PK Nair

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PK Nair ( Paramesh Krishnan Nair ; Malayalam പി.കെ നായർ ; born April 6, 1933 in Thiruvananthapuram , Travancore ; † March 4, 2016 in Pune , Maharashtra ) was an Indian film archivist and director of the National Film Archive of India , who specializes in Has made a contribution to the preservation of the Indian film heritage .

Life

Nair discovered his interest in film in the early 1940s with mythological Tamil films such as K. Subramanyam's Ananthasayanam (1942). He graduated from the University of Kerala with a science degree in 1953 . In 1958, against the advice of his family, he went to Bombay to become a filmmaker. He studied under Mehboob Khan for some time , but found that he was unsuitable for this work.

Instead, he applied to the newly formed Film and Television Institute of India as a library assistant and was hired in March 1961. While doing this work in the campus library with literature on the film trade and a small collection of films, he recognized the need for a separate film archive and advocated its creation. In 1964, the National Film Archive of India was officially established.

Nair became the archive's assistant film curator in 1965 and was involved in the compilation of films for the FTII's film education courses . In the course of time he collected around 8000 Indian films and several thousand foreign films for the archive. His most important acquisitions include two silent films by Dhundiraj Govind Phalke : Raja Harishchandra (1913) and Kaliya Mardan (1919) - Phalke's last remaining film roles that Nair was able to locate in the director's family in the 1960s. He also procured films from the major studios of the 1930s and 1940s, Bombay Talkies , New Theaters , Minerva Movietone , Wadia Movietone , Gemini Pictures and the AVM Film Company : including PC Baruas Devdas (1936), Franz Ostens Achhut Kanya (1936), Jeevan Naiya (1936) and Kangan (1939), SS Vasans Chandralekha (1948) and Uday Shankars Kalpana (1948). Nair came too late when looking for the first Indian sound film Alam Ara : Ardeshir Irani's son had already sold the last nitrate copy of the film for its silver price without his father's knowledge. A real archive selection was only available for films from the 1950s onwards. From the time before, Nair took everything to the archive that he was able to get hold of, since the vast majority of Indian filmmaking no longer exists at that time.

Nair was promoted to director of the NFAI in 1982 and held that post until his retirement in April 1991. He was succeeded by Suresh Chabria .

Nair helped found the International Film Festival of Kerala in 1994, remained closely associated with the film festival, and attended it annually. In 2008 he was awarded the Satyajit Ray Memorial Award from the Asian Film Foundation.

The film director Shivendra Singh Dungarpur , himself a graduate of the FTII, created the almost three-hour documentary Celluloid Man about PK Nair in 2012 . He has received two National Film Awards for the documentary division. During the shooting in 2011, they found that the storage conditions in the archive no longer met the requirements of a film archive and that the holdings were neglected.

PK Nair died of heart failure in March 2016 at the age of 82 in Pune.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ PK Nair: PK Nair remembers BD Garga ( memento of July 12, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) of July 19, 2011
  2. ↑ Shivendra Singh Dungarpur: Indian Cinema - A Vanishing Legacy. In: Journal of Film Preservation, 10.2014, p. 26 ff.
  3. ↑ Shivendra Singh Dungarpur: Indian Cinema - A Vanishing Legacy. In: Journal of Film Preservation, 10.2014, p. 26 ff.
  4. ↑ No prints of many epic films, says archivist PK Nair at NDTV Movies on April 18, 2013
  5. ↑ IFFK has built its own identity in The Hindu of December 12, 2010
  6. ↑ Programmazione - Cineteca di Bologna , June 26, 2012
  7. ↑ 60th National Film Awards 2013
personal data
SURNAME Nair, PK
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Nair, Paramesh Krishnan (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Indian film archive
DATE OF BIRTH April 6, 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH Thiruvananthapuram , Travancore (now Kerala )
DATE OF DEATH 4th March 2016
Place of death Pune , Maharashtra