist dedicated his life to preservation of films and building its collection at the NFAI, and was instrumental in archiving several landmark Indian movies, including Dadasaheb Phalke's Kaliya Mardan and Raja Harishchandra, Bombay Talkies' films such as Jeevan Naiya, Bandhan, Kangan, Achhut Kanya and Kismet, S S Vasan's Chandralekha and Uday Shankar's Kalpana. Nair joined the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune as a research assistant in 1961, and played a key role in the setting up of the NFAI in 1964.

He was appointed assistant curator in 1965, and continued with the NFAI till 1991. By the time he retired as director, he had acquired a whopping 12,000 films for the archive. Of these, 8,000 were Indian and the rest foreign films.
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P K Nair (1933-2016): Cinema's guardian angel no more

Film archivist PK Nair passed away on Friday, leaving behind an enviable legacy in cinema preservation
Shakti Shetty (MID-DAY; March 5, 2016)
If you haven’t watched the documentary Celluloid Man (2012) yet, you have missed out on something worthwhile. The subject of this film uses the phrase ‘bits and pieces’ repeatedly while talking about his work. Interestingly, he isn’t the only one doing that. Accomplished cinematic personalities like Shyam Benegal, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Krzysztof Zanussi, Gulzar, Naseeruddin Shah, Mrinal Sen, Jahnu Barua, Girish Kasaravalli, Shabana Azmi, Vidhu Vinod Chopra — to name a few — have something to say not only about the protagonist of this film, but also how he influenced them. After all, he was once a collector of items long lost; not just in physicality but also in memory. Nonetheless, he was determined enough to do his precious bit for the neglected ones.

The person in question here is renowned film archivist and scholar Paramesh Krishnan Nair (fondly called P K Nair) and the work being referred to is preservation of old films — films that belong to the Silent era as well as the Talkies; films that are national as well as international in nature; films that barely made it to the present because nobody else in the past cared to preserve
the reels.

If it weren’t for his unbridled efforts, it would have been almost impossible to find an original copy of Dadasaheb Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra (1913) or Kaliya Mardan (1919) today. Or for that matter, classics like Jeevan Naiya (1936), Bandhan (1940), Kangan (1939), Achhut Kanya (1936) and Kismet (1943), SS Vasan’s Chandralekha and Uday Shankar’s Kalpana, both of which released in 1948. And these are just a few of the many films he managed to preserve.

The tragedy of losing innumerable cans of old films is now cascaded with the loss of the man dedicated to saving them. Nair passed away yesterday morning in Pune after being critically ill for 10 days. He was 82 and is survived by his son and daughter.

Born in 1933 in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, Nair’s interest in films developed at a young age. Determined to serve cinema, he joined National Film Archive of India (NFAI) in 1965 as assistant curator. Seventeen years later, in 1982, he became its director. It would be remiss to say that his tenure wasn’t without any controversy, given his ceaseless battle against the indifferent bureaucracy. However, by the time he retired in April 1991, he had collected over 12,000 films, of which 8,000 were of Indian origin.

Known for his reticence, Nair has left a resounding legacy in the world of cinema preservation. An effort that dates way before the likes of Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation came up. Contributions of the aptly nicknamed Celluloid Man to world cinema is extraordinary, to confer the least. But despite all these, chances are that you may never have heard of him. And that’s precisely what makes the aforementioned documentary a must-watch.