HYDERABAD: Films conservation is the need of the hour, said
Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, director,
Film Heritage Foundation
(FHF) speaking in the city on Thursday.
He was speaking at ‘Kalapana’, a
Tata Trusts
platform which focuses on the theme of conservation.
“1338 silent films were made in India, of which just 29 survive and this includes Bhishma Pratigya, the first Telugu film. By 1950, we had lost almost 70% of our films, including H.M. Reddy’s Bhakta Prahlad, the first Telugu talkie. The loss of our
film
heritage is a cultural emergency as we continue to lose more films every day in both celluloid and digital formats,” he said.
“We believe that film is an art form that is an integral part of our social and cultural fabric and yet we have to fight for the audiovisual medium to be considered as part of our heritage,” said Dungarpur.
“The aim of the workshop is to remind the Telugu film industry about their rich legacy and the urgent need to safeguard it for posterity while training future film archivists in every aspect of film preservation from film identification, treatment and repair to digital preservation and restoration and data management, to photograph and paper conservation and archive management and curation,” he said.
The lecture was followed by an open air screening of a restored classic, ‘Meghe Dhaka Tara’, a 1960 film by Ritwik Ghatak at the Quli Qutb Shah Heritage Park. Deepika Sorabjee, head, arts and culture, Tata Trusts, said, “With each workshop, the awareness among filmmaking community and the general public increased but the pool of trained conservators has started earnestly.”
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