The importance of film archives has been the subject of much debate across the world since cinema’s invention in the late 19th century. Through the decades, filmmakers and archivists have argued that every country must preserve great works of cinema, especially in the celluloid format, and establish systems of exhibition where the public can freely access them. By the mid-20th century, countries including the USA, France, UK, Belgium, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Poland, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, and the USSR had all accorded cinema the status of art, and much like historical museums and public libraries, recognised film archives as repositories of national treasure. While the first film archives of India were set up in this broader historical climate, the attitude of the Indian state towards film has been fundamentally different. Our government still views film as a medium for information and broadcasting and often neglects its cultural and historical value. This is brought into sharp focus in recent developments where the government has decided to shut down four of its oldest and most reputed film units – the National Film Archives of India (NFAI), Films Division (FD), Children’s Film Society of India (CFSI), and Directorate of Film Festivals (DFF) – providing no information to the public about the future of thousands of historic films and filmic material preserved by them.
What are these film archives, and why are they important? The Indian government established the Films Division in 1948. Given the task of producing and distributing newsreels and documentary films, FD was an archive of eminence right from the beginning. Post-Independence, films made by the erstwhile colonial agencies of Information Films of India, Indian News Parade, and Army Film and Photographic Unit were handed over to FD. In the following years, it preserved audio and visual records of India’s history of decolonisation and the process of nation-building, and today it safeguards nearly 8,000 newsreels and documentaries on historical events and political figures. These also include rare works of stalwarts like Satyajit Ray, MF Husain, Mani Kaul, Pramod Pati, and more recent films by contemporary filmmakers. The NFAI was established much later in 1964 with the mandate to trace, acquire, and preserve the heritage of fiction cinema in India. Built under the supervision of the renowned curator P K Nair, the NFAI has reserves of several thousand films, books, scripts, posters, and photographs dating back to the 1910s, and it actively promotes film research and scholarship on Indian and South Asian cinema. Apart from FD and the NFAI, the other two film units of significance include the CFSI, established in 1955, and the DFF, established in 1976. While the former is responsible for producing children’s films, the latter organises the National Film Award, Dadasaheb Phalke Award, and the International Film Festival of India (IFFI). All four of these institutions have historically provided original prints from their archives for screenings at film festivals, film societies, and educational institutions around the world. However, despite their contribution to preserving and promoting the national heritage of India, their future looks precarious.
In its most recent orders in December 2021, the Ministry of Information andBroadcasting (MIB) has decided to close all regional and national offices of FD, NFAI, CFSI and DFF and bring them under the workings of the National Film Development Corporation (NDFC). The NFDC is a public sector undertaking established in 1975 to promote filmmakers outside the mainstream film industries of India. In the past, NFDC has been recognised for its contribution to parallel cinema, and also criticised for its failure to provide exhibition infrastructures to independent films. In 2018, the Niti Aayog evaluated the workings of the NFDC and declared it a loss-making unit. Subsequently, the matter of its closure was proposed in Parliament, and the need to evaluate FD, NFAI, CFSI, and DFF was also discussed. Three years later, without any consultation with the film fraternity of India, the MIB decided to merge them with NFDC. This arbitrary and opaque decision of the MIB was severely criticised at different public forums at the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) where renowned filmmaker Adoor Gopalkrishnan warned the government against “killing film institutions by merging them with a moribund body like the NFDC.”
What is the problem if a public corporation like NFDC manages our archives? While any attempt of the MIB to bring greater efficiency to public institutions is welcome, the suspicious manner in which the merger is being carried out raises concerns. First, the MIB has not been able to explain why four public-funded bodies are being merged with a loss-making corporation. Second, it has largely been silent on the matter of handover of the archives and has released no plan on how the transfer of fragile and inflammable material like celluloid will be carried out. In recent months, the MIB has also dismissed more than eight RTI inquiries, a writ petition by FD employees, and ignored numerous articles, public debates and open letters written by concerned filmmakers, historians and archivists that seek clarification on the matter. Could the move towards making archives into profit-oriented entities mean that the government might try to disinvest from them in future if they do not perform “up to the mark”? Within such a dismal scenario, what will happen to the free and unencumbered access that the Indian public enjoys to the historical films made in our country? Would they always remain free?
Unaware of the gravity of the situation and misled by the garb of digitisation, some naïve filmmakers disregard the importance of physical archives. They argue that in recent years, both NFAI and FD have uploaded rare Indian films, posters and photographs on their YouTube and Instagram accounts to increase public access and therefore it will not be a problem when these archives don’t exist in the future. It is almost laughable when we forget that big multinationals own social media sites and that there have been innumerable examples of interviews, reports, and articles being taken down when these sites have given in to the pressures and demands of governments and interest groups. Are we fooling ourselves into believing that our films will remain online forever? Or do we imagine a future where we will crowdfund a public archive from our individual hard drives? How many films would we be able to keep, and for how many years would our hard drives survive?
We must remember that archives are repositories of our history. And it is important to safeguard them from the vested interests of political regimes that aim to re-write national histories in their favour. If our archives do not remain autonomous public institutions, they will undoubtedly be tampered with, damaged, or destroyed forever. We are now in a time when the rhetoric of nationalism is thrown around in various public forums; we need to understand this particular aspect of preserving our film heritage is a matter of national interest. Therefore, the government must urgently declare our archives as national heritage cannot be monetised under any circumstance. They belong to the people of India and must be protected and insulated from any commercial pressures.
This column first appeared in the print edition on March 26, 2022 under the title ‘Our film, our history’. The writer is a National Award-winning filmmaker, currently teaching at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences
