Another icon of Indian Cinema passed away this week: PK Nair.
Founder Director of the National Film Archives of India, the pioneer of film preservation in India. There isn't much that I can add about Nair Sahab that is not already well known.
In our days at FTII (in another era!), Nair Sahab was the quiet figure sitting in the back seats, with a torch mounted pen and a pad in hand, silently making notes in every screening. It was the first time a lot of us had seen the device- a torch with a ball point pen. when I asked he said it was given to him somewhere and was useful, and easier to use than the separate devices (torch & pen) that he used till that time.
To the students of FTII, Nair Sahab and the NFAI were of course magic. Every film opened our eyes and minds into new directions, new cultures, new ways of using film language. Before you knew it, we had drifted away from the worlds of Hindi Cinema and Hollywood that we had grown up with.
In the eighties, (the pre VHS, DVD & online days of cinema), NFAI used to get a fair amount of visitors from the cinema industry, some wanting to catch up on movies, others benchmarking themselves against classics. At those times, you got to see the respect that Nair Sahab really commanded. I guess he must have needed that respected, otherwise the producers would never agree to give him film prints for preservation.
If you spoke to him Nair Sahab could tell you fascinating stories of how each print in the archives had been procured. Though to be fair, at that time we were too young to appreciate the value of those stories.
I did see him in Pune in recent years, the physical decline was there but the spirit was there for all to see. I guess the going away of the body was a matter of time.
Like Prof Satish Bahadur before him, PK Nair started a new path. Now that he is no more, we as his students, have to follow on that road.
Can't let the flame die out!
Founder Director of the National Film Archives of India, the pioneer of film preservation in India. There isn't much that I can add about Nair Sahab that is not already well known.
In our days at FTII (in another era!), Nair Sahab was the quiet figure sitting in the back seats, with a torch mounted pen and a pad in hand, silently making notes in every screening. It was the first time a lot of us had seen the device- a torch with a ball point pen. when I asked he said it was given to him somewhere and was useful, and easier to use than the separate devices (torch & pen) that he used till that time.
To the students of FTII, Nair Sahab and the NFAI were of course magic. Every film opened our eyes and minds into new directions, new cultures, new ways of using film language. Before you knew it, we had drifted away from the worlds of Hindi Cinema and Hollywood that we had grown up with.
In the eighties, (the pre VHS, DVD & online days of cinema), NFAI used to get a fair amount of visitors from the cinema industry, some wanting to catch up on movies, others benchmarking themselves against classics. At those times, you got to see the respect that Nair Sahab really commanded. I guess he must have needed that respected, otherwise the producers would never agree to give him film prints for preservation.
If you spoke to him Nair Sahab could tell you fascinating stories of how each print in the archives had been procured. Though to be fair, at that time we were too young to appreciate the value of those stories.
I did see him in Pune in recent years, the physical decline was there but the spirit was there for all to see. I guess the going away of the body was a matter of time.
Like Prof Satish Bahadur before him, PK Nair started a new path. Now that he is no more, we as his students, have to follow on that road.
Can't let the flame die out!
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