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P. K. Nair, film archivist and film scholar, was the founder-director of the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) formed in 1964. He was instrumental in acquiring for the archive several landmark Indian films like Dadasaheb Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra and Kaliya Mardan, P. V. Rao’s Marthandavarma, Bombay Talkies films such as Jeevan Naiya, Bandhan, Kangan, Achhut Kanya and Kismet, S. S. Vasan’s Chandralekha and Uday Shankar’s Kalpana.
The first P. K. Nair Memorial lecture will be delivered by Dr. Sudhir Kakar on 22 March, 6:00 pm at the Main Theatre of SRFTI.
22 March, 6:00 PM, Main Theatre
Paramesh Krishnan Nair (6 April 1933 – 4 March 2016), an Indian film archivist and film scholar, was the founder and director of the National Film Archive of India (NFAI). He is regarded as the Henri Langlois of India because of his lifelong dedication towards the preservation of films in India.
Nair was born and brought up in Thiruvanantapuram, Kerala. He graduated in science from the University of Kerala in 1953. His fascination for cinema began with Tamil Mythological films from the 1940s. He pursued a career in filmmaking in Bombay working with eminent filmmakers like Mahboob Khan, Bimal Roy and Hrishikesh Mukherjee. He soon realised he was more inclined to pursue an academic career than filmmaking. He joined the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in March 1961 as a research assistant, where he assisted Marie Seton and Professor Satish Bahadur in initiating and conducting the film appreciation classes of FTII. He also conducted early work to establish the film archive set up as a separate wing of FTII. On the advice of various film archivists from all over the world, whom he was communicating with, the independent autonomous entity for National Film Archive of India (NFAI) was established in 1964.
Nair was appointed the assistant curator of NFAI in 1965. He established the archive from scratch by collecting films from all over the world and was promoted as director of the archive in 1982. He was instrumental in acquiring several landmark Indian films like Dadasaheb Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra and Kaliya Mardan, Bombay Talkies films such as Jeevan Naiya, Bandhan, Kangan, Achhut Kanya and Kismet, S. S. Vasan’s Chandralekha and Uday Shankar’s Kalpana. When he retired in April 1991, he had collected over 12,000 films, including 8,000 were Indian films.
He introduced the students of FTII, film society members and other film study groups in the country to world masters of cinema apart from significant Indian film makers. He was also instrumental in setting up the International Film Festival of Kerala. Nair was awarded the Satyajit Ray Memorial Award in 2008.
SRFTI pays homage to this crusader of Indian cinema by organising a commemoration talk in his honour by an eminent thinker every year. These talks will deal with the idea of archiving and memory in their widest connotations, without restricting themselves to cinema alone. Our endeavour is to initiate wider discussions around different conceptions of memory in our world, the importance of preservation, and its relationship with other aspects of our culture.
The 1st P. K. Nair Memorial lecture will be delivered by Dr. Sudhir Kakar, renowned psychoanalyst, writer and thinker, on 22 March.
Dr. Sudhir Kakar is an eminent psychoanalyst, novelist, and a scholar in the fields of cultural psychology and the psychology of religion. He has been a Professor at IIMA, IIT, Delhi, and at the universities of Harvard, Chicago, McGill, Melbourne, Hawaii, and Vienna. His many honors include the Bhabha, Nehru, ICSSR National Fellowships, Kardiner Award of Columbia University, Boyer Prize for Psychological Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association, Germany’s Goethe Medal, Merck-Tagore Award and Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Le Nouvel Observateur listed him as one of the world’s 25 major thinkers while Die Zeit portrayed him as one of the 21 important thinkers for the 21st century. Kakar is the author/editor of eighteen books of non-fiction and six novels including The Inner World, Shamans, Mystics and Doctors, Tales of Love, Sex and Danger, Intimate Relations, The Analyst and the Mystic, Culture and Psyche and The Indian Psyche.
Cinema and Psychology: A Personal Perspective
From the various psychological perspectives on cinema, this talk will focus on the analysis of spectatorship of Indian popular cinema, its cultural psychology. Beginning with his own promiscuous consumption of popular Hindi films as a child growing up in the 1940s, Dr. Kakar will talk about the various archetypal heroes and heroines over the decades.
