Restoration should reimagine the film as how Ray would have filmed it if he had colour photography at that time, with minimal use of colour.Īs a tribute to Ray’s classic, director Kaushik Ganguly made the film Apur Panchali based on the life of Subir Banerjee, the actor who played Apu in Pather Panchali. With this as the golden rule, it’s fair to demand that any upscaling or AI colouring of Ray films must be done by fully adhering to his philosophy and aesthetics. He used color very carefully and did not like the laboratory to do any color corrections to his footages later. After a point in his career, Ray started cranking the camera himself and found innovative ways of harnessing natural light to achieve “bounce” lighting. The Ray we know was not averse to using colour or technology in films to achieve the right results. A number of his productions were in colour (some in Eastman colour). No one can claim that Ray was against using technology or colour. There is no doubt that the 4K restoration, upscaling and colouring process can bring many lost films to life and make those films that are deteriorated accessible to the new generation. Many of world’s renowned filmmakers including Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Abbas Kiarostami, François Truffaut, Carlos Saura, Wes Anderson, and Christopher Nolan had paid glowing tributes to Ray stating that Ray films had a great influence on their body of work. Ray had remarked that he wants his films to be remembered even after he’s gone. Many cartoons, serials and films were colourised for TV and video. The pace of restoration of old classics and making them accessible to general public did not stop with any of these controversies. As a proof of what was attempted, a one-minute colorized footage of Citizen Kane was included in a documentary produced by BBC in 1991. The public outcry increased when director Henry Jaglom revealed that Orson Welles had implored him to protect Citizen Kane from being colorised before his death. When the media mogul and founder of CNN Ted Turner told the media in 1988 that he was considering colorizing Citizen Kane, all hell broke loose. Digital colourisation took over by the 70s and the process reached maturity by the 80s. The next decade saw the colouring process picking up steam with many filmmakers enhancing select sequences of their black and white films in colour. Thuillier lead a team of two hundred artists who painted directly on film stock with brushes and more than twenty separate shades. In 1912, the first full-length feature film The Miracle was hand-colored and released. Parts of French illusionist and director George_Méliès’s film prints were hand-painted by artists in Elisabeth Thuillier's coloring lab in Paris. Parts of some of the old black and white classics were coloured by hand in early 1900s. Criterion released the trilogy as a collector’s set that includes a couple of Ray documentaries, behind-the-scenes footages, interviews, TV programmes, booklets and so on in Blu-ray format worldwide.Ĭompared to the restoration process, the digital colouring that Aniket Bera did can be considered purely cosmetic in nature. This resulted in a remarkable improvement over the grainy black and white print with noise. The Criterion Collection, the American company that focuses on restoring and digitally distributing important classics, discovered these negatives and put them through their signature restoration process that involve rehydration, repair and 4K scanning, spending over 1000 hours of their technicians’ time. Many shared the nostalgia of watching the movie on a film projector in black and white, which the experience of watching the digitally enhanced and coloured version can never match.Įven if a film’s print is damaged, the Academy Film Archive archives it with utmost care in its vaults. For them, the classics are best left in their original form. Purists, including filmmakers and personalities from literature and culture, especially Bengalis, were soon up in arms protesting against the project. Let us look at the issue of releasing coloured and digitally enhanced versions of classics in this part.Īniket Bera, a professor of artificial intelligence (AI) at the University of Maryland in the United States coloured Pather Panchali and released a trailer online. We have discussed the issue of direct OTT releases in a previous edition of this column. The recent attempt to add colour to the Satyajit Rai black and white classic Pather Panchali and the decision of producers to release their new films directly on the OTT platform Amazon Prime were no exceptions. Cinema’s brush with technology has always resulted in a generational shift, but not without controversies.
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