This presentation offers a set of ‘theses’ on celluloid, taking as an example what I propose are five distinct stages in the career of Ritwik Ghatak’s famous Titash Ekti Nadir Naam.

There are, says Giovanna Fossati (in From Grain To Pixel: The Archival Life Of Film In Transition, 2009), two ways for an archive to approach the digital challenge to celluloid. One ‘identifies the advent of digital technology as a radical change in the nature of the medium’, and a second ‘inscribes digital technology in a broader media landscape where film is one of the participants’. Eminent film historians defend both sides.

The first category, she says, traces to Andre Bazin’s reflection (from Ontology of the Photographic Image) on the photographic image’s unique power of transferring the “reality from the thing to its reproduction”. This is a crucial thesis ‘dear to many film archivists’. But its downside is that, if taken to an extreme, it necessarily ‘fuels the idea that “digital film” is not film anymore, and that it therefore represents the end of film as we know it’.

Clearly Fossati is making a mistake here. Clearly the digital version of a film is not not the film, and yet it is clearly something new. Is this a copy, then? A new iteration? Trying to navigate this most foundational of all archival challenges, I shall explore the afterlife of what was the cinema by adapting the original Bazininan ‘ontology’ a little bit further. We will look in a little more detail at what that transfer from reality to reproduction entails, and what a radical conception of the archive might look like. Using Ghatak’s Titash as an example, I shall split Bazin’s Ontology into five. I will then offer a set of theses on celluloid film.

Ontology A: In 1981 when Safdar Hashmi organized the Delhi retrospective at Delhi’s Pyarelal Bhavan, there was no Titash in the lineup. Ghatak’s masterpiece was presented then as an unfinished film possibly lost, thus a Missing Film on the revered level of Orson Welles’ Don Quixote or Eisenstein’s Bezhin Meadow, as well as – an incredibly important category in Indian cinema – a film that would live on only in memory.

Ontology B: Three years later, in November 1984, a print sourced from Bangladesh was screened at the Nantes Film Festival. Shown for perhaps the first time after Ghatak died, it was an unsubtitled, sprawling, crazy, three hours and fifteen minutes version: yet another classic category of cinema, the archival equivalent of the objet trouvé.

Ontology C: That same year, Ritaban Ghatak claimed to possess a 16 mm print that he claimed was the director’s cut. We had no access to this, but it nevertheless fulfilled FIAF’s definition of originality as original material. We had our Original Artefact.

Ontology D: Inevitably, what followed was an official cut, 45 mins less than what both Nantes and Pesaro had shown, cleaner, seemingly more romantic, more comprehensible, more tragic. We now had the classic category of the Restored film. Typically, film restorers claim fidelity to the original work: restoration D seeks to eliminate A.

Ontology E: Then came the final twist, the final war on memory: the Digital Remaster, produced in the Cineteca Bologna and now marketed by Criterion, the glistening artefact scrubbed clean, it has a new roll call of thank-yous in the credits which include Giorgio Armani, Cartier, Qatar Airways and the Qatar Museums Authority. Memory was finally buried. Or was it?

The ten ‘theses’ on cinema are placed in the digital ‘afterlife’ of film, when post-celluloid forms reproduce cinema and also exist in some sort of war of position with the memory of what used to be cinema. It queries the ‘war on memory’ that digitization presents, and asks how this might transform our understanding of the film archive, both as an institution and as popular practice.

Suggested reading: Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Ten Theses on Celluloid.

In this session Dilip Menon shall argue that films serve as a parallel archive and supplement the historical imagination of modern India. They not only reflect the conditions of a time as envisaged by auteur directors but provide an alternative time space that brings together the past present and future. They also imagine a desirable present and utopian future. 

In this session the speaker talks about his love for editing old film archive footage, as it offers many possibilities to imagine or reimagine the past. Used well it can add multiple layers to storytelling and play with time in a way that contemporary footage cannot. Seeing the lead character in a story young, in an old photograph and as an old person now is a fantastic tool to understand or imagine the life they have led and can be extremely important in creating the necessary curiosity and involvement from an audience. It adds a different dimension to the story. Working with archive and sound can create an extraordinary immediacy, making the film a notable experience, allowing audiences to witness the past as it unfolded without the fog of memory. It can surprisingly showcase how far the human race has come or how far they still have to go.

Scholars of Indian cinema have for long been confronted with the challenges posed by the limited holdings of the celluloid archive. They have worked around this absence by assembling an expanded archive which looks to non-celluloid resources for information about the cinema. By this we mean tracking reference to and remediation of cinema in sound media like gramophones and cassettes and audio-files, in evolving video formats, in print and paper, in photography and visual culture. There is a corollary to this agenda, that such an archive is always an intermedial archive, relating to a dynamic transfer and circulation of sensory features amongst media. In Expanded Cinema, Gene Youngblood invokes the artist John Mchale to make this point: “The cinema isn’t just something inside the environment; the intermedia network of cinema, television, radio, magazines, books, and newspapers is our environment, a service environment that carries the message of the social organism. It establishes meaning in life, creates mediating channels between man and man, man and society.” (sic.)

While drawing on this intermedia argument, Ravi Vasudevan also suggests that the archive of cinema needs to attend to certain neglected film-types, amongst which he particularly focuses on the short information film. Short information film is associated with genres such as the newsreel and state propaganda, a host of minor genres such as topicals, actualities and scenics, educational, instructional and process (how-to-make) films, travel and cultural films, promotional, public relations and advertising films. It is important to stress that the short film crossed amateur and professional practices. This blurred line, along with the other elements he uses to describe the short film resonate with contemporary video, suggesting a long and dynamic technological history. While appearing “minor”, short film is also associated with the more ambitious concept of the documentary film, and the term documentary was often used interchangeably with the short information film in the South Asia context. He holds that particular connotation at a distance, preferring to stick to the more modest category of information.

To focus on the short film expands the archive of cinema by addressing the history of celluloid as one differentiated by formats – 35mm, 16mm, 8mm, 9.5mm, later Super 8 – and thereby also highlighting the differentiated circuits, forms of circulation and of exhibition that made up the history of cinema. Short film moves the archive beyond the cinema theatres into a host of spaces and publics, facilitating the possibility of capturing local and embodied experiences of the cinema, and generating media infrastructures that were used by feature film distributors as well. Dispersed into a variety of sites and used for a variety of functions, this is a dimension of the film archive that speaks to a much wider and deeper penetration of the social world by cinema.  

In the mid-1990s Umashankar Manthravadi began his research in acoustic archaeology by measuring the acoustic properties of Ranigumpha, a double-storied structure of rock-cut caves dating back to circa third century BCE, generally believed to have been a monastery, but arguably a theatre. One day he was on site making some tests with his headphones on when an officer of the Archaeological Survey of India came up to him and pried, “So, can you hear them?” Hear whom, exactly? Or what? The people who built the place? The sounds once made?

The officer’s question will echo through this discussion with Umashankar, who began his career as a journalist in Madras in 1967 but quit a year into the Emergency and moved to Delhi. There he found himself working as a freelance sound recordist for independent documentary films and experimental television productions. From this vantage point we will ask: what does it mean for cinema to try and listen to the past, and to its absence which remains. Positing the past as that which cannot be captured, the session will attend to what is lost but nevertheless always with us, a collectivity across time beyond possession, instrumentalisation, and accumulation.