In terms of career choices, I found this bit by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur fascinating and almost singular:
A few years ago, I had gone to a slum, Pathanwadi, in the suburbs of Mumbai — accompanied by my guide, Bipin ‘Silver’ — the place where films go to die. Bipin Silver has earned his name from his choice of livelihood: extracting silver from black-and-white films. In a darkened room piled high with 16 mm and 35 mm film cans, I watched a thin old man systematically strip these films bare of silver, leaving ghostly, translucent white strips of nothing scattered on the floor. Bipin says he strips 1,000 kgs of film in one go; he has been doing this for the last 40 years. [The Telegraph of India]
The rape of India’s cultural heritage? Or merely a recovery operation of a precious metal? Assuming the films were acquired legally by Bipin, it’s a mixture of both, honestly speaking. Much like the thousands and thousands of oil lamps residing in archaeological collections, I fear there’s a little bit of over-reverence for the past, an inevitable and to-be-desired quality for those who delve into cultural history. Not that these concerns aren’t important:
In 2014, I received a phone call from Gulzarsaheb. He had been awarded the Dadasaheb Phalke award and the government wanted to screen a retrospective of his films at the International Film Festival of India in Goa. But it couldn’t find a print of his acclaimed film, Maachis. This was a film less than 20 years old; yet it seemed to have vanished. This is just the tip of the iceberg in the tragic story of the colossal loss of India’s film heritage. [The Telegraph]
Certainly, the loss of professional films that win awards is startling and to be avoided. But thousands of home movies? I still puzzle over all the pictures my parents took and left behind when they passed away. Perhaps this is just a reflection of the consumer culture in which they were embedded, I think.
