Director of Film Heritage Foundation Shivendra Singh Dungarpur spoke to Brut about the importance of archiving Indian movies and how he restored the 1976 film “Manthan”, which was screened at Cannes Film Festival. Brut is the official media partner of the Cannes Film Festival. #Cannes2024
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00:00Van Gogh was a very prolific painter, right?
00:02He painted a painting a day, whether it was a sunflower or any of it.
00:06Now it's in the museum in Amsterdam.
00:08How much they must have spent to preserve it?
00:10In India, we didn't recognize films as an art form.
00:12We always thought of them as entertainment.
00:14It was 2014 when we set up the Film Heritage Foundation and one of the first people to
00:27donate material to us was Shyam Benegal.
00:30So he donated all his archival material, photographs, lobby cards of all his films.
00:35And with that, there was a print of Manthan, 35mm print of Manthan.
00:40While handing it over, he said, this was one of my favorite films.
00:45If you can do something about it, you know, the color has faded.
00:49He was speaking with such nostalgia and feeling.
00:53Just imagine 500,000 farmers giving Rupees 2 to produce a film, the first crowdfunded
01:00film.
01:01What a story by itself.
01:03And it still holds.
01:04It talks about caste, it talks about women empowerment, it talks about so many complexities
01:10of what we have in India.
01:13And still, it's so modern in many ways.
01:17And it would be a shame if the negative had gone or we would not be able to see it the
01:21way we should have seen.
01:32Could you explain to our viewers why archiving and restoration is important?
01:38And how do you pick the subject?
01:40There's a saying which I say to everyone that unless you know where you came from, you will
01:45not know where to go.
01:47That's a sense of human civilization.
01:49The reason why we archive is that we've got to keep looking back and seeing what has been
01:54created, what has been part of history, who we are and where we came from.
01:59Van Gogh was a very prolific painter, right?
02:01He painted a painting a day, whether it was a sunflower or any of it.
02:05Now it's in the museum in Amsterdam.
02:07How much they must have spent to preserve it.
02:09So any piece of art, unless you recognize it as an art form, in India we didn't recognize
02:15films as an art form.
02:16We always thought of them as entertainment.
02:19But when you really look deep and you see that in the 70s and the 80s, look at the great
02:25filmmakers like Vimal Roy and Gurudutta and Raj Kapoor.
02:29They almost combined the commercial with the art and they were able to bring in such beautiful
02:34films which reflected its people.
02:37And unless we recognize them as an art form, we'll never be able to think of it, you know,
02:42to restore them.
02:43We'll always say, can we do it cheaply?
02:44Can we do it in one lakh or two lakhs?
02:47But when you look at it from an art perspective, then the cost doesn't matter.
02:56Restoration is an ongoing process.
02:58And there have been so many people who are from the contemporary world who lost their films.
03:04Naseesa was talking about Mirch Masala, which is not that far back.
03:07I can give you many, many references of many big films where the negatives are almost gone.
03:12And many people don't even realize the difference what is on YouTube and what the resolution
03:16of a celluloid film is.
03:18The resolution of a celluloid film is almost 24K.
03:21If you look at this, there's no modern building.
03:23It's all classical.
03:25To restore these buildings and to bring it back, there is a cost to it.
03:29So restoration is costly.
03:31And I really sometimes fail to understand that in India we have so many restoration
03:36companies which are giving very cheap restorations.
03:39How can you restore a film?
03:41Because it's almost, you're doing 24 frames per second, you're almost looking at each
03:45frame, you're almost digitizing them, bringing it back.
03:48There is a lot of work on it and it is costly.
03:53Every day we get films from everywhere.
03:57And whenever I want to restore a film, I always see what materials are there.
04:02But we've always had terrible material.
04:05The reason is that that's why it's so exciting because you're bringing back that film back
04:10onto the screen, which was almost going.
04:16And I think the best compliment came from Shyam Benegal.
04:20When I showed it to him, he said it looks better than what it was when he had released it.