The casting in this particular script is unusual - after all, why would two German guys be working on a project on Indian cinema, that too in Bangalore? It's a question that Sebastian Lutgert, one of the two protagonists, begins with before the small audience that has gathered one mosquito-infested evening at Jaaga in Bangalore, a community space for innovation in different fields as well as a venue. In all the brouhaha over 100 years of Indian cinema, Lutgert and fellow-German Jan Gerber have been working on a tribute of their own - an annotated online archive of Indian cinema, www.indiancine.ma.
The project takes off from Indian copyright laws according to which copyright for films expires after 60 years from the date of release. The primary source of the archives is Aashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willeman's Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema from which over 25,000 entries have been sourced, though at a little over 200 films, the number of films for which video is available is relatively small at the moment.
Despite this, as Lutgert takes the audience through the website during the preview that evening, one can sense the potential it could have for research scholars, institutes or just anyone interested in cinema. Essentially for research and resource, the site has been designed so that one can also watch a full movie if its copyright has lapsed. First off is the fact that it is an archive of Indian cinema and not just Bollywood - Hindi films still dominate, of course, with over 3,000-odd entries but there are also entries on films in every other Indian language, including those like Bodo, Konkani, Awadhi and Brijbhasha. The amount of information on each is not uniform, though, particularly since the website will be officially launched only later this year. The site uses pan.do/ra, a free open source platform the duo developed for media archives, which offers users a number of options in navigation, search and viewing. For example, you can choose "view with map" and a Google map with multicoloured dots appears. The dots represent references to places in the films. South America has a single dot - click on it and you will see that the reference is to a line from the 1959 Ritwik Ghatak film Bari Theke Paliye (the line goes "Which river? The Amazon basin in South America").
"The amount of films we have video for is tiny but we hope that it will grow. We will never be able to find every single film and it's not our ambition either. But, it would be worth it to make an effort to find films on specific directors or a specific theme," says Lutgert when we meet the next day to chat a bit more about the whats, whys and wherefores. The out-of-copyright films they have uploaded so far are what have already been released on DVD. For many out-of-copyright films there are no prints available but with every passing year as copyright expires for a new set of films, it would get progressively easier to get films.
Lutgert, 39, and Gerber, 32, had been working in Internet technology in Germany and were, as Lutgert says, interested in the intersection of technology and arts and the politics of it. "It's a bit difficult to explain what we do really because it's not one single field. We are not people who produce websites, though a website might come out of our work. And we are not artists who produce works for galleries though a work might show up there." Gerber is currently an artist in residence at Jaaga. The two came to India in 2008 and began working on pad.ma, short for Public Access Digital Media Archive, an archive of text-annotated videos and a predecessor of sorts of indiancine.ma. They say they knew this was the year in which India celebrates 100 years of cinema and so always wanted to do something around it but "it only became concrete in the last month or so."
The institutes they are collaborating with so far include Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi and Jadavpur University in Kolkata. But there are challenges. The Film Archives, for instance, deals with celluloid prints which can't be imported directly. "But we'd love to talk to them about how we could put some of their material online. It would be interesting to think of ways to make celluloid films accessible more easily in a digital format without having to go through the time-consuming and expensive process of professional restoration," says Lutgert. The project, the two repeatedly emphasise, is still at a very early stage and is bound to change in the coming months.
But were they fans of Indian cinema, before embarking on indiancine.ma? "Well, I wouldn't call myself an enthusiast of Indian cinema, or of any national cinema in particular. But currently it's 100 years, so it's a reason to look at it," says Gerber adding that he hopes to see a lot more of Indian cinema through their project. Lutgert says he finds the "situation" itself interesting, not just the films. "It's the second largest film industry. So the way films are produced, distributed, their influence on African cinema, the grey market, all make for a super interesting system, especially when you compare it to Hollywood, which can be very rigid."
(The website, www.indiancine.ma, is live but will be officially launched later this year)
