Nibandha

Those of you who have watched Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds or Giuseppe Tornatore’s Nuovo Cinema Paradiso would recall how integral the use of nitrate reels and projection rooms was to the plot. In Inglourious Basterds, Shoshanna uses nitrate reels to burn down a cinema hall to assassinate Adolf Hitler, while in Cinema Paradiso, Alfredo loses his eyesight in a mishap triggered by combustible nitrate reels.‌‌

Inflammable and Difficult to Douse

Despite the availability of the relatively safer acetate reels since 1908, auteurs preferred nitrate films. This is despite the fact that these reels were highly inflammable, difficult to douse, and could even burn underwater. This state of affairs continued till 1951, when nitrate reels were finally supplanted by acetate reels.

One of the peculiar joys of reading lies in discovering that seemingly unrelated disciplines are often intertwined. Cinema, as it turns out, owes an unexpected debt to botany. In 1838, French chemist Anselme Payen isolated cellulose—the principal structural component of plant cell walls. By itself, cellulose was unremarkable. But once chemists learned to treat it with nitric acid, they had in their hands a substance that would profoundly influence two entirely different worlds. One led to explosives such as gun cotton; the other to plastics.

Among the earliest commercial plastics was Parkesine, patented by English inventor Alexander Parkes in 1862. A few years later, the Hyatt brothers in the United States refined Parkes’ process while searching for a substitute for ivory in billiard balls, leading to the invention of Celluloid in 1872.

When Eastman Kodak began manufacturing photographic film on a celluloid base in 1889, cinema inherited not only a new medium but also a new name. For decades thereafter, films were made on celluloid stock, and before long, the medium itself came to be known simply as “the celluloid.”

That seemingly innocuous material would prove to be both cinema’s greatest ally and its greatest menace. It carried moving images to audiences across the world, but it also burned with terrifying ferocity. The same reels that preserved cinematic history possessed an alarming tendency to erase it.

Meanwhile in India

Some time in the late 1950s, a bespectacled man, strolling through the bylanes of a scrap market in Kolkata, stopped by at a dealer’s place, where dumped tins of condemned reels awaited their end. His eyes chanced upon a set that seemed promising. A closer investigation made his eyes light up.

He had accidentally stumbled upon the negatives of a film, which many thought had been lost in a fire. Stories of a spare reel existed, but it had landed in Pakistan after the partition. At an obscure scrapyard, India’s official entry to the inaugural International Cannes Film Festival lay rotting.

The Great Find

The bespectacled man was Subrata Mitra, the cinematographer friend of Satyajit Ray. Mitra had helmed the camera for Ray’s Pather Panchali. He is also credited with pioneering the art of bounce lighting. Mitra deposited the reels with the National Film Archives for restoration.

The reels belonged to the Chetan Anand directorial Neecha Nagar, the only Indian film to date to have won the Grand Prix, or as it is known today, the Palm d’Or, at the International Cannes Film Festival. This seminal piece of Indian cinema inspired Satyajit Ray and sent him to the sets of Jean Renoir’s The River, where he met Mitra. But that’s a story for another time.‌‌

Neecha Nagar was the debut of director Chetan Anand, the elder brother of Dev Anand. Neecha Nagar also marked the debuts of a bevy of actors, including Kamini Kaushal, Rafiq Anwar, Zohra Segal, Chetan Anand’s wife Uma, as well as Pandit Ravi Shankar as the music composer. Inspired by Maxim Gorky’s play The Lower Depths, Neecha Nagar juxtaposes two localities: Ooncha Nagar (High City) and Neecha Nagar (Low City). Ooncha Nagar being the abode of the high and the mighty, looking down upon Neecha Nagar, whose destinies and fortunes they wrote.

The story centers on the designs of an Ooncha Nagar businessman seeking to drain a swamp to make way for high-rise residential buildings. He channels the swamp water through Neecha Nagar, which becomes a breeding ground for disease. Amid this calamity, a youth takes the fight to Ooncha Nagar, but fails. His eventual death coalesces the disparate villagers, who repose their trust in the fallen youth’s love interest—also the daughter of the businessman.

Anti-Fascist Film Festival

Neecha Nagar was ahead of its time. As the film is not charitable towards the British, it’s no mean feat that he managed to complete the filming and get the Censor Board’s approval, too. Rafiq Anwar, who also served as the producer, took the films’ reels to Pakistan after the partition. It was India’s official entry at the inaugural Cannes Film Festival in 1946 and won the Grand Prix alongside 10 other movies.

Interestingly, a majority of the films that won the top honors were anti-imperialist and anti-colonial in tone. The reason could be that Cannes itself was an act of protest. When the first annual international film festival was inaugurated in Venice, Italy, in 1932, the country was in a vice-like grip of Benito Mussolini. A couple of years into the festival, the participants correctly surmised that only Nazi and Fascist propagandists were likely to take home the Mussolini Cup, which later came to be known as the Golden Lion.

It was in protest of this partisan selection that French bureaucrats and ministers decided to start their own festival. Cannes was selected as the venue, and September 1, 1939, was set as the inauguration date. However, on that very day, Nazi Germany invaded Poland to start the Second World War, and the festival was called off. The festival resumed in 1946 after the war ended.

Struggles in India

Despite being well received abroad, Neecha Nagar struggled to secure a release in India. The fact that Chetan Anand refused to compromise on the box-office demands did not help matters either. There was not a single love song in the entire film, reasons enough to keep the revelers away. It was only after Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru intervened that the distributors relented and agreed to provide slots for Neecha Nagar’s theatrical release.

But the audience refused to have anything to do with an ‘art cinema’ that was heavy on sermon and watertight on entertainment. The film tanked. Neecha Nagar, for all its global exposure and acclaim, was a miserable failure in its homeland. And with that, Chetan Anand’s hopes of being a trailblazer in the world of Indian cinema died. Probably he should have paid heed to what Anton Chekhov said to Maxim Gorky in 1902 after reading the play The Lower Depths…

“The tone is gloomy, oppressive; the audience, unaccustomed to such subjects, will walk out of the theatre, and you may well say goodbye to your reputation as an optimist…”

Resurrection, of Sorts

After the failure of Neecha Nagar, Chetan got tagged as a non-bankable, unsafe, and dangerous director. To get work again, he had to make compromises. After tasting further defeats in Afsar and Andhiyan, he first tasted success when the noir Taxi Driver turned out a hit.

1964 was a watershed in his career when the granddaddy of Indian war films, Haqeeqat, was released. His 1966 film Aakhri Khat showcased what genuine craft meant when he let a toddler loose on the unforgiving streets of Bombay and followed him with a handheld camera to record his journey. Aakhri Khat predates Baby’s Day Out by a quarter of a century and was Rajesh Khanna’s debut vehicle.

(First published on earnestdiscourse.com in 2019)