00:00Van Gogh was a very prolific painter, right?
00:02He painted a painting a day, whether it was a sunflower or any of it.
00:06Now it's in the museum in Amsterdam.
00:08How much they must have spent to preserve it?
00:10In India, we didn't recognize films as an art form.
00:12We always thought of them as entertainment.
00:14It was 2014 when we set up the Film Heritage Foundation and one of the first people to
00:27donate material to us was Shyam Benegal.
00:30So he donated all his archival material, photographs, lobby cards of all his films.
00:35And with that, there was a print of Manthan, 35mm print of Manthan.
00:40While handing it over, he said, this was one of my favorite films.
00:45If you can do something about it, you know, the color has faded.
00:49He was speaking with such nostalgia and feeling.
00:53Just imagine 500,000 farmers giving Rupees 2 to produce a film, the first crowdfunded
01:00film.
01:01What a story by itself.
01:03And it still holds.
01:04It talks about caste, it talks about women empowerment, it talks about so many complexities
01:10of what we have in India.
01:13And still, it's so modern in many ways.
01:17And it would be a shame if the negative had gone or we would not be able to see it the
01:21way we should have seen.
01:32Could you explain to our viewers why archiving and restoration is important?
01:38And how do you pick the subject?
01:40There's a saying which I say to everyone that unless you know where you came from, you will
01:45not know where to go.
01:47That's a sense of human civilization.
01:49The reason why we archive is that we've got to keep looking back and seeing what has been
01:54created, what has been part of history, who we are and where we came from.
01:59Van Gogh was a very prolific painter, right?
02:01He painted a painting a day, whether it was a sunflower or any of it.
02:05Now it's in the museum in Amsterdam.
02:07How much they must have spent to preserve it.
02:09So any piece of art, unless you recognize it as an art form, in India we didn't recognize
02:15films as an art form.
02:16We always thought of them as entertainment.
02:19But when you really look deep and you see that in the 70s and the 80s, look at the great
02:25filmmakers like Vimal Roy and Gurudutta and Raj Kapoor.
02:29They almost combined the commercial with the art and they were able to bring in such beautiful
02:34films which reflected its people.
02:37And unless we recognize them as an art form, we'll never be able to think of it, you know,
02:42to restore them.
02:43We'll always say, can we do it cheaply?
02:44Can we do it in one lakh or two lakhs?
02:47But when you look at it from an art perspective, then the cost doesn't matter.
02:56Restoration is an ongoing process.
02:58And there have been so many people who are from the contemporary world who lost their films.
03:04Naseesa was talking about Mirch Masala, which is not that far back.
03:07I can give you many, many references of many big films where the negatives are almost gone.
03:12And many people don't even realize the difference what is on YouTube and what the resolution
03:16of a celluloid film is.
03:18The resolution of a celluloid film is almost 24K.
03:21If you look at this, there's no modern building.
03:23It's all classical.
03:25To restore these buildings and to bring it back, there is a cost to it.
03:29So restoration is costly.
03:31And I really sometimes fail to understand that in India we have so many restoration
03:36companies which are giving very cheap restorations.
03:39How can you restore a film?
03:41Because it's almost, you're doing 24 frames per second, you're almost looking at each
03:45frame, you're almost digitizing them, bringing it back.
03:48There is a lot of work on it and it is costly.
03:53Every day we get films from everywhere.
03:57And whenever I want to restore a film, I always see what materials are there.
04:02But we've always had terrible material.
04:05The reason is that that's why it's so exciting because you're bringing back that film back
04:10onto the screen, which was almost going.
04:16And I think the best compliment came from Shyam Benegal.
04:20When I showed it to him, he said it looks better than what it was when he had released it.
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