Shivendra Singh interview: How ‘Celluloid Man’ PK Nair led him to work on film heritage

Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, who has made award winning documentaries like ‘Celluloid Man’, speaks about his journey through films that led him to be a pioneer in film preservation and restoration in India.
Shivendra Singh Dungarpur
Shivendra Singh Dungarpur
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In his days as a student at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur and his friends had been intimidated by PK Nair, who’d show up in the campus and screen films for them. He was a man of great importance, the founder of the National Film Archives of India (NFAI), who had just retired the year before Shivendra joined the FTII. Neither Shivendra nor Nair knew that, years from then, they’d make a film together about the astonishing journey that the older man took to build the archive of Indian films. The making of that film, Celluloid Man, would lead Shivendra to found the Film Heritage Foundation, and become a pioneer of film preservation and restoration in the country.

Running about for the film preservation workshop he has put together in Thiruvananthapuram – the ninth such across India – Shivendra barely has the time to recall the story that led him here. But Thiruvananthapuram is a special place for him, he says — this is where PK Nair fell in love with cinema, as he watched films seated in the sand outside the Padmanabha Theatre.

Shivendra’s childhood in Bihar was a world away, but he too was drawn to the magic of cinema from a young age. “We had a projectionist called Chandi Mistry who would come to our house every evening, on his bicycle. He would stream the films of [American comedians] Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Danny Kaye and home movies of his and other families. There was a room called the thanda room (cold room) with a glass cupboard full of films. I would run into the room and pick out a film and wait for Chandi Mistry. He would thread the reel through the projector and I would watch the image go upside down first, and then straighten up on the screen. It fascinated me to watch the light reach the screen and the images come alive,” Shivendra says, bringing to mind a similar relationship between a child and a projectionist in the Italian masterpiece, Cinema Paradiso

This was not all that long ago — it was the 1970s and the time of Amitabh Bachchan’s entry into Bollywood. Shivendra’s grandmother, Usharani, was a great lover of Hindi cinema and would take him to Patna to watch movies. While Pakeezah was her favourite, Haathi Mere Saathi was the one that first crushed him. He used to go to school on an elephant and could relate to the film so much that he realised that cinema could be “such a reflection of the life around you” and became “crazier” in his passion for the art. 

His parents did not want him to take up films. They wanted him to study law at Cambridge. Shivendra was a promising student too — he did well at The Doon School in Dehradun and was majoring in History at St Stephen’s in Delhi when he expressed his desire to try his hand in films. “My classmate Chandrachur Singh (who would be a noted actor in the mid 90s in movies like Maachis and Tere Mere Sapne) and I would dream about working in films, he as an actor and I as a director. Chandrachur went to Bombay to try his luck. I decided to go and work with [poet, lyricist, and filmmaker] Gulzar.”

The decision was not taken lightly by the family — his father did not speak to him for two years after that. Shivendra went to Mumbai and stayed with a friend and his aunt. The aunt knew Gulzar and put him in touch with the filmmaker. 

Gulzar
GulzarCourtesy - Wiki Commons / Bollywood Hungama / CCBYSA3

Shivendra worked with Gulzar in Lekin (1990) as an assistant and really enjoyed that stint. “I wasn't exposed to such kinds of films before, to [Satyajit] Ray or art house cinema.” It was also Gulzar who made him join the FTII. However, Shivendra was initially upset by the suggestion, thinking that Gulzar was trying to get rid of him.

But the years at the FTII turned out to be his most beautiful, he says. He learned of many great filmmakers, of Aravindan, Adoor, John Abraham, and the new wave directors. He understood the importance of regional cinema. 

In his final year, he got his break when a producer saw the diploma film he made with a then struggling Irrfan Khan. “It was about a man who was afraid of his shadow,” Shivendra says dreamily of the time he toyed with fiction. A producer who liked the work said he would fund a full feature of Shivendra. 

