Side Tangent - Celluoid Man

I haven't updated the blog in a few weeks - those freaking Warhol movies threw me off my game - I tried watching Flesh for Frankenstein a couple times and just gave up - ugh.   Add to that me working on a professional certification and moving to Eau Claire, and time of two hrs a pop just hasn't been there.

But in the meantime, I came across another gem on Netflix called Celluloid Man - it is a documentary about a film archivist called P.K. Nair who almost single handed built up India's National Film Archive.   In the process, he saved several Indian films destined for recycling shops where the silver nitrate would be taken off the film stock and sold.   Of course, there's also the age old enemies of moisture, damage, rust, etc.

It was great to see a film again about a guy who loved films so much he'd watch them four or five times a day - he worked out of the Film and Television Institute in Pune, and was building up the archive one reel at a time.  Apparently there were times where if a film on loan came in, he made a pirate copy - (we archivists don't like that word, he said) - and he built up a library of almost 12k films, 8k were Indian.   Some were incomplete or were cut up and had to be figured out how to be reconstructed

He would watch them with students who wanted to be directors, cinematographers, actors, writers, and had a projectionist who wouldn't quit till the last roll was sometimes shown at 3am.  They'd show up at 630am to watch a series of clips for films that had been censored - it was just something to see what a love for film archiving looks like.  Who knows how many times he saw Rashamon or Bicycle Thieves and got to discuss it with other people.

We also saw a bit of the cost - his daughter telling us he wasn't a father in the traditional sense, but now that he was old and slowing down they had a relationship like friends - (not father and daughter) - and you get the sense he isn't a fan of digitizing images - He thought something was lost in that - but of course, we can't all have temperature controlled archives of film canisters lying around.

He wanted to make films but never made a single one.  Arguably he had a bigger impact on film, and certainly Indian film than any one director.   He SAVED these images.  What a wonderful treat.

RB