Pirate Histories: Rethinking the Indian Film Archive

Leadership Insights from Jaina text Saman Suttam ��

Pirate Histories: Rethinking the Indian Film Archive

Kuhu Tanvir

AbstractThis article argues that despite their inherent illegality, forms of media piracy are an essential part of the memory of Bombay cinema. While Bombay cinema’s history is replete with its encounter with myriad pirate forms—cheaply published film dialogs and lyrics, locally produced posters, illegal music tapes, video cassettes, VCDs and DVDs—the activity of viewing, sharing, and storing cinematic objects sees a new order of proliferation online, leading to the creation of a network of private and indeed pirate archives of cinema. Built largely of illegal material (downloaded, ripped, and copied) and the “poor image” (Steyerl, 2009), the pirate archive is at odds with the official state archive of cinema that is all too aware of its role in preserving the “heritage of Indian cinema.” The pirate archive unpacks the carefully constructed and preserved hierarchy of “meaningful cinema” by including more derided forms like porn and “trash,” bringing them into the fold of history. I argue that its illicit, often incomplete, sometimes erroneous and ephemeral material then poses a challenge to the state archive’s performance of stability and its attempt to control cinematic history.

KeywordsBombay cinema, piracy, archive, preservation, network, history of Indian cinema, digital, celluloid

Veteran actor Shammi Kapoor’s official page on Facebook saw little activity on most days; with its mun-dane looking pictures and unconnected and unexciting links, the page seemed more of a technological duty that actors are burdened with in the digital age. On the 14th of August 2011, however, as news of Kapoor’s death started appearing in news tickers, the following words suddenly brought the page alive, “Tum Mujhe Yun Bhula Na Paoge.” 1 There was something eerie about these words not only because they seemed to come from the grave, but also because they seemed to embody the specter of Shammi Kapoor, challenging the audience to forget his electric image. The words seemed to be a knowing premonition that is the privilege of the other-worldly; and different media scrambled to capture the spirit of the rebel-lious, romantic, and magnetic Shammi Kapoor.

As Kapoor’s co-stars, directors, friends, and family gave interviews recounting their relationships, his fans crafted their own, personalized tributes on various platforms across the Internet. A case in point is

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Kuhu Tanvir is a Ph.D. candidate in Film Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

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the tribute from a fan in Sri Lanka who laboriously made a 21-part tribute titled “Shammi, We Miss You,” collecting and collating his/her favorite songs and scenes from Kapoor’s films in a collage that, over 21 parts, spans nearly five hours.2 The aim was arguably to “immortalize” the cinematic giant through this unofficial, unauthorized archive of Shammi Kapoor that exists online, quite unaware of its own richness and value.

Powered by simplified and easily available digital technologies, the Internet houses a bursting archive of cinema created by the combined, often default, actions of fans, cinephiles, stars, programers, production houses, and a host of other unidentified forces. The digital explosion has created a space that is conducive to easy exchange and transfer of the film object across a complex network, creating new avenues of accessing cinema. Consisting largely of pirated material, often of poor quality and unknown origins, this pirate archive of cinema occupies an illicit space in the moral economy of the copyright regime. The cinephile is at the centre of this archive, because he is one of several archivists contributing to this global phenomenon in productive or destructive ways. There is then a fundamental change in the constitution of the archivist and the archive, as the fluid, pirate, and networked archive of cinema poses a potent challenge to the contours of control wielded by a state-run archive. This article will examine the nature, creation, and sustenance of this essentially mobile archive in order to understand the changes ushered in by digital technology in the politics of the archive, on historiography and the history of Indian cinema.

The constant, albeit often silent activity of erasure and exclusion in the archive bursts the myth of historical stability. Documents in the archive may well be moving toward a slow death, lying in forgotten dust-laden piles, but the archive itself is never inert. As an institution that houses “raw” information, the archive is constructed with considerable foreknowledge of its cataclysmic or conversely revolutionary potential. The idea of control is therefore paramount with reference to the archive and also to the funda-mental difference between history and memory.3

Remarking on the essential relationship between cinema and the archive, Paula Amad (2010) has docu-mented the response of a critic who experienced the first Lumiere films in Paris and remarked upon the cinematograph’s unique ability to record movement, allowing it to “collect and reproduce” life. Cinema’s default of archiving a “reality” outside the political document—be it fashion, song, dance, fables, humour, and so on—allows it to pose a “counter-archival challenge to the positivist archive’s sacred myths of order, exhaustiveness and objective neutrality” (Amad, 2010). While the stasis and the commemoration of the positivist archive and the “historical evidence” it houses allows one to liken it to a monument—a static reminder of past glory, but also of death—cinema is, as Andre Habib says, “a trace left at a certain moment in time by a given culture” (Habib, 2006). This trace is not counted as history, but rather, as memory. Highlighting the fragility and inherently destructible tendencies of celluloid, Habib argues that in electing cinema as the site of collective memory, modern society has renounced the monument (Ibid., p. 125).

