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Producing film heritage

Author:

Journal:

South Asian Popular Culture

Issue Date:

2015

Abstract(summary):

This essay asks how digital remediation affects the memory of celluloid, understood as an analog medium. What are the cultural consequences of digitizing old screen media? Do such practices contribute to celluloid's obsolescence – or do they increase its cult value? What role does the multiplex play in the heritage boom? The author considers the centenary as a commemorative effort that cannot be seen in isolation from a neoliberal revaluation of the silver screen. This essay asks how digital remediation affects the memory of celluloid, understood as an analog medium. What are the cultural consequences of digitizing old screen media? Do such practices contribute to celluloid's obsolescence – or do they increase its cult value? What role does the multiplex play in the heritage boom? The author considers the centenary as a commemorative effort that cannot be seen in isolation from a neoliberal revaluation of the silver screen. When Sholay was released on 15 August 1975, only four 70-mm prints were available for film projection: one for Delhi, one for Uttar Pradesh, and two for Bombay. Show timings had to be varied according to the amount of time it took for the physical print to arrive. ‘We used to shuttle the same print on motorcycles between Shaan cinema in Vile Parle and Chandan in Juhu, between Minerva and Metro, Eros and Central Plaza in South Mumbai. This cost us Rs 7000–10,000 per week,’ recalls Dilip Dhanwani, owner of Mumbai's Dilsa Distributors. 1 In contrast, the more recently released Salman Khan blockbuster Bodyguard (2011) came with 2000 ‘prints’, of which 1483 were digital, some on DVD and the rest streamed via satellite through a digital server. Massive circulation of this kind hinges on technologies that were introduced in the new millennium, which include e-cinema as well as digital 2K and 4K projection – systems that allow prints to ‘shuttle’ much faster, sometimes at the press of a button. 2 Digitization has loosened the reigning supremacy of the single-screen theatre and the 70-mm print. 3 Along with the shopping mall, digital formats have emerged as the preferred mode for distributors and audiences alike, not only in the four metros but even in single screens in smaller townships such Jalgaon, Madurai, Jamnagar, Manipal and Raipur that have simultaneous access to digital prints. In the metros, the multiplex is located in prosperous shopping malls, where it offers an alluring viewing space that combines ‘real estate… jewellery, retail [with] hospitality’. 4 What are the larger consequences of the digitization of screen media? How does such technological transformation affect the memory of Indian cinema during its celluloid years? Last but not the least, how does Bollywood's growing wealth contribute to the production of cinematic heritage? How has the multiplex contributed to the heritage boom? My concern here is not with the so-called ‘death of celluloid’. Rather, I prefer to focus on the ways in which memories of cinema are encouraged by its digital proliferation. Riding a wave of heightened consumption that brings food, travel, fashion and cinema together in a potent mixture, the multiplex now accounts for more than 900 screens in India. That number is expected to top 3000 by 2017, making Bollywood one of the richest industries in contemporary India. 5 In their seminal study, Adrian Athique and Douglas Hill argue that since the 1990s ‘the middle classes have consistently sought to escape from the spatial relationship which has placed them in proximity to the urban slum’ (14). In this new geography of the city, the old single-screen theatre has lost its magnetism and is slowly falling out of favor. Old theaters persist, but they are increasingly associated with urban decay and stagnation and do the work of identifying unruly mass sensibilities that are sanitized and brought in line with lucrative digital economies that are anchored in the multiplex. More suggestively, in current industry parlance, 100 is a figure that can no longer connote, as it once could, the number of days a film held an audience in a theater with silver, golden, diamond and platinum jubilee anniversaries; rather, as a number, it compulsively invokes sales and box office collections that run into several ‘hundred’ crores. 6 Discursively, the press and the media deflect attention away from cinema's narrative and affective value toward consumption and monetary worth. Arguably, in Bombay cinema's everyday life, the centenary is a distant memory with limited commercial value. But anniversaries can function as repositories of film history if they have the potential to recycle classics as new commodities. It is in this context that the popular memory of celluloid resurfaces in unexpected and insistent ways. Although such recollection frequently begins in the 1970s and can extend to the 1950s, it usually does not go as far back as the 1930s, '20s or '10s. Echoing re-runs of ‘colorized’ classics like Naya Daur (1957) and Mughal-e-Azam (1960), Sholay was re-released in a 3D version on 3 January 2014. Not surprisingly, the 3D version was written off as a box office failure. Nonetheless, what audiences and critics do not want to let go of is the iconic theatrical experience it represents and can no longer replicate. 7 Ironically, monetization crafts perceptions of loss that remain crucial for an entire generation of filmgoers who have strong investments in the history of Indian cinema. Comprising academics, preservationists, fans, cinephiles, film practitioners, journalists and biographers, this is a constituency for whom the memory of cinema matters a great deal as symbolic, material and cultural heritage. To return briefly to Sholay, its 3D ‘restoration’ cost $3.5 million but made only $1 million at the box office. 8 While journalists may have mourned its poor performance, it is clear that Bollywood's luxury economy sustains surplus restorations that can resuscitate ‘film’ for new audiences, even when significant risks are involved. Consider for example, an organization like the Film Heritage Foundation of India (FHFI), which was founded by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur (in collaboration with Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation) in the wake of the Indian cinema centenary. 9 Fifty years after the formation of the National Film Archive of India, the FHFI's mission statement declares:

