Five gems of Bengali cinema brought back to life through digital restoration

Restoring a film has always been an extremely difficult task. If the negative is severely damaged, it’s next to impossible. But then there are technology and dedication from few people, which resulted in some unusable negatives to be restored digitally. Many Bengali movies, mainly black and white, still kept locked in dusted rooms, torn and badly damaged, some negatives have become unusable. But in the recent past, few Bengali classics have been restored to a digital format to save the history of Bengali cinema. Here is a list of five very special ones among them.

‘Jalsaghar’ is Satyajit Ray’s finest, Chhabi Biswas’s legendary and one of the greatest Bengali movies ever. But it turned out to be the biggest challenge any lost film has given while restored. When the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) started its work there were no negatives of the film. The restoration had to be done only from a positive print. There was a tremendous amount of dust, bumps, continuous line scratches, mould and flickering in the source print.

Not just Satyajit Ray’s classics, many priceless Bengali films from Ritwik Ghatak also lay in ruins. The World Cinema Project (WCP) took the initiative to preserve and restore this film with great effort from Ritwik Memorial Trust and the National Film Archive of India. However, WCP says the original negative was incomplete and few reels were severely damaged.

Made in 1932, ‘Natir Pujo’ is the first screen adaptation of a story by Rabindranath Tagore. More importantly, it’s the only film in which Rabi Thakur took part directly. He played a key role in the production as well as direction. He was also a part of the cast. Its reels were torn apart but the National Film Development Corporation joined hands with Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation to restore this priceless film. It is also the oldest piece of film the organisation was able to preserve.

'Kanchenjunga', as we all know, is Satyajit Ray’s first colour feature film featuring legends like Chhabi Biswas and Haridhan Mukherjee. But did you know, its negatives were so damaged that at first researchers said they were beyond repair. Then it was transferred to a Mumbai film lab but sadly it was left exposed to sun and rain as the producers were not interested to pay storage fees. Later the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences took the initiative to achieve the unimaginable. The original negative was completely damaged because of mishandling. So they worked with the only copy of the master negative film and several months of hard work gave the result one day, they were able to restore whatever they could of the film.

Sadly, Uttam Kumar - Suchitra Sen films are also facing the same fate of being lost forever. However, one of the only remaining but extremely damaged reels of ‘Harano Sur’ was found and restored after great research. The 1957 Bengali classic is directed by Ajay Kar and still remains a must watch for every romantic Bengali couple.