A short excerpt from the booklet essay by Mark Cousins.
India's is partially an oral culture, many of the great stories are preserved in people's memories, but Celluloid Man shows that, in the movie world, Nair wanted to change that. He wanted to make a
physical memory bank, a depository of film prints, a place you had to cool and dust. It's the physicality of his story that is striking: the long taxi rides to the relatives of Phalke, the country's first feature
director, to see if they have any rolls of film in their home; the bang on the door at 3am because a filmmaker must see Pasolini's The Gospel According to Matthew there and then; the stripping of miles
of 35mm negatives to harvest their silver to make jewellery. It's a pre-digital epic.
Like all epics, Nair's story has revelations. One of its first is his arrival in Pune, where the great old Prabhat Studios were, in 1961. Walking through the ageing sound stages, he says that he
"entered the space" of cinema in that year. He shows us where a pond could be made on the studio floor, and the great cranes which still work and, in doing so, we can almost see how cinema
took him in its arms. The "studioness" of movies is the magical, otherworldly property that many of us first fell in love with and which caused our cinephilia. As much as anything, Celluloid Man is a story of cinephilia.
It is, of course, an Indian story. Nair rightly says "We are a film conscious nation", though India is more like a continent than a nation. Many of the great Indian film people - Gulzar, Ramesh Sippy (who made Sholay), Shyam Benegal, Mrinal Sen, Adoor Gopalakrishnan - are here, talking about Nair. Each is a world of cinema, a hyperlink to film styles, stories, cultures, times. If you know their work, see this film, if you don't, see this film. If you've seen Kaagaz ke Phool, or if you haven't, this movie is for you. It captures how each part of India has its own films, based on its own language, and also "All India" Hindi cinema, what we now call Bollywood, which floats like a cloud about the country.
Mark Cousins' complete essay, from which this excerpt is taken, appears in the booklet which accompanies the DVD release.
Essay
A short excerpt from the booklet
DVD Reviews
Little White Lies by David Jenkins
Peek-a-boo Magazine by Didier Becu
DVD Beaver by Eric Cotenas
Backseat Mafia by Rob Aldam
E-Film by Michael Ewins
CineVue by Adam Lowes
The Digital Fix by Clydefro Jones
Cinematic Investigations by Harriet Warman
Cinehouse by Shane James
Close-Up Film by Martin Goolsarran
CineOutsider by Slarek
Recommended Viewing by Jonathan Rosenbaum
Sight & Sound by Michael Brooke
Mondo Digital by Nathaniel Thompson
Starburst by Dominic Cuthbert
Little White Lies -
'Best DVDs and Blu-rays 2014'
Film Reviews
The Hollywood Reporter
IBN Live
Eye For Film
bollywoodlife.com
Indian Express
Time Out Mumbai
Crazy Mind's Eye
Connections
(i) Restoration Man
(ii) Interview with Shivendra Singh Dungarpur at DearCinema
(iii) The Celluloid Man: PK Nair and the future of our cinematic past
(iv) BFI: Film preservation
(v) Some basic principles of film and video conservation and preservation - guidance notes
(vi) Celluloid Man - Facebook
(vii) Dungarpur Films
India, 2012
Length / Feature: 150 minutes
Length / Special feature:
13 minutes
Sound: Original stereo 2.0 /
Dolby Digital 5.1 option
Colour and Black & White
Original aspect ratio: 1.85 :1 / 16:9 anamorphic
Languages: English, Hindi, Kannada, Bengali, Malayalam
Subtitles:
English (fixed)
PAL DVD9
Region 0
RRP: £12.99
Release Date: 14 April 2014 Second Run DVD 084