Out of 17,000 silent films made in India, only five or six remain. Among all the Kannada silent films ever made, none remain. These facts were revealed at Chamundeswari Studio on the occasion of Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s presentation on film preservation.
Shivendra, of the Dungarpur Royal Family, has taken up the responsibility of ensuring India preserves its remaining cinematic heritage.
“I am the founder-director of the Film Heritage Foundation and one of the goals of the Foundation is to initiate every filmmaking state into becoming self sufficient, have archival policies and preserve its own heritage and cinema. In a country like India, which has a massive regional film industry, it is not possible for one centre such as Mumbai to control the archival positions of the entire country,” explains Dungarpur, ahead of his presentation.
Dungarpur is also the founder of Dungarpur Films, under which he has directed and produced over 500 commercial films, documentaries and short films. A graduate from the Film and Television Institute of India, he began his career as an assistant director to Gulzar.
“This initiative has come out from the Karnataka Chalanchitra Academy after they got to know we were conducting a big film preservation workshop in Chennai last month, where we brought in experts from around the world. They were keen that we do something in Bengaluru and I was keen to create an awareness about preserving cinematic heritage, especially in the Kannada film industry which has lost all its silent films and many of its early films.”
Though he has conducted several workshops on film restoration and preservation and has also given talks on the subject around the world, Dungarpur says the presentation in Bengaluru was the first of its kind.
His own journey with preservation began when he was working on his first feature-length, National Award winning film Celluloid Man , a tribute to PK Nair, a film archivist who was also the founder-director of the National Film Archive of India. The film explores the early history of Indian cinema and highlights the importance of preserving India’s film heritage. He also did a course in Bologna on film preservation and restoration to learn the art.
“The film, for me, was a journey of self-realization. It was such an important journey that I started realizing the immense loss of India’s cinematic heritage.”
That’s how, he started thinking about finding lost films, working towards preservation, which eventually led to the work being done by the foundation. “Apart from creating awareness on the need for film preservation, we have also created job opportunities through our preservation and restoration workshops, for those interested in taking it up as a profession. We also ensure that films be looked upon as an art form, not just as a medium for entertainment.”
The Film Heritage Foundation has already helped restore several films, even working closely with Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation (WCF) to facilitate the restoration of classic films like Uday Shankar’s Kalpana (1948) and Sri Lankan filmmaker Dr Lester James Peries’ Nidhanaya (1972).
“One of the most challenging films which we have been working on is the first Konkani film ever made, Mogacho Aunddo. It was brought to us tattered and wrapped in a newspaper and we had to literally save it,” he recalled.
“There is a way to preserve films. We always say that preserving a Van Gogh panting is more expensive that the cost of making the painting. Preserving is an expensive medium but it needs to be done.” A major dilemma, in terms of film preservation, is the challenge posed by digital drives, which appear eternal but actually only have a life of over five years. Celluloid, on the other hand, he revealed, is proven to last for over a hundred years. “Our vision is to build a world class cinema centre, an archive centre. It will have an archive, a cinema hall, a research centre and a film preservation school.”
