Archiving the Archivist! "The Celluloid Man"

Shivendra Singh's tribute to Mr P K Nair.

What a privilege it was for me to see “the Celluloid man” directed by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur. The film has got the award for best biographical film and best editor in the recently concluded National Awards. The film deserves all the awards possible because 1) The work of Mr Nair is very very important. It is because of him that we as film students or film buffs, have had the opportunity to see at least some of what Mr Nair could preserve of pre Independence Indian Cinema and some of the best of European, Russian and Japanese Cinema.2) Because what Mr Nair has done should not stop with him, but continue with the same passion and honesty (a thing which is not happening unfortunately). Because if we have a past and we don’t record History, it is lost forever or even more dangerously, can be distorted in the years to come.

Shivendra has told us the story of the untiring, passionate archival work done by Mr P K Nair, a legend at FTII and founder of the National Film Archives of India. What Hsuan Tsang did in terms of recording Indian History of the early 7^th century AD and introducing Buddhism to China, Mr Nair has done for the history of Indian Cinema. Because History, it definitely is. Today we remember Dadasaheb Phalke as the father of Indian Cinema because Mr Nair travelled to Nasik in the year 1969 and salvaged what he could of the film clips that the sons of Dadasaheb Phalke parted with. He visited the bungalow where Dadasaheb Phalke had shot Raja Harishchandra. And today when he goes to the site where Dadasaheb Phalke used to live he is sad and so are you. The house has not been preserved. There is only a large commemorative stone on the road in the midst of small shops jostling for their daily business, which says that the father of Indian Cinema lived here once. So without Mr Nair we would still be fighting about who made India’s first film. Unfortunately in our country, giving credit to where it belongs almost always means taking it away from another person. In the bargain nobody is allowed to be celebrated at all! Let’s face it, archiving or preserving has never been our forte. We have allowed many an art form, folk form, Indian craft to become extinct because of lack of Govt. patronage or lack of a collective will. Many heritage monuments face disrespect from our country men daily. Our natural resources, flora and fauna have also not been spared. In this respect, Mr Nair’s childhood passion of preserving and recording things meticulously as well his mad love for Cinema, has helped scores of us directly as students of Cinema and many more film buffs who’ve watched the regular screenings that he threw open to the public so that we could be proud of our History. An audience for good Cinema has to be nurtured. He is not a hoarder who wants things for himself, he is a nurturer who wants to share. Therein lies his greatness. If he saw a genuine thirst in you, he would go out of his way to give you access to the many treasures lying behind the locked vaults of NFAI. A point brought about beautifully by the scores of film directors and actors who’ve graduated from FTII like Saeed Mirza, Naseeruddin Shaha, Kumar Shahani, Jahnu Barua, Hariharan, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Shaji Karun, Ketan Mehta, Girish Kasarvalli, Shyam Benegal, Shabana Azmi, Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Raju Hirani, Santosh Sivan, Balu Mahendra.

His evocative description of how he felt very royal sitting on the floor of the tent house Cinema to watch films as a child in Kerala; royal because the white sands of Kerala were associated with splendour, rituals, festivities and Cinema for young Nair was an expression of all that and much more. It was and still remains a fascination, a passion and an obsession with him. The film shows us so many rare sequences of old black and white films, it’s a film aficionado’s dream! It starts and ends with two of my favourite films, ‘Citizen Kane’and ‘Kaagaz Ke Phool’. Raja Harishchandra, Kaliya Mardan, Devdas, Meghe Dhaka Tara, Kismet, Achhut Kanya, Chandralekha, Kalpana and the Lumiere brothers’ “An Arrival Of A Train In A Station”, a film which fascinated Dhundiraj Govind Phalke and fuelled his passion for making moving images or movies.

