Shivendra Singh Dungarpur is in a hurry. He has just an hour to catch a flight to Kolkata, where he will continue the mission he finished partially in Chennai: to showcase some portions of the history of Indian cinema.
Some , that’s the keyword here, points out the filmmaker, archivist and restorer, all rolled into one. “This is a 40-minute film that the organizers of the Busan International Film Festival have commissioned me to make. I don’t think I will even be able to fit the history of Tamil cinema in that time,” he chuckles.
But he’s at it, trying to weave in as many interesting elements from Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata in it.
Chennai, and Tamil cinema, is dear to his line of work, for it’s here that the old is, well, still considered gold. At least in some places, he tactfully adds. “Look at the AVM studios. Look at the L.V. Prasad Academy,” says Shivendra, referring to some of the places he shot at for his documentary, “There’s a lot of heritage there that is still being preserved; people in other places should learn from them.”
He’s full of praise for the history of Tamil cinema and the legendary names that it has produced. “I met up with the families of T.P.Rajalakshmi, K Subramaniam and K Balachander and unearthed some interesting information,” he reveals. But the most interesting discovery was unearthing a black and white lab in the middle of bustling Chennai.
“It was a big discovery,” he says, referring to the lab managed by Karthik Meiyappan, “I mean, here is a lab still following the old way. There’s no other commercial place in India which can boast a place like this.”
The gleam in his eye is visible. It’s the same gleam that he had as a child, spending his summer holidays in Dumraon, Bihar, when he was first introduced to the magic world of films.
“Every evening, the family would gather on the verandah to watch a film. I have vivid memories of the projectionist cycling up to the house as the sun went down and setting up the projector as I waited impatiently for the show to begin,” he recalls, “I would hold up the strips of film to the light and examine the tiny images that sprang to life on the screen when the film threaded its way through the projector. It was magic.”
Back then, he’d be taken to the local cinema hall by his grandmother and there, he’d get the experience of watching films back to back the entire day. All alone. “My grandmother would have booked the entire theatre for us to watch film,” he says, “In the interval, I would be taken up to the projection room where I would watch spellbound as the projectionist wound and rewound the films and at times, even spliced together some of the joints.”
It’s these varied experiences that shaped up Shivendra to take to cinema in a bigger way. In 2012, he made Celluloid Man, a film about India’s pioneering film archivist P.K. Nair, to showcase how India was lagging behind in preserving its cinematic heritage.
In 2014, Shivendra started the Film Heritage Foundation to give the movement he started a further push. “I’d like to call myself a filmmaker trying to preserve cinematic heritage,” says the director, who collaborates closely with Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation, “I believe that only if you look back, you can have a prosperous future.”
Is he talking about preserving only what is usually considered “good cinema”? “See, as a filmmaker, I might have an opinion about a certain individual’s work, but as an archivist, I cannot afford to be judgemental. I want everything that is out there. Take names like Shankar, Mani Ratnam and Manikandan (of Kaaka Muttai fame), for example. I want the work of all three preserved, for they may be viewed in different light fifty years from now.”
He cites the instance of Nadia to prove his point. “During its time, it was considered a C-grade film, but now, you have people discussing it. Time sometimes changes the way we look at films.”
For Shivendra, cinema is beyond just merry entertainment. “It is an art form, just like a painting,” he says, “I visit museums and when I see a stone from, say, the Harappan civilisation, I think, ‘When there’s so much done to preserve a stone, why not much to preserve film, which is a reflection of us?’”
