He might be known as a great filmmaker of classics might be best known as the responsible film buff/cinephiles. Martin Scorsese is my choice as this week’s Orange of the Week. This year, it’s the much neglected films from India’s cinematic golden age that will be receiving a huge helping hand from the American master’s World Cinema Foundation. Here are portions from last week’s The Guardian report:
Kalpana, a Hindi-language comedy-drama influenced by modernist trends in Europe, was directed by Uday Shankar, the elder brother of the famous Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar and a pioneer of Indian modern dance.
Released in 1948, the film starred Shankar and used dance, drama and dream sequences to tell the story of a writer pitching a movie to a film producer.
“It is a cutting edge film, very forward looking,” said film critic and author Anupama Chopra. “It got so badly damaged that most of it was destroyed and they are trying to re-create it before it is totally lost so it can be shown to new audiences.”
Despite recent efforts, India risks losing much of its cinematic heritage as original celluloid deteriorates. When Chopra was researching a book on the seminal 1975 Bollywood mega-hit Sholay, she found only one copy of the original screenplay and no trace of the costumes or the original recordings of the songs.