We feel that without the intervention of the foundation in collaboration with the government, the film industry and the public at large, it will not be possible to save our film heritage… It is important to educate the public on the history and language of the moving image and to recognize that film can be a powerful educational tool that can be incorporated into existing school curriculum. 10

Similarly, the web portal https://indiancine.ma, launched in February 2013, offers an encyclopedic ‘annotated online archive of Indian film … intended to serve as a shared resource for film scholars and enthusiasts in India and beyond.’ Here the work of film studies departments, media labs and research institutions across the country have been reorganized into an easily accessible web resource, with a dedicated focus on sharing ‘out-of-copyright films, currently pre-1954’. The site is exemplary in its pre-1950s outreach. Like other online archives, such as https://archive.org/ and http://mediahistoryproject.org, https://indiancine.ma makes unseen films available by taking advantage of expired copyrights. Fueled by the heady excitement of recirculating previously inaccessible materials, such sites revive the past through initiatives that commemorate – centenary or not – the arrival of an entire curiosity of materials into the public domain. We feel that without the intervention of the foundation in collaboration with the government, the film industry and the public at large, it will not be possible to save our film heritage… It is important to educate the public on the history and language of the moving image and to recognize that film can be a powerful educational tool that can be incorporated into existing school curriculum. 10 Collaborative and open-access initiatives of this kind, which bring multiple institutions together, would have been inconceivable in 1964 when the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) was founded, largely through the singular effort of preservationists like P.K. Nair. Back then, public memory and the messy business of archiving cinema in India was organized, funded, and inevitably regulated by the State's proprietary directives. The material reality of the hard-to-transport celluloid print, its associated systems of analog projection and the institutional power of the ministry of information and broadcasting (which supervised NFAI) worked in tandem to imagine cinema as an institution of national importance. The centrality of this imaginary comes across forcefully in the Indian Cinematograph Act of 1952, which mandates every cinema hall in India to have at least one analog projector installed. 11 Economic liberalization, on the other hand, has decentralizing tendencies which remediate and redirect cultural detritus into a host of gateways such as mobile phones, YouTube, Dailymotion and eBay, where digitized film proliferates outside the analog cinema hall. While neither Indiancinema.com nor FHFI are directly associated with neoliberal agendas, their beneficiaries (which includes academics and researchers like us) cannot be isolated from the cultures of economic prosperity. Global flows also support ideological changes that have the power to transform restrictive public policies by privileging a logic of capital that bypasses straightforward national regulation. Other websites dedicated to appreciating India's film heritage, such as www.uperstall.com and www.cineplot.com, signify attempts to regenerate cinema in the present through artful simulation of historical traces that are available for retrieval. More broadly, the revival of these old forms articulates a popular consensus and pedagogical responsibility to ‘intervene’ on behalf of the State to ‘educate the public’ about ‘the history of the moving image’ (FHFI). Indeed, new memory practices coexist with old forms of memorialization like the museum. They can also bring national and neoliberal ideologies together in tense and forceful relationships, particularly in instances where the national has subsumed the regional. The trajectory of the Prabhat Studios is a case in point. Founded in 1929 in Kolhapur, the studio shifted its premises to the city of Pune, Maharashtra in 1933. The old Prabhat studio was converted into the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in 1960 – a neat example of institutionalized commemoration geared to promote cinema in the new nation. Located within the FTII campus, the Prabhat museum exhibits ‘all the available original costumes, properties, [and] contracts of the Prabhat Film Company, [its] equipment, posters and stills’, draws that are boldly advertised on tourism sites 12 that invite patrons to visit the FTII and the museum to see its chief attraction, ‘the tutari (a traditional Indian trumpet) … the symbol for Prabhat Studios [which] hangs at the entrance to the first floor of the building’. In spite of such recognition, the Shiv Sena, motivated by the desire to ‘right’ a historical ‘wrong’, has demanded that FTII's name be changed to Prabhat-FTII to honor the studio's regional, Maharashtrian, identity. 