Yesterday’s Films for Tomorrow
Shruti Narayanswamy
Shruti Narayanswamy is a PhD student at the University of St Andrews, researching the infl uence of women’s reform and the Indian nationalism movement on Indian fi lm publicity in the 1930s and 1940s. She is an alumna of the Film Heritage Foundation’s preservation workshops, and a former intern at the National Film Archive of India.
Reviewing this book is a bitter-sweet experience for me, having known Mr P.K. Nair towards the fi nal years of his life in my capacity as an Indian cinema researcher. For those of us who learned of Mr Nair through Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s 2012 documentary Celluloid Man, or from the numerous stories about “Nair Saab” that every researcher of Indian cinema inevitably comes across, he was the cultural force responsible for saving and preserving endangered Indian fi lms. archivist, the fi lm historian, the fi lm critic, and the columnist. For newly inducted enthusiasts, Yesterday’s Films for Tomorrow, published the book will reveal the many layers of the chro- by the Film Heritage Foundation and edited by nology of Indian cinema history. While the writ- Rajesh Devraj, is a collection of Mr Nair’s select- ings themselves are short, the span of this collec- ed writings on cinema, sourced from his person- tion is ambitious – essay range from informative al diaries and published articles. The collection commentary on the early Indian studio system, serves as an important introduction to Mr Nair’s recollections of the burgeoning fi lm society critical role in shaping the culture of Indian cin- movements in the 1950s, and Mr Nair’s personal ema appreciation and its future directions. refl ections on the fi lmmakers he admired.
Nair’s writings vividly bring to life the era Though this collection is not intended to when fi lmmaking was born in India, through be academic, it will be of enormous interest a spirit of entrepreneurship and the desire to to scholars of Indian cinema as a gateway to make, as he refers to it, a “national cinema”. understanding the birth of fi lm preservation Mr Nair’s recollections of the monumental ef- in India, and the signifi cance of the National forts to obtain early Indian fi lms for the ar- Film Archive of India (NFAI), an institution that chive are especially illuminating, though he has been crucial to our cinema research. Nair’s never romanticises the process. His essays as writings also refer to important historiograph- an archivist inevitably channel his sadness at ical sources that will be familiar to research- the devastating loss of fi lms from the fi rst few ers of early cinema, such as the Report of the decades of Indian cinema, and he writes un- Indian Cinematograph Committee 1927-1928, erringly about the institutional and cultural and the personal memoirs of J.B.H. Wadia myopia, and an indiff erence to fi lm as an art of the Wadia Movietone Studio. The essay on form and historic memory of the nation, that the evolution of fi lm posters in Indian cinema precipitated this loss of cinema heritage. emphasises the importance he placed on ex- tra-fi lmic material such as publicity materi- The essays are organised in such a way as to als, which remain invaluable sources for early give voice to the various facets of Mr Nair’s ap- Indian cinema researchers (especially when preciation of cinema – Nair the moviegoer, the the fi lm in question is considered lost).
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es una colección de escritos escritos de colección una es présente une sélection
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books Yesterday’s Films for Tomorrow Shruti Narayanswamy 97 | 10.2017 JFP