Documentarian Shivendra on challenges and joy of reclaiming the reel

From Sahir Ludhianvi's letters to personal archives of film personalities, how documentarian Shivendra Dungarpur is helping preserve cine heritage

Lost things have a way of finding their way to Shivendra Singh Dungarpur. Earlier this year the only 35mm print of Celluloid Man, his documentary about the life and times of film archivist P K Nair, was reportedly misplaced by FedEx while being ferried back from a screening in Vienna. Within days of his making heartfelt appeals on social media, which were picked up by newspapers, the delivery company located and returned the shipment. It is such sincere requests and a vast network of friends online and offline that have allowed Dungarpur to build Film Heritage Foundation (FHF), a Mumbai-based not-for-profit that has been finding and reviving film memorabilia for nearly five years now. 

Recently, for instance, a number of letters, photographs and booklets of the lyricist Sahir Ludhianvi were brought to his attention by one of the many raddiwallahs he has befriended in the city. They call as soon as anything arrives bearing pictures of movie stars. The items are currently being cleaned and catalogued. The 49-year-old and his team have just finalised a plan, in his Tardeo headquarters, to restore the worn original reels of Shyam Benegal’s Mandi (1983) when he breaks for tea and a conversation. Artefacts and literature (P C Barua’s stopwatch, copies of Filmindia) are preserved in the same South Mumbai space, while more than 300 films (personal archives of Amitabh Bachchan, Govind Nihalani among them) in formats including 35mm, 16mm and 8mm are in another temperature-controlled facility in Navi Mumbai.

The day-to-day of archiving the stylish universe of cinema is rather unglamorous. By the waiting area in the FHF office, staff members debate the merits of gel-based insecticide versus sprays for safeguarding objects from pests and the elements. That saving films requires this sort of low-key technical knowledge is something FHF has been trying to teach through its annual travelling workshops, which will have a fifth edition in Hyderabad this December. Each time, the team picks a new city and sets up labs where participants are taught how to unspool vinegar-smelling, hardened celluloid, or to catalogue and conserve tattered photographs.

It is expensive, too. To drum up attention for the cause, Dungarpur's film world contacts including Martin Scorsese and Kamal Hassan wrote testimonials for the workshops. Last year, he invited Christopher Nolan to India to talk about the importance of photochemical material. He hopes such activities will raise funds for the task of maintaining repositories. So far, global bodies like International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) and British Film Institute (BFI) have partnered with him, and some corporate houses have sponsored various workshops.

Documentarian Shivendra Dungarpur

When the FHF does not have the resources to salvage footage, it sends it to outside connections. This happened with the lone surviving reel of Mogacho Aunndo, the first-ever Konkani film, which was restored by the Cineteca di Bologna in Italy. Filmmaker Bardroy Baretto, who sourced and passed on that film, recalls getting anxious calls from Dungarpur through the day with precise instructions for care.

In so far as saving film heritage is “a battle”, Dungarpur views the emerging crop of archivists as “an army”. The scope of their fight has been beyond just the national. After being trained, Dammith Fonseka, a scholar from Sri Lanka, reportedly went on to revive archiving efforts in his country. Nepalese scholars have participated too, and this year they are likely to be joined by candidates from Afghanistan. 

Dungarpur seems to map his world according to cinema: his building is a short walk away from Benegal’s office, he says, adding they are both just a few minutes from where producer-director Ardeshir Irani had his erstwhile Imperial Studio. Even if heritage preservation has been a self-funded venture, the archivist owes the beginnings of this interest in cinema to his roots in the royal family of Dungarpur. His father, Samar Singh, always filmed family holidays and wildlife with a Super 8mm camera, before cutting the film and fusing it with Kodak cement. His maternal grandparents, both cinephiles living in the Dumraon region of Bihar, had an influence too. Usha Rani, his grandmother, would hire a cinema-place to watch screenings back-to-back, while little Dungarpur explored the hall. And, grandfather Kamal Singh kept a thanda room(cold room) from which reels of Buster Keaton and Howard Hawks titles would be brought out for viewings. 

Filmmaking was still considered an unconventional choice and that road was initially bumpy for him. Along the way he assisted Gulzar, studied at the Film and Television Institute of India, launched a feature film with Rani Mukerji and Chandrachur Singh that was later shelved, and faced a period of unemployment. Stability came around the 2000s, when he stepped into advertising. Of the roughly 800 ad films he worked on, he remembers fondly the first breakthrough, a “film-like” commercial shot in black-and-white for Vim. 

But Dungarpur is a thorough man. The tyranny of “beginnings and endings”, and “time limits” only come in the way of his learning everything about a subject. This prompted him to move away from making brief ads and towards unhurried documentaries. His experiments with non-fiction cinema and film preservation developed simultaneously. He had assisted the World Cinema Project (run by Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation) in its restoration of Uday Shankar's Kalpana (1948). That project took him to Bologna, where he saw restoration performed at levels that made him rue the miserable conditions back home. “After returning, I drove straight to Pune,” he says. His intention was to interview Nair, founder of National Film Archive of India (NFAI) — who had retired but still lived on campus — about the deteriorating state of the archive he had painstakingly built. 

That short video, meant to be shared with the media, turned into a four-hour documentary on Nair, filmed over two years. “I didn’t think I was making a great film.” But Celluloid Man (2012), which critiques the large-scale neglect in archives through the biography of a man who did everything to stave off such decay, is still a festival-circuit success. Dungarpur also made CzechMate (2018), about the Czech New Wave filmmaker Jioi Menzel, which, at seven hours and 15 minutes, is the longest film ever censored in India. He has not given up on fiction filmmaking, and is slowly chipping away at a script.

The collector’s instinct was always there, he says. While in film school, he wrote to Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa and received a handwritten response that left everyone suitably jealous. Dungarpur may not be widely recognised but those in movie and museum circles readily name him as the go-to guide on matters of shot heritage. One steadfast partner in the endeavour has been FHF co-founder and wife Teesha Cherian, a writer-cinephile who is usually seen working in a corner office.

Otherwise, says Dungarpur, saving films in India is a largely lonely affair, dismissed as quixotic or less relevant than other causes. He compares it to the punishing fates of the Greek king Sisyphus and the protagonist in Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982), who each dragged very heavy things up steep hills. “I find it difficult to discuss it with family or even friends.” Routinely, he observes, they pose questions like “Really, you are still continuing with that?” or “Why?”.

Yet optimism seems to lingers behind his jadedness. Anytime acquaintances from filmdom make a trip anywhere in the East, a hopeful Dungarpur reminds them to “please ask around about Alam Ara”, the first talking picture from 1931 which most archivists have written off as lost. If that film is at all extant, it would do well to find him.