Benegal’s 1976 film will be presented at the Cannes Film Festival on May 17. An Indian classic at the Cannes for the third successive year owes its presence to Dungarpur’s Film Heritage Foundation
“It all happened because of Martin Scorsese,” says Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, a National Award-winning filmmaker, who studied direction and scriptwriting at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune. Unlike many of his batchmates, who would quickly proclaim the influence of the celebrated American director’s famous films like Taxi Driver (1976) or Raging Bull (1980) on them, Dungarpur is eager to indicate an impact of a different kind. The Mumbai-based filmmaker credits Scorsese with influencing another important aspect of his film career: conservation of India’s rich cinematic heritage.
“I read an interview with Scorsese in a newspaper in which he speaks passionately about his work of rescuing films from near-death across the world by restoring them from disintegrating celluloid,” says Dungarpur, who is a nephew of Raj Singh Dungarpur, the late president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, the national governing body for cricket. Within months of reading the interview, Dungarpur arrived at L’Immagine Ritrovata Laboratory in Bologna, one of the world’s finest film laboratories in Italy, to see firsthand how it was collaborating with Scorsese to give a fresh lease of life to scores of classics dating back to more than half-a-century.
Preserving India’s cinematic heritage
It was 2010 and film restoration was not a popular subject then as it is even today. Scorsese had launched the Film Foundation to restore American movies. Four years later, Dungarpur would launch one of his own and call it, Film Heritage Foundation. “I wanted to give attention to our country’s cinematic heritage. We grew up on the films of the great masters like Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, John Abraham, K G George and Adoor Gopalakrishnan. Cinema is a reflection of who we are. We must know our past to move forward,” explains Dungarpur as he prepares to present a 4K restoration of Shyam Benegal’s 1976 film Manthan at the 77th Cannes Film Festival on May 17.
It’s not the first time Dungarpur will be presenting a restored Indian movie at the Cannes Classics section, devoted to the celebration of cinematic heritage at the French Riviera festival. He was there last year with Manipuri director Aribam Syam Sharma’s 1990 Meitei-language film, Ishanou (The Chosen One). The year before, he presented Malayalam director G Aravindan’s 1978 film, Thampu (The Circus Tent). Both had been restored by the Film Heritage Foundation. “The hat-trick of restored Indian films in Cannes Classics is a major step for the preservation of India’s cinematic heritage,” says Dungarpur.
“The restoration of Manthan was a tough process. There was no sound negative. The print had turned green and yellow from mould. The colour had faded,” says Dungarpur.
Since it was formed a decade ago, the Film Heritage Foundation has restored four films: Thampu and Kummatty by G Aravindan, and Ishanou and Manthan. A painstaking process, film restoration often takes years to assemble negatives and prints, deteriorating in unfavourable conditions, and clean and digitise them with fresh colour and sound frame by frame in state-of-the-art laboratories. “There are just too many movies in India that need restoration,” says Dungarpur. “It is a mammoth task. The central government is also doing it through the National Film Heritage Mission. But that is not just enough. Our cinematic heritage can’t be rescued by a few entities,” he adds.
Manthan: The symbol of a dream
Dungarpur’s first film as a director after he graduated from FTII was Celluloid Man (2012), the story of India’s cinematic treasure, most of which is lying neglected and awaiting death. The film won him two National Awards — the Best Historical Reconstruction and Best Biographical Film.
“Celluloid Man set the stage for the Film Heritage Foundation,” he recalls. “After my visit to L’Immagine Ritrovata Laboratory in Bologna more than a decade ago, I met P K Nair, the former director of National Film Archive of India (NFAI), Pune, who had devoted his life to conservation of Indian cinema. We had several conversations about what to do for our cinematic heritage.”
By now word had begun to spread about Dungarpur’s attempts to save dying movies. Then one day actor Jaya Bachchan called him. “It was Jaya Bachchan who suggested I should set up a foundation for film heritage,” says Dungarpur. “And we did.” When it was launched in 2014, the Film Heritage Foundation had on its advisory board such eminent filmmakers as Shyam Benegal, Gulzar, Kumar Sahani and Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi.
Benegal lent his support to the foundation with a 35 mm print of Manthan. “Benegal is turning 90 years old this year. Manthan, a film produced by farmers in Gujarat, is my favourite film. It was not in a good condition,” says Dungarpur. The film was restored using the original camera negative and a 35 mm print lying at the NFAI, now part of the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC).
The story of Manthan symbolises Dungarpur’s dream for the conservation of the country’s cinematic heritage. The story of the beginnings of the remarkable dairy cooperative movement that transformed India from a milk-deficient nation to the world’s largest milk producer. The film is also the country’s first crowdfunded movie produced by about 5,000 dairy farmers who contributed two rupees each.
Up next: Maya Miriga, Ghatashraddha, Sholay
“The film was aimed at breaking the shackles of economic inequality and caste discrimination while empowering the farmers. It will remind the world of the power of cinema as a vehicle of change,” says Benegal. “The film was a runaway success when it was released almost 50 years ago,” recalls actor Naseeruddin Shah, who will be attending the world premiere of the restored Manthan along with five of the original producers of the film, which stars Girish Karnad, Smita Patil and Shah.
The restoration of Manthan took one-and-half years and was mostly done in Bologna, along with the Prasad Labs in Chennai. “It was a tough process. There was no sound negative. The print had turned green and yellow from mould. The colour had faded,” says Dungarpur. “It was the toughest restoration we have done so far.”
Next in line for restoration are Odia film Nirad N. Mohapatra’s 1984 film Maya Miriga (The Mirage) and Kannada director Girish Kasaravalli’s 1973 film Ghatashraddha (The Ritual), followed by Ramesh Sippy’s 1975 blockbuster, Sholay. The 4K restoration of Manthan is expected to be released in theatres across the country later this year.
The restoration of films went global in 2007 when Scorsese created the World Cinema Foundation at the Cannes festival to extend his work to Africa, Asia, Latin American and central Europe. One of the first Asian films to be restored by the World Cinema Foundation was Uday Shankar’s 1948 film, Kalpana, in 2012, a historic moment for Indian cinema that had a deep impact on Dungarpur.
