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Musings of the celluloid man

The late PK Nair's passion for cinema examines the legacy of films and filmmakers' socio-cultural ethos, notes Pratik Ghosh

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Yesterday's Films for Tomorrow, a collection of musings by PK Nair, is a remarkable book from a remarkable man. Anyone in India remotely interested in the moving pictures ought to know who Mr Nair was and his tremendous, unparalleled contribution to the field of film preservation and archiving. Had it not been for him, a nation's cinematic past would have disappeared into the black hole of collective amnesia. The National Film Archive of India, which Nair joined in 1965, a year after it was set up, began with a collection of some 80-odd films. By the time he retired as its director in 1991, the collection swelled to around 12,000.

The book, culled from a treasure trove of personal diaries, files full of letters and notes, speaks volumes about the legend and his religion — cinema. Though it may seem outrageous to many, Nair used to associate cinema halls with places of worship. His other seminal effort was to spread "the gospel of cinema" among the masses. He not only set up the Archive's film appreciation course, but also built a film library that sent prints of the classics to film clubs and societies all over India. In the piece, titled The Archivist, he deplores the nonchalance of the filmwallahs — for whom the commercial aspect of films towered over everything else. "It took us nearly 17 years after Independence to start collecting films in an organised manner. By that time, nearly 60 to 70 per cent of our pre-Independence output had vanished. Their negatives had crumbled and turned to powder or had been turned into bangles and ladies' handbags after extraction of silver from the nitrocellulose base." In the same article, he talks about how the original negative of the film is exploited to the hilt to derive maximum copies, thus rendering it unserviceable.

Through the chapters of the book, a reader will develop a better understanding of cinema, thanks to Nair's in-depth observations on the various aspects of the art and craft of Hollywood as well as Hindi and regional cinemas, our cinematic legacy and socio-cultural ethos informing a filmmaker's choice of stories and depiction. The section titled Film Historian is a journey into cinema's birth and evolution, its arrival on Indian shores and the early pioneers, notably Dadasaheb Phalke. Nair, the historian, also shines bright in the essay Towards a Better Understanding of National Cinema in which he chronicles the trajectory of Indian cinema, from the pre-Independence era to the 1997 hit Pardes.

His penchant for a certain kind of cinema was influenced to some extent by Ritwik Ghatak. In 2011, when Nair prepared a CV where he mentioned — "Worked as understudy to the famous filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak during his academic tenure at FTII between 1963 and '65." In an interview, he had once stated that he had been watching a film a day since the early 1940s. That is truly an astonishing number of films, given that Nair passed away on March 4 last year at the age of 83. He was a man who believed that he had come to understand the world and people better through cinema.

This all-consuming passion for a medium is a rarity even among ardent cinephiles. As Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, the director of Film Heritage Foundation, which published this book, states in the preface: He was a collector, a cinephile, a historian, an archivist, an evangelist, a teacher and a student of cinema — all of which reflected in this compilation of his writings. Dungarpur's fascinating documentary Celluloid Man released in 2013 had chronicled Nair's life and work "as the guardian of Indian Cinema".

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