Iconic Oscar-nominated movie on Partition digitally restored
Project Took 3 Years, Cost Around Rs 1 Crore
There was dirt, dust, tears
and numerous jerks. By the time, researcher Subhash Chheda and director M
S Sathyu, finished watching around 2 lakh frames of `Garam Hawa', the
acclaimed post-Partition saga from the 1970s, it was as good as new and
intact. “Nothing was edited out,“ says Chheda, founder of Indikino
Edutainment that did the work. Retaining every bit of Kaifi Azmi's
dialogues, songs and enhancing the visual appeal of Balraj Sahni's
towering performance in this Ismat Chugtai-story was “a Herculean task“
and took around three years. “Sathyu was with us from day one and
approved each and every frame that we restored. In a sense, he is the
hero of the project,“ says Chheda.
It made big news when `Garam Hawa', which sensitively brought out the plight of a Muslim family after partition, was made part of polit ical science textbooks by NCERT in 2009. The spanking new version of this Oscarnominated movie is ready for a theatrical re-release on Friday and will be screened at PVR screens across the country. To movie buffs, this is great news as prints of several classics are available only as grainy DVDs or You Tube clips, or lost, like the first talkie 'Alam Ara'.
“It is not easy to store negatives as you need to maintain a certain temperature in the storage space. Also, it is expensive,“ says Sathyu. Studios never find space to do it.Digging out the original negative from cold storage and restoring it for around Rs 1 crore was an “expensive experiment“ but necessary if it were to reach new audiences, he says.
One of the first such efforts in India was the restoration of `Mughal-e-Azam' in 2004 with Sterling Investment Corporation sinking in quite a bit of money to ensure a theatrical release and not just on DVD and TV . Chheda, Sathyu and others decided to take the same route and have a fullfledged restoration to make a crystal clear version in 2k resolution and fit for theatres.
Once dirt, grime and stains were cleared from the frames, experts grappled with another problem. “Most of it was shot with handheld cameras. There was lot of shaking and we had to stabilize it,“ says Chheda.
The biggest challenge was audio restoration, which Chheda says no other project here has undertaken. “So far, most restorers recreate the audio. We restored the original sounds and upgraded it to Dolby ,“ says Chheda. That meant, sending the prints to Delux Lab in the US as the technology isn't available here. They scanned the audio from the negative and restored it to the original Mono format but couldn't proceed because of language barrier.Finally , a sound technologist here split the audio to various tracks, including Dolby Digital. “We wanted to retain the originality of the soundtrack (Ustad Aziz Ahmed Khan Warsi) and Balraj sahib's powerful last performance.We came up with solutions as all of us were thrilled to work on it,“ says Chheda.
Individual efforts like these remain one-off events.Much of the film heritage can be regained if producers and studios make space for original reels, says Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, filmmaker and founder-director of Film Heritage Foundation. “Out of the 1,700 silent films, only 5 or 6 survive,“ says Dungapur.“That is why we are organising a workshop in February to train people from across the country in restoration.We need trained personnel to preserve and restore,“ he says.
It made big news when `Garam Hawa', which sensitively brought out the plight of a Muslim family after partition, was made part of polit ical science textbooks by NCERT in 2009. The spanking new version of this Oscarnominated movie is ready for a theatrical re-release on Friday and will be screened at PVR screens across the country. To movie buffs, this is great news as prints of several classics are available only as grainy DVDs or You Tube clips, or lost, like the first talkie 'Alam Ara'.
“It is not easy to store negatives as you need to maintain a certain temperature in the storage space. Also, it is expensive,“ says Sathyu. Studios never find space to do it.Digging out the original negative from cold storage and restoring it for around Rs 1 crore was an “expensive experiment“ but necessary if it were to reach new audiences, he says.
One of the first such efforts in India was the restoration of `Mughal-e-Azam' in 2004 with Sterling Investment Corporation sinking in quite a bit of money to ensure a theatrical release and not just on DVD and TV . Chheda, Sathyu and others decided to take the same route and have a fullfledged restoration to make a crystal clear version in 2k resolution and fit for theatres.
Once dirt, grime and stains were cleared from the frames, experts grappled with another problem. “Most of it was shot with handheld cameras. There was lot of shaking and we had to stabilize it,“ says Chheda.
The biggest challenge was audio restoration, which Chheda says no other project here has undertaken. “So far, most restorers recreate the audio. We restored the original sounds and upgraded it to Dolby ,“ says Chheda. That meant, sending the prints to Delux Lab in the US as the technology isn't available here. They scanned the audio from the negative and restored it to the original Mono format but couldn't proceed because of language barrier.Finally , a sound technologist here split the audio to various tracks, including Dolby Digital. “We wanted to retain the originality of the soundtrack (Ustad Aziz Ahmed Khan Warsi) and Balraj sahib's powerful last performance.We came up with solutions as all of us were thrilled to work on it,“ says Chheda.
Individual efforts like these remain one-off events.Much of the film heritage can be regained if producers and studios make space for original reels, says Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, filmmaker and founder-director of Film Heritage Foundation. “Out of the 1,700 silent films, only 5 or 6 survive,“ says Dungapur.“That is why we are organising a workshop in February to train people from across the country in restoration.We need trained personnel to preserve and restore,“ he says.
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