Mr Nair can say the dialogues of Citizen Kane even without looking at the film running behind him. He can rattle of which reel the Odessa step sequence in ‘The Battleship Potemkin’ is or which reel the song “Door hato o duniya waalon Hindustaan hamaaraa hai” from the immensely popular black and white film “Kismet” is or many many more; the list just goes on. The thing which strikes you most is the effort to get films from all over India. Everything has become so Hindi film centric these days that many people forget the contribution of regional films like Bengali, Marathi, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Assamese, Oriya etc. to the History of Indian Cinema. But for Mr Nair Cinema is Cinema and has its own language and it needs to be preserved at all costs.

As one sees Mr Nair’s dissatisfaction at the way things are being run by callous people who have taken over from him in the years after his retirement in 1991, I remember a time I met Dr Kurien, (the father of the white revolution and founder of the first milk co-operative in Anand, Gujarat, popularly known as Amul) after he had just retired. I saw the dissatisfaction of a man whose entire life was devoted to this endeavour and the people who were meant to carry his legacy forward were busy discrediting him. I see the same sadness and pain in Mr Nair’s eyes. Those reel cans are his babies. He knows them better than he knew his own children for the most part of their growing life! There is a pain in his eyes about so many films that were not preserved by the people who made them; they were not stored or they were sometimes even sold for the silver in the negatives as happened in the case of India’s first talkie “Alam Ara”. That is lost! And what a loss it is! But Shivendra’s film is about a celebration of what is not lost because of Mr Nair. It is a celebration of what has been passed on to the most unlikely film audience. A wonderful account of common villagers, areca nut farmers in the village of Heggodu in Karnataka proves this point amply. A simple people without a Cinema hall were exposed to the best of Indian and World Cinema by the founder of Ninasam in Hegoddu, B V Subanna. He, with the help of Mr Nair showed films as diverse as Wild Strawberries, Pather Panchali, Rashoman to a film illiterate audience. Mr Subanna would translate what is going on in the film into Kannada for the villagers. These simple folk were so drawn into the films shown to them that they can still recall their favourite Bergmen film or discuss the impact of Kurosawa and Ray while getting the areca nuts out of the fruit. Wow! This reminded me of Arun Kaka( Khopkar) telling me after one of his visits to Russia how the Russians are so clued in to their culture that even a taxi driver can recite Pushkin or discuss Eisenstein.

In today’s world where more and more film makers are switching from shooting on film to shooting in a digital format, Mr Nair’s wistfulness about the smell of the negative and the magic of celluloid makes a very strong impact. It leaves you feeling sad for a magical era slowly dying before your eyes. It makes your heart ache for the subjects of honesty, hope and compassion that were told in that bygone era. It makes you wonder why there aren’t any people like those film makers or Mr Nair any longer. In a country where incompetence, crassness and stupidity is what constitutes political power, niceness and honesty are no longer values people hold. Compassion just doesn’t exist. And pride in one’s job is unheard of. Only egos exist over jobs never done and corruption has spread faster than termites at a piece of wood. People in power break laws, get away with murder and build castles on the blood and tears of their less privileged and helpless fellow beings. Trampling on the rights of tax paying citizens is rewarded every day. The end has to be money, whatever the means, is the motto today. Selflessness and sharing are almost looked upon as a sign of madness. And Cinema has become a prisoner of monetary gain or the over touchiness and lack of tolerance of violent people quick to ban, protest and torch.

In all this inhumanity, Shivendra’s celebration of the celluloid man, Mr Nair acquires a significance that is not limited to the fascinating subject he is presenting. It is a cry to bring back all the goodness that our country once had and to preserve it. Yes! Preservation is the key! Thank you Mr Nair. And thank you Shivendra for preserving on celluloid Mr Nair’s great celluloid contribution. It’s a fitting tribute indeed in the centenary year of Indian films. But an even more fitting tribute to the man whose work undoubtedly established Dadasaheb Phalke as the father of Indian cinema would be to honour Mr Nair with the Dadasaheb Phalke award. Anyone in the Government listening?