Mohua Das (THE TIMES OF INDIA; May 19, 2019)

What makes for a classic Bollywood movie? A beginning, middle and an end; a hero, heroine and villain; a few challenges; and a generous dose of drama, mystery and romance. Can real life stories be just as exciting and is there any power in sharing these tales with a larger audience? Turns out, there are few things more stimulating than a story straight from the mouths of those who lived it.

In an initiative to discover, document and preserve unwritten personal recollections, anecdotes and informal tales of Indian cinema legends, the Film Heritage Foundation (FHF) in Mumbai has partnered with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to co-produce and archive “on-camera spoken accounts” of those who shape India’s filmmaking legacy. The shared mission titled Oral History Project will chronicle unmediated truths in the form of audio and video interviews of how one became who they are and what they’re on their way to becoming.

The subjects of the project will span 25 filmmaking professionals including actors, directors, cinematographers, writers, music composers, illustrators, film projectionists, film lab technicians, make-up artistes and others.

The Academy’s visual history program has been recording oral histories on video and documenting representatives from a wide variety of film professions since 2012. Till date, the program has conducted more than 140 interviews in seven languages featuring film professionals including Rachel Portman, Alejandro G. Inarritu, Douglas Slocombe, Ann Roth, Rick Baker, Agnes Varda and others. The project has also collected over 2000 interviews from various sources in their bid to establish a “primary preservation repository” for filmmaker interviews globally.

It was last year when filmmaker and archivist Shivendra Singh Dungarpur – who set up the FHF in 2014 and been rallying to preserve India’s motion picture heritage – was invited by the Academy to deliver a keynote speech when he was approached with the proposal. “Oral history has been on our Foundation’s wish list since inception. We had begun the programme with Kamini Kaushal and were very excited at the new prospect of collaborating with the Academy which has years of experience in the area. They have developed an excellent format which informed our methodology for research, interviewing, transcripts and records. It’s heartening that oral narrative of and by living legends in cinema will be available for posterity, for researchers and scholars to understand them better,” explained Dungarpur who completed the first slew of interviews this month. “We decided to start with stalwarts who represent the three major film industries—Tamil, Bengali and Hindi. Next on list are veterans Shyam Benegal, Gulzar, Asha Bhonsle, Ilaiyaraaja, Salim Khan and others.”

The pilot slate features actors Amitabh Bachchan, Soumitra Chatterjee and Madhabi Mukherjee; directors Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Mani Ratnam, and Buddhadeb Dasgupta; and Vishwa Mehra (R K Studios’ production manager, and brother-in-law of Prithviraj Kapoor). The interviews spanning four to six hours each threw up endearing memories that will serve as a living testimony of their life.

Take for instance Amitabh Bachchan. It can be hard to imagine a chapter in the megastar’s life when the Big B wasn’t that big nor the tallest star that tall as a kindergarten boy at the St Mary’s Convent High School. “That’s the time I first appeared on stage and played the role of a chicken… with feathers,” he narrates before confessing about a time in the early phase of his career when his photograph was rejected by Filmfare for a talent hunt contest. Also, who would have thought that Mani Ratnam, the man who crossed over from the South and gave Hindi cinema some of its greatest hits in the 90s was brought up with a lot of “orthodox and constraints and not allowed to watch movies”? “I was really into maths and physics and was working as a project leader in a financial consultancy firm” when he quit and joined the crew of a Tamil film, he recounts. Auteur Adoor Gopalakrishnan spoke about how his debut film was removed from theatres soon after its release because theatre owners and audiences complained about the lack of song and dances; Ray actor Madhabi Mukherjee described the genius of filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak and his extraordinary lensing abilities including a time when he used his spectacles as the lens for a shot.

“A key thing in oral history is that the person should opt to speak without the interviewer putting words into their mouth. The questions are based on extensive research and have to be open ended, in a way that lends direction to the narrative arc and allows the person to reveal himself without being probed,” explained Dungarpur.

To counter India’s culture of dusty archives, this oral cache will be made available for scholars, students, aspiring filmmakers, journalists and movie lovers to actively engage at the Academy’s archive and museum in Los Angeles and the FHF in Tardeo. “The aim of our collaboration is to ensure long-term preservation of interviews through digital archiving. In the future we hope to develop an online access plan,” he said.