Lights, camera, inaction!

Pune offers the best atmosphere for maintaining films and that explains the location of the National Film Archives of India NFAI. That8217;s why the films could last that long. But films, specially the very old ones, require special care. It8217;s not enough to keep them in vaults at controlled temperatures. They need to be aired periodically, at least once in three months as nitrate prints release gases in closed confines. If you take them out periodically, you will learn about how much life is left over in the material.

The blame for this incident has to be borne by all of us. Films, by and large, are not given the kind of respect that old books and our arts get. Until that attitude changes, fires such as this will continue to happen.

As it is, the NFAI has very few of the films made in the silent era. Of the 1,200 films, we could get our hands only on nine 8212; primarily because the producers were not interested in storing films for posterity. The same goes for the talkies period, from the early 8217;30s to the 8217;50s. After producers made a film and recovered the money on it, they lost interest. The British were hardly interested in storing Indian films. And when the NFAI was set up in 1964, it was 17 years too late. We were a country that was into filmmaking right from 1910!

It was from word of mouth that we were able to locate producers and beg them to part with their prints. Companies like Prabhat Talkies, New Theatres and Bombay Talkies, which went into liquidation, handed over their films to us for safekeeping.

While some were lost in the haze of Partition, others were destroyed with the passage of time. Fires were not uncommon even then. That8217;s how New Theatres lost major portions of the first Devdas. We were able to lay our hands on very few films. We could locate some in South Africa, some in Thailand, but retrieving them was usually a long drawn out process.

As long as the NFAI and the FTII were headed by the same person, there was a commonality of purpose, a shared responsibility. They shared space and stored old films in the old vaults at Prabhat studio. But ever since they were bifurcated in 1967, their paths have digressed.

As the NFAI is dependent on public funds, film preservation is nobody8217;s agenda. Look at the West: Disney, MGM took care of their films. In Russia the state was the producer then and in Japan, the four or five companies took care of their history. Unlike India, where most of the films were made by independent producers. Very few of the banners, like RK Films, B R Chopra, Guru Dutt, have survived on their own.

All of us now know that films need a lot of our attention. When we started, we had 120 films to take care of. When I left in 1991, there were 1,200. Unless there is a trained workforce committed to the preservation of films, their future looks bleak. 8212;As told to Anuradha Raman

The writer was director of the NFAI between 1967-91