How P.Ok. Nair Constructed the Nationwide Movie Archive of India

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How P.K. Nair Built the National Film Archive of India

The early protocols of NFAI have been initially restrictive. Guidelines dictated that solely these movies which had received a Nationwide Award could be requested to submit a duplicate of their print for the archive. Nair, nonetheless, had no real interest in such hierarchies of style. Whether or not it was a Fearless Nadia spectacle or a Girish Kasaravalli movie, it was welcome in his archives and to that finish, he expanded the scope of NFAI’s repository. He would go on to gather a complete of 12,000 movies (8,000 of them have been Indian) for NFAI. 

Nair retired in 1991, however remained concerned along with his beloved NFAI whereas he was bodily in a position. In 2016, Nair handed away.  

Each Celluloid Man and Nair’s assortment of essays, titled Yesterday’s Movies for Tomorrow, are reminders of how a lot of our cinematic heritage we’ve misplaced to carelessness and greed. One well-known story is about Alam Ara (1931). Nair approached Ardeshir Irani, the movie’s producer, to obtain any surviving materials, solely to study that the producer’s son had bought the prints, which have been then recycled to extract silver for coloured bangles (this incident was most lately given a romanticised spin in Pan Nalin’s movie Chhello Present, which has obtained an Oscar nomination for one of the best worldwide characteristic). It wasn’t till the Eighties, when Doordarshan began telecasting motion pictures, that movie discovered a life past the theatre and producers have been incentivised to become profitable from their earlier tasks. For a lot of movies, this improvement got here too late.

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