Dress Circle | Restoring Pather Panchali is not a violation of authorship and sanctity

Cinema’s brush with technology has always resulted in a generational shift, but not without controversies. The recent attempt to add colour to the Satyajit Rai black and white classic Pather Panchali and the decision of producers to release their new films directly on the OTT platform Amazon Prime were no exceptions.

We have discussed the issue of direct OTT releases in a previous edition of this column. Let us look at the issue of releasing coloured and digitally enhanced versions of classics in this part.

Aniket Bera, a professor of artificial intelligence (AI) at the University of Maryland in the United States coloured Pather Panchali and released a trailer online. Purists, including filmmakers and personalities from literature and culture, especially Bengalis, were soon up in arms protesting against the project. For them, the classics are best left in their original form. Many shared the nostalgia of watching the movie on a film projector in black and white, which the experience of watching the digitally enhanced and coloured version can never match.

I’m no fan of AI altering the texture of films to current standards, neither do I endorse indiscriminate tinkering with someone else’s work. It is pertinent to remember that the film prints of Satyajit Ray’s classics were already in ruins by the time Ray died in 1992. The prints of the Apu trilogy, of which Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road - 1955) is the first film and Aparajito (The Unvanquished - 1956) and Apur Sansar (The World of Apu - 1959) being the others, was an important set that the world wanted to preserve. The prints of these films were moved to Henderson Film Labs in London soon after Ray’s death for restoration. However, within a year, a nitrate explosion there severely damaged the film prints and made them unusable.

Even if a film’s print is damaged, the Academy Film Archive archives it with utmost care in its vaults. The Criterion Collection, the American company that focuses on restoring and digitally distributing important classics, discovered these negatives and put them through their signature restoration process that involve rehydration, repair and 4K scanning, spending over 1000 hours of their technicians’ time. This resulted in a remarkable improvement over the grainy black and white print with noise. Criterion released the trilogy as a collector’s set that includes a couple of Ray documentaries, behind-the-scenes footages, interviews, TV programmes, booklets and so on in Blu-ray format worldwide.

Compared to the restoration process, the digital colouring that Aniket Bera did can be considered purely cosmetic in nature. Parts of some of the old black and white classics were coloured by hand in early 1900s. Parts of French illusionist and director George_Méliès’s film prints were hand-painted by artists in Elisabeth Thuillier's coloring lab in Paris. In 1912, the first full-length feature film The Miracle was hand-colored and released. Thuillier lead a team of two hundred artists who painted directly on film stock with brushes and more than twenty separate shades. The next decade saw the colouring process picking up steam with many filmmakers enhancing select sequences of their black and white films in colour. Digital colourisation took over by the 70s and the process reached maturity by the 80s.

When the media mogul and founder of CNN Ted Turner told the media in 1988 that he was considering colorizing Citizen Kane, all hell broke loose. The public outcry increased when director Henry Jaglom revealed that Orson Welles had implored him to protect Citizen Kane from being colorised before his death. Turner later gave up the move. As a proof of what was attempted, a one-minute colorized footage of Citizen Kane was included in a documentary produced by BBC in 1991. The pace of restoration of old classics and making them accessible to general public did not stop with any of these controversies. Many cartoons, serials and films were colourised for TV and video.

Ray had remarked that he wants his films to be remembered even after he’s gone. Many of world’s renowned filmmakers including Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Abbas Kiarostami, François Truffaut, Carlos Saura, Wes Anderson, and Christopher Nolan had paid glowing tributes to Ray stating that Ray films had a great influence on their body of work.

There is no doubt that the 4K restoration, upscaling and colouring process can bring many lost films to life and make those films that are deteriorated accessible to the new generation.

No one can claim that Ray was against using technology or colour. A number of his productions were in colour (some in Eastman colour). The Ray we know was not averse to using colour or technology in films to achieve the right results. After a point in his career, Ray started cranking the camera himself and found innovative ways of harnessing natural light to achieve “bounce” lighting. He used color very carefully and did not like the laboratory to do any color corrections to his footages later.

With this as the golden rule, it’s fair to demand that any upscaling or AI colouring of Ray films must be done by fully adhering to his philosophy and aesthetics. Restoration should reimagine the film as how Ray would have filmed it if he had colour photography at that time, with minimal use of colour.

As a tribute to Ray’s classic, director Kaushik Ganguly made the film Apur Panchali based on the life of Subir Banerjee, the actor who played Apu in Pather Panchali. I remember watching the film at a film festival with Ganguly and Banerjee in attendance and later having a word with both of them on how the film that juxtaposes the similarities between the life of Subir Banerjee and the iconic character Apu came along. Ganguly won the best director award for the film in the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) that year. You can see some of the original footage from Pather Panchali and the flashback portions in majestic black and white.

The original, grainy copies of Pather Panchali will continue to exist for the purists and historians to watch again. The high-definition restored version in black and white as well as the AI-coloured version would make more and more people from all over the world watch the classic and keep it alive. It is also important to add a disclaimer that it is a colourised version that the viewer is watching, and not Ray’s original version.

The quality of archiving films is abysmal in this country due to which we had lost many precious works. Discouraging the adoption of technology for restoring and enhancing old films would not do any good to preserving and promoting the art.

Those who argue that restoration and colouring will violate the authorship and the sanctity of the original work should think for a moment what would have happened if novelist Bibhutibhusan Banerjee had decided not to let anyone tinker with his work. Would we have got that screen-filling bright eye of Apu that defined Indian cinema for the world?

Japanese auteur Akira Kurasawa watched Pather Panchali in 1975 and remarked that “to live without seeing the films of the Indian director Satyajit Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon. It is the kind of cinema that flows with the serenity and nobility of a big river.” Do we want a whole generation to live without seeing the sun or the moon?

(Dress Circle is a weekly column on films. The author is a communication professional and film enthusiast. Read his past works here.)