13 My last example is a giant mural of Dadasaheb Phalke painted by Ranjit Dhaiya for the St+ART (Street Art) India Foundation in Bandra, Mumbai in December 2014, a structure that looms large on the city's MTNL building. The mural follows closely on the heels of other celebrations of the centenary at the Mumbai International Film Festival of India (2012), where Indian silent films were screened outside the archive after a prolonged hiatus. NFAI's DVD of Phalke's restored works also became commercially available to the general public at the time of the festival. A mammoth feature of the Mumbai skyline, the mural required 800 liters of paint and the use of two boom cranes over 10 days for its completion. It depicts Phalke holding up a strip of celluloid for closer inspection. Aerially visible from a plethora of viewpoints in the city, its monumentality is designed to compensate for a historical oversight: ‘Dadasaheb Phalke made the first ever full length feature film in 1913. He was instrumental in setting up the Bollywood industry that has become the lifeline of the city. Yet he remained a forgotten face in the timeline of this city’. 14 It is not hard to see that the mural perpetuates an oft-repeated, popular conception of Dadasaheb Phalke as ‘the father of Indian cinema’. However, the scale of its expression is entirely new, something that resurrects Phalke's submerged regional Marathi identity to realign it with Bollywood – and Mumbai's preeminence. Last but not the least, as a supplementary event, the 120 × 150 foot mural – the largest in India so far – produces a material history of celluloid that is firmly imprinted on the city's landscape. One cannot imagine a mural dedicated to Phalke's wife Saraswatibai, who punched sprockets in his film stock and fed his crew. Names of the early Tamil film actress Rajlakshmi or the Dalit silent film actress P.K. Rosy would matter little on the streets of Mumbai, not to mention regional firsts like J.C. Daniels in Kerala (Menon, 3 ) or Hiralal Sen in Bengal. Still, Kamal [sic]'s biopic Celluloid (2013) carries a dedication to the centenary that celebrates J.C. Daniels' contribution to Malayalam silent cinema. Similarly, Prakash Mokashi's Marathi film Harishchandrachi Factory (2009) insists on bringing Saraswatibai's contribution to life even as it revolves around Phalke the pioneer. Both films won national awards in the regional category. Operating at the cusp of official agendas and neoliberal affluence, such efforts represent small but important interventions that seek recognition against larger projects of centenarization such as Bombay Talkies. Literally and figuratively, the centenary is a memory-practice that draws strength from its ability to reanimate celluloid history for a contemporary audience. The challenge is to identify and mark the small footprints it leaves on the margins of official historiography. No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. ^1. ‘Transition to digital film projection: Is the cinema as we knew it coming to an end?’ The Economic Times, 22 Oct. 2011, http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2011-10-22/news/30309865_1_ufo-moviez-prints-theatres. ^2. Homepages of major distributors Qube Cinema Network and UFO Digital Cinema include detailed information on the advantages of e-cinema. as well as digital 2K and 4K projection: http://qube.in/about-digital-cinema and http://www.ufomoviez.com/Digital_Cinema_System.aspx?pgindex = DCS. ^3. The Economic Times. ^4. http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-05-21/news/39476317_1_srs-group-srs-ltd-shimla. ^5. See http://4k.com/news/3000-new-sony-4k-cinema-screens-coming-to-india4079/ and http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-opportunities/multiple-career-openings-in-multiplexes/article3375053.ece. ^6. ‘Simultaneous release … ensure[s] higher revenue collections’, UFO Moviez. ^7. Raja Sen notes, ‘ Sholay … is a part of the Indian motion picture experience that can't be matched, and getting another chance to watch it on the big screen is something special, even though the screen isn't as big as it once was’; see http://www.rediff.com/movies/review/review-watch-sholay-but-not-in-3d/20140103.htm. ^8. http://variety.com/2014/film/box-office/sholay-3d-disappoints-at-the-box-office-1201035206/. ^9. Dungarpur also made Celluloid Man (2013), an homage to NFAI's legendary founder, P.K. Nair. The 3.5-hour film includes a mammoth collection of interviews with film enthusiasts, professors, actors, directors and graduates of the FTII and NFAI staff. ^10. My emphasis; http://filmheritagefoundation.co.in/about-us/beliefs/. ^11. The Economic Times. ^12. Advertised on http://www.happytrips.com/pune/prabhat-museum/ps40918988.cms and http://www.virasatpune.com/prabhat-film-studios-ftii/. ^13. http://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/ftii-be-renamed-as-prabhat-ftii-shiv-sena-demands-113050500328_1.html. ^14. http://www.nowdelhi.tv/art/indias-largest-mural-the-dadasaheb-phalke-project/.

1. Athique, Adrian and Douglas Hill. The Multiplex in India: A Cultural Economy of Urban Leisure . London: Routledge, 2009. Print.
2. Menon, Bindu, Re-Framing Vision: Malayalam Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life in Kerala, Ph.D. diss., Jawaharlal Nehru University 2014. Print

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