MUMBAI MIRROR (February 9, 2019)
On Wednesday (February 6), Mirror had reported that the 'only' 35-mm print of filmmaker-archivist Shivendra Dungarpur’s 2013 documentary, Celluloid Man, was lost in transit. The docu-film on the life and works of legendary Indian archivist P K Nair has bagged two National Awards for Best Biographical Film and Best Editing and was on its way back from the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna, when after waiting three weeks for it, Shivendra believed that it had been misplaced by FedEx. After repeated calls, the courier company informed Mirror at the time of going to press that the “shipment had been located”.

Celluloid Man was returned to the filmmaker on Thursday evening. Confirming the news, an elated Shivendra said, “I am relived. Thanks to the efforts of Mumbai Mirror which took the initiative to follow on this important film on preservation, we finally got back this film.”

Filmmaker Shivendra Singh Dungarpur started his Film Heritage Foundation in 2014, which has since introduced over 150 individuals to the highly specialised world of film preservation. He talks to Mohua Chatterjee about the shortage of trained archivists in India and how to fix it
Mohua Chatterjee (THE TIMES OF INDIA; November 2, 2018)

Why did you think of taking up preserving films when the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) is there for the purpose?
Countries like France, Italy, Germany, the UK and US to name a few, have several film archives for preservation of their moving image heritage and very few of these archives are run by government or are dependent solely on government funds. India has an over 100-year-old film history and we are the most prolific film industry in the world, besides being one of the most diverse. It would be impossible for a single archive to preserve even a fraction of the best films that we produce.

Film preservation is a highly specialized field that requires trained archivists. NFAI was run by P K Nair, for whom it was a passionate obsession, but he was one of a kind. There were no trained archivists or curators to take over after him.

My decision to establish Film Heritage Foundation, a non-government organisation, was an outcome of discussions with the film industry as we felt we should start our own movement, rather than wait for government to do all the work. Many more film archives and public-private partnerships have to be encouraged if we are to safeguard our films.

How many films have you preserved and how do you store them?
Currently we have a growing film collection of about 300 titles on 35mm, 16mm and 8mm formats that is preserved in a temperature-controlled storage facility. We maintain films of leading personalities like Amitabh Bachchan, Shyam Benegal, N N Sippy, Mani Ratnam, Kumar Shahani, Govind Nihalani, Chitra Palekar, Onir, Shaad Ali, Sumitra Bhave, Sunil Sukthankar among others. The films are periodically checked, cleaned and repaired with inspection reports on their condition.

Every day we get a call asking for help to rescue films. Recently I was invited by the Odisha State Archives to look at their collection and advise them. We found hundreds of films, some very important ones, lying abandoned and in urgent need of preservation. This is why advocacy is a priority for our foundation as we try to reach out to different parts of the country to spread the word that films, and especially those on celluloid, need to be saved.

Tell us about your documentary film Celluloid Man?
I always had an interest in preservation – something that I learnt from my father. I had read an interview with Martin Scorsese about the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, Italy where they screened restored films. I was fascinated by this and attended the festival.

On my return from Bologna, I went to meet P K Nair in Pune for whom building the collection of the NFAI had been a single-minded purpose. This meeting brought back all the old memories of the time I spent at Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) when Nair saheb had shown us so many wonderful films. Thanks to him we began to love and live for films.

So Celluloid Man was really an organic process. It was a journey of discovery. Nair saheb had an encyclopaedic memory not just of the films in the Archive, but of all the films he had seen in his lifetime.

The history of Indian cinema as well as the terrible loss of this heritage unfolded over many hours and days of conversations with Nair sahib, and is captured in Celluloid Man. But I realised that to really make a change, I couldn’t stop with the film, which was just the first step and gave birth to the foundation in a sense.

As for your seven-hour film on Jiri Menzel, you may get international festival acclaim but how will you show it to regular audiences?
I make films based on what I feel at the moment and what inspires me. It is not about indulgence or need. Why should there be an ending? This film has been a labour of love that has been eight years in the making. It took me almost a year of phone calls and emails to convince Menzel to meet me in a cafe in Prague in 2010. And so began a conversation and a friendship that has culminated in a seven-hour film that not only explores the deceptively whimsical comic films of Menzel, but also discovers the fascinating world of the Czechoslovak New Wave. This was a movement peopled by brilliant artists paradoxically making films funded by an oppressive regime, beautifully disguising their subversiveness through humour and artistry.

I would like to show it to general audiences. I firmly believe that we should not underestimate our audiences. The journey of this film has just begun and I hope that it will find its own audience. 

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.