In a boost to film preservation in the country which is celebrating 100 years of Indian cinema, "Runumi", written and directed by late writer and Xatriya dance exponent Suresh Chandra Goswami, has undergone digital audio and video restoration after a painstaking process of manual cleaning at the restoration laboratory that cost around Rs 6.5 lakh.
"About 85 per cent of the film could be salvaged by the technical and restoration staff of NFAI. The print was sent for digital restoration after the preliminary manual checking, cleaning and repairing.
"The restoration project had posed a huge challenge as the condition of the film was very, very poor," says NFAI director Prashant Pathrabe, who oversaw the restoration after the untimely demise of his predecessor Vijay Jadhav, who had taken the initiative to restore after hearing about its recovery.
Going into the technicalities, he said, "The 2K scanning was done at a very slow rate, at 5/6 frames per second. Damaged frames were corrected from the adjacent frames. This project took nearly 1650 man-hours of restoration (digital) and expertise of our team to achieve reasonably good visual quality for viewing.
"The total number of frames that were worked upon was 1,31,061 (about 91 minutes in length) of content with 11 reels scanned and restored, out of 13 reels originally present in the title. The reels numbered "08" and "09" could not be scanned as they had deteriorated and decomposed beyond recovery."
NFAI has also done the English subtitling of the film, and has sent a master DVD to Goswami's grandson and National Award-winning film critic Utpal Borpujari.
The 1952 film, based on Goswami's highly-successful stage adaptation of Henrik Isben's play "The Warriors of Helgeland", was the ninth movie to be made in the Assamese language. Its songs, set to tune by Darpa Sarma, the father of Jitu of the famed Jitu-Tapan duo, and sung by Ivy Baruah, Sewali Sarma, Swarna Devi and Prafulla Baruah, became very popular.
"It is definitely heartening that NFAI has been able to save about 85 per cent of the print that was found lying inside a steel trunk for more than four decades in the extreme humid conditions of Assam.
"Coming at a time when we are celebrating 100 years of Indian cinema, this story of restoration of the lost-and-found film should be an example of the urgent need for people having possession of old film prints and negatives to get them scientifically restored and archived before they are lost forever," says Borpujari.