This ability to record history in visual form allowed cinema to bear witness to the past, to tell a tale that would linger on in popular memory, giving it a power that few other forms could boast of. It is now almost commonplace to say that one of the challenges that popular cinema has faced is a dismissal of its (counter) archival value as mere mass culture. A greater danger to the historiographic element of cinema is posed by its very materiality that is subject to rapid deterioration and is always under threat of disappearance. It is only recently that India has come to appreciate the value of storing and restoring the disappearing film object. However, as we move from cinema as archive to the archive of cinema, a paradox is put in play with reference to cinema’s relationship to monumentality. Contrary to cinema’s counter-archival potential, the archive of cinema has arguably paid heed to the always-already monumental spirit of the archive.



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A Monument to the Moving Image: Indian Cinema and the National Film Archive

One of the earliest examples of a burdened film archive is the National Film Library (NFL) established in 1935 as an associated concern of the British Film Institute (BFI). Deeply conscious of the duty of a national outfit, the NFL sought to “maintain a national repository of films of permanent value.”4 Further, the brief required the NFL “to be a library of educational films distributed to schools and other educa-tional organizations,” a “prerogative” that was abandoned in the 1940s. From the outset, the archive contained itself within a national framework, wherein it was a resource of primarily British cinema and consequently also British television. Thus, from the counter-archive that potentially held alternative histories in its folds, the archive of cinema was pulled into the rubric of national history and a history of the nation.

India acknowledged the need to archive cinema a few decades later. A letter to the Editor of The Times of India, written by a Harish S. Booch in 1960 noted the need to “preserve outstanding film(s) on an institutional or national basis” (The Times of India, 1960). The following year, the Union Minister for Information and Broadcasting (I&B), Dr B.V Keskar, made a statement before the Parliamentary Consultative Committee promising the establishment of a National Film Library (The Times of India, 1961). In 1964, the I&B Ministry inaugurated the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) at Pune, Maharashtra.

While the NFAI was influenced by the structure of other national archives, unlike the NFL in Britain, it never abandoned the pedagogic function it assumed at its birth. Consider for instance, its mission statement as it appears on their Charter:

The National Film Archive of India is committed to the acquisition, preservation, restoration and dissemination of India’s socio-cultural heritage[...]The mission is critical for the benefit of society at large and aims to create an archival and preservation policy through strategic direction, leadership, partnership, and collaboration between not just the National Film Archive of India, but also other government institutions...5

Further, the agreement that is signed between the NFAI and the individual or company that donates archivable material includes a clause that says:

That the party of the first part (the NFAI) hereby undertakes to archive the copy of the aforesaid cinematographic film … so as to preserve the cinematographic history and evolution of India and the impact of Indian films on Indian society as a whole. (emphasis added)6

Weighed down by this need to prove the cultural and artistic pedigree of cinema, and consequently its historical relevance, the NFAI created a safe framework for acquiring films that would then be treated and preserved. With the state-controlled National Awards7 serving as a crucial benchmark for selection, associated notions of “masterpieces” and historical relevance became decisive factors in the selection of films that would be archived.8 The NFAI’s intellectual and governmental exchanges with associated bod-ies like the Censor Board without whose clearance the archive cannot accept a film even today, and the Film Division that makes “documentaries for publicity of Central Government programmes,” ensured a nexus of outfits controlled by the state.9 It is however, the archive’s association with the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) and the Film Finance Corporation (FFC)10 that has arguably had an impact on its notion of “good cinema.”11 NFAI’s original location on the FTII campus has much to do



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with this relationship, for it encouraged confusion about the autonomy of the archive.12 Discourse around films as heritage gained particular momentum in 2003 when a vault containing roughly 1,700 films from the pre-1950 period were lost in a fire that broke out at FTII.13 The nitrate-based prints were stored in an air-conditioned vault that presumably suffered a malfunction, leading to a rise in temperature and ulti-mately a fire. One report told the sordid tale of bureaucratic red-tape that went into the archive even acquiring the required air-conditioning for a material as inflammable as nitrate (Frontline, 2003). Frontline reported the loss of “landmark films” like Raja Harishchandra (Phalke, 1913), Aage Badho (Pithkar, 1947), Amar Jyoti (Shataram, 1936), Bhakt Prahalad (Reddy, 1931), Sant Tukaram (Damle and Fattelal, 1936), Lanka Dahan (Phalke, 1917), and others. There was also particular anger over FTII Director Prem Maithani’s statement, “the loss is not as bad as it is made out to be. There are copies” (Frontline, 2003). This statement led to an outcry from several avenues, including former NFAI directors Suresh Chhabria and P.K Nair as well as several newspapers and magazines, all of whom underscored the loss of original film prints as a substantial loss. Conveying shock over a statement like this, film theo-rist Amrit Gangar angrily referred to the safer acetate based duplicates, as “nothing more than copies of bad copies” (The Times of India, 1972, p. 20).

The insistence on the original print is not unique to the NFAI, but is instead the bedrock of archival work (particularly with reference to cinema wherein each subsequent generation of print is manifest with a loss in print quality). Once a film is out of the commercial screening circuit and into the archive it becomes invested with aesthetic and historical relevance and weight, becoming what Habib calls a monument-document (Habib, 2006). The monumentality of the film is the value ascribed to it by the process of selection, preservation, and circulation in an archive. As the film becomes an “artifact” or as