Film is dead. In Chennai, officially.
Prasad Film Laboratories, one of the big labs in the country — one that has won as many as 19 National Awards for Best Film Lab — recently shut down its film lab and has rechristened itself as Prasad Digital Film Labs.
Established in Chennai in 1976, Prasad Labs emerged to become the largest network of film labs in Asia with facilities in Hyderabad, Bangalore, Bhubaneshwar, Mumbai and Trivandrum, and has been the pioneer in bringing emerging technologies to India.
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Sai Prasad, director of Prasad Group, explains through a statement, “With a clear vision of the changing times ahead and to continue to serve the coming generations of film makers Prasad Film Labs was the first to shift to digital technologies and established Asia’s first Digital Film Lab in Mumbai way back in 2003. From then onwards, we have been working on the transformation of all our other units across India into Digital Film Labs. With the fading away of celluloid film projection in theaters and more recently in image acquisition, Prasad has transformed completely into a Digital Film Lab. Keeping in mind the importance of preserving celluloid film negatives and restoring old films for generations ahead to enjoy, we continue to provide film rewashing and printing facilities through our Hyderabad Lab.”
Considering that almost all filmmakers today have switched from film to digital with digital cameras providing greater resolution and clarity these days, not many except purists and old-fashioned lovers of the film print would think much of this huge shift.
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The big shift Why is it huge?
“Because the lab is the only hi-tech, professional, skilled place in the whole film industry surrounded by unskilled people. It is an irony of the film industry,” says K. Hariharan, director of the LV Prasad Film and TV Academy. “People maintaining temperature, chemicals, conducting detailed checks of solution, water content, pH levels need to be skilled whereas to make a film, you don’t need any sort of skill. The labs have a strong purpose and connection with the Censor certificate. The British, when they introduced censorship, insisted that the married print have all the changes executed because you would have to hand over the physical copy of your cuts on film. The government is involved because someone from the Excise Department is ensuring that the excise duty is paid when you take the print; it is the duty of the lab to show the censorship certificate because you could not do it in your bathtub. Indie filmmakers used to do it in their bathtubs but censorship was carried out because of labs. Unfortunately in India, many labs did not realise that the function of a lab was also to preserve films. That never happened because they were only keeping films while they rotted. If only the labs and the government of India had come together to make it mandatory to have preservation facilities, Indian cinema would’ve gone somewhere else. Today, even L.V. Prasad’s film prints have been destroyed. There is no proper copy, all negatives are gone. A hundred years of cinema lost and not available. We have to depend on Scorsese to restore Ray. Why didn’t we learn from Hollywood? Would you believe that the mother negatives of films such as Shankarabharanam and Ek Duuje Ke Liye are gone?”
Filmmaker Sharada Ramanathan put up a RIP update for film on Facebook. “The closing of Prasad film laboratories is pretty much closing the doors on a traditional time-tested technology and that is somewhat unsettling. Also since Prasad labs are an institutional memory, a repository of an entire cinema, that must somehow be preserved,” she says.
Prasad Digital Film Labs will continue to undertake restoration work of archival prints. Over the last few years, the group restored classics, including Kabhie Kabhie , Karnan , Paasamalar and over 300 Hollywood classics.