Preserving films in a tropical country like India is a challenging task. Express Photo
On Friday, the Information and Broadcasting Ministry set up a five-member committee to assess the functioning of the Pune-based National Film Archive of India (NFAI), following a series of reports in The Indian Express that had revealed missing film reels, poor conditions for storage of film materials, and negligence that put valuable film heritage at risk. Set up in the 1960s to preserve India’s cinematic heritage and promote film-related research, the NFAI has, for the last couple of years, been implementing the National Film Heritage Mission (NFHM), an ambitious programme to restore, digitise and store all Indian films and film-related material for future generations. Atikh Rashid explains why this mission was needed, its objectives, and the progress that has been made so far.
Barely six months after the very first show of motion picture was held by Louis and Auguste Lumière in December 1895 in Paris, the moving images arrived in India. In July 1896, a show dubbed “marvel of the century” was held at the Watson’s Hotel in Mumbai. Since the early times (feature films happened much later), the movies have documented India and the lives of its people. The audio-visual medium of cinema has a unique ability to document what it sees with immediacy and accuracy. which is unique to the craft of cinema. Over generations, cinema – fiction or non-fiction – has documented in direct or indirect manner the way Preservation of these moving images, hence, is preservation of historic documents.
The Mission
In February 1964, I&B Ministry established the National Film Archive of India in Pune with an aim to trace, acquire and preserve, for posterity, the heritage of national cinema and a representative collection of world cinema. By the turn of the century, the NFAI had collected as many as 1,32000 film reels or around 22,500 films.
However, there was a lack of adequate funding as well as want of sufficient facilities to preserve the films in an ideal manner. With NFHM, which was proposed in 2009, sanctioned in 2014 and finally launched in 2016, the government planned to take stock of the health of the surviving films, initiate conservation and repair of the damaged films, and fast track the digitisation and restoration of important selected films so that they could be made available to the public for viewing.
The Backlog
Between 1913 and 1931, an estimated 1,300 silent feature films were made in India, of which only seven full-length films and partial footage of 23 films could be found and procured by NFAI. A lot of this content was lost at the hands of producers who saw no point in preserving a film after it had finished its commercial role and sometimes even preferring to sell the reels to people who melted it to extract silver.
The Challenge
Film negatives and prints are perishable items as they have a tendency to destroy themselves. Nitrate prints — very few of them are left with NFAI after a fire incident in 2003 — are highly inflammable while acetate base films decompose if not kept in controlled conditions of temperature and humidity. Preserving films in a tropical country like India is much more challenging as maintaining the requisite temperature (10 to 12 degrees Celsius for colour films, and 2 degrees Celsius for B&W) and humidity levels (30 to 45 percent RH) inside the vaults is a very costly and cumbersome affair.
The Tasks
NFHM will work in phases to meet its objectives, which include preventive conservation of 1.32 lakh film reels, undertaking film condition assessment of the reels, digitisation of carefully prioritised 1,345 feature films and 2,768 short films as well as restoration of 1,145 feature and 1,108 short films. Among other objectives of NFHM is construction of more and better vaults as well as upgradation of existing vaults.
The first phase of the mission, for which contract has been granted to the Chennai-based Prasad Labs, is the film assessment project under which health of all the film reels held by NFAI will be checked on various parameters. Results of this will decide the future course of action. Since NFAI has very limited staff — about 25 people including those on deputation — it hired a private firm as the project management unit for NFHM.
The Progress
Prasad Labs started work in January 2017 and was supposed to finish by November 2017. As per information provided by NFAI, the project is far from over as the Archive is suffering from a shortage of material needed for assessment and repair processes.
Apart from this, I&B Ministry’s displeasure over the way funds are being spent and works being prioritised has also caused it to set up a review committee, which will conduct a financial and physical review of the project. Until the committee submits it report, the contract of award for future works can’t be carried out.