“I wrote a script with two friends, Karan Bali and Sriram Raghavan (who would go on to be a renowned filmmaker). It was a thriller. Smitten by a location I watched in a Bharathan film, I went to shoot the film in Alappuzha, staying at the Prince Hotel there, asking director Fazil to give the first clap. The year was 1994. We had people from the National School of Drama to act. We had Sanjay and Karisma. We picked up Rani Mukherjee from her Computer class (Chandrachur had introduced her as the cousin of Kajol who was in his acting class). The music director was new to Hindi cinema, AR Rahman. We shot 30% of the film, but then something went wrong and the producer could not fund the film. My film was shelved. Those were days when such things were considered a bad omen. I was considered a bad omen. I had signed two other films but everything went out of the window. I struggled for six to seven years before I got into advertising.”

Shivendra
Shivendra Courtesy - Film Heritage Foundation

There he made it big, creating more than a thousand commercials with big names and taking his production house – Dungarpur Films – to heights. The next turning point came when he was on a flight, when he came across an interview of legendary American filmmaker Martin Scorsese and the Film Foundation he ran for film preservation and restoration. Shivendra felt a tug in his heart. He had been so lost in his advertising career that he had almost forgotten the history of cinema, a pet area that was engraved in him, he says. He went to Bologna in Italy, to the restoration laboratory that Martin spoke about and witnessed how the best of world cinema was being restored. 

“I thought of Pune, I thought of PK Nair. He was still living just outside the institute because he could not leave the archives he helped build, it was his baby. I met him, took him to NFAI. That evolved into Celluloid Man. I thought I will give him attention and thereby give the cause attention,” Shivendra says. 

Celluloid Man made a big impact – travelling to 40 film festivals across the world – and led Shivendra to found the Film Heritage Foundation in 2014. He felt it was imperative to build on the archive that PK Nair had worked so hard on. Nair, before passing away, left all his material to Shivendra, trusting him to do the rest of the work. “When I went to Bologna, they had wanted to restore [the 1948 Hindi film] Kalpana but needed the material for it. I came back and sat outside the NFAI until they gave me the material for the restoration.”

He had not realised the enormity of the work before him. There were so many film industries in India, in so many different languages. Shivendra did a little course himself and then began organising workshops on restoration and preservation across the country when he realised they needed people to look after the material. “We have trained over 400 people, held workshops across India, built our own archive with over 500 films.”

From the film preservation and restoration workshop in Thiruvananthapuram
From the film preservation and restoration workshop in Thiruvananthapuram

Restoration is a very difficult and time consuming process. When he chose to restore Aravindan’s Thampu  (“Martin wanted to restore that and I wanted to do Kummatty”), it took him two years. Getting the material was not easy at all, both being movies of the late 70s. 

“Many of the materials were in terrible condition. I was determined that films had to be restored from different parts of India, that regional cinema had to be picked up. So we worked on Ishanou (1990)  from Manipur, Ghatashraddha (1977) from Karnataka and Maya Miriga (1984) from Odisha. We did Kummatty and Thampu during the COVID-19 pandemic. The next film we are working on is John Abraham’s Amma Ariyan (1986).”

Shivendra Singh Dungarpur
After Aravindan’s Kummatty, Film Heritage Foundation to restore Amma Ariyan

The Foundation also collects rare materials. Shivendra is very excited about a bag full of material about JC Daniel, the first filmmaker in Malayalam, that he obtained from a collector in Kerala. On November 14, the last day of his workshop in Thiruvananthapuram, he will bring veteran actor Madhu to the stage. Chemmeen, the iconic film led by veteran Malayalam actors Madhu and Sheela and the late Sathyan, is still to be restored. It is apt, Shivendra says, that Sheela had come for the inauguration of the workshop and Madhu for its conclusion.

In between the travels for the Foundation, Shivendra made two more documentaries – a seven-hour-long one called CzechMate: In Search of Jiří Menzel, that he had begun even before Celluloid Man and finished in 2018, and another documentary called The Immortals. Shivendra is also the festival director of the Mumbai Film Festival. He misses being on a film set, he says, but the responsibility he has taken up is too big. Recalling a quote from Martin Scorsese, he says, “This work of preserving our film heritage, keeping them alive is much more valuable than the films I could make.” 

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