For most cinema aficionados across the globe, instant identification with legendary film-maker Satyajit Ray’s cinema comes with either the celebrated ‘Apu trilogy’ of films (1955-59), or other classics like Charulata, Mahanagar (The Big City) or Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder).
While the above films have been available in high-quality prints abroad and in India owing to their being digitally restored, pristine prints have been lacking for Ray’s other ‘trilogy’ that he made during the 1970s — the so-called ‘Calcutta Trilogy’ beginning with Pratidwandi (The Adversary) in 1970, which was based on a novel by Sunil Gangopadhyay.
Now, the Pune-based National Film Archive of India (NFAI), on the occasion of the great auteur’s birth centenary year (Ray was born in May 1921), has started the process of restoring Ray’s films under the auspices of the National Film Heritage Mission (NFHM) and top of the list is Pratidwandi.
“From start, the priority was to focus on the restoration of those Satyajit Ray films which have not gotten due attention in recent years. Pratidwandi was at the top of the list. Hitherto, the film had been available in poor quality, possibly sourced from a transfer done in the late 1990s or early 2000s. To locate the original camera negative, the NFAI contacted the film’s producer Purnima Dutta. Happily, Ms. Dutta had kept the original camera negatives of Pratidwandi in her possession for last 50 years in Kolkata, which is an incredible feat in itself,” said NFAI Director Prakash Magdum.
Ray’s ‘Calcutta Trilogy’ offers an unforgettable, heart-wrenching showcase of the toll exacted by the great metropolis in turmoil on young, educated men, captured by the director with his trademark depth of feeling. In Pratidwandi, the sensitive, frustrated 25-year-old protagonist Siddhartha (played unforgettably by Dhritiman Chatterjee) searches for a job in vain.
In his biography of Ray titled Satyajit Ray, The Inner Eye: The Biography of a Master Film-Maker, British writer Andrew Robinson notes how the film-maker remembered Calcutta as “a nightmare city” in 1970 at the time of making Pratidwandi, which was set against the rise of the revolutionary Naxalite movement.
“Pratidwandi, along with the other two films that make up the Calcutta Trilogy — Seemabaddha and Jana Aranya, capture the city as a ‘time capsule’ like no other films. There is, of course, director Mrinal Sen’s equally great ‘Calcutta Trilogy’, again filmed and released in the first half of 1970s. But the cinematic rawness that Ray achieved in Pratidwandi was a new high for him, surpassing that of even Pather Panchali in some regards. The upheaval that Calcutta was going through by the end of 1960s and beginning of the 1970s is reflected beautifully, and most importantly, in an accessible manner, in Pratidwandi,” said Mr. Magdum.
Commenting on the negatives, the NFAI Director said he was pleasantly surprised to find them in a decent condition even after five decades.
“The very step for restoration of a film involves sourcing the original camera negative, which is the edited film negative which was used by film-makers during the shooting of the film itself. So, we transported the film’s negatives in a temperature-controlled environment from Kolkata to Pune,” Mr. Magdum said.
State-of-the-art scanners
On the NFAI’s premises, the film is to be first digitised using state-of-the-art archival film scanners manufactured by the Munich-based company ARRI, which is widely known for providing top-notch film cameras through the world, he said.
“These ARRI scanners have the capacity to handle very fragile film material. The original negative of Pratidwandi was scanned [aka digitised] on one of these ARRI scanners in 4K resolution. The digitisation of the film will be followed by restoration, which is an extremely time-consuming activity as it literally involves working on each frame, with one second being equivalent to 24 frames of the scanned film,” says Mr. Magdum, adding that the process will involve removal of scratches and dirt, stabilisation of image and complete colour correction among other things.
In coming months, the NFAI intends to complete the restoration of Pratidwandi, thus giving cineastes worldwide the opportunity to view the film as it looked when it was released 51 years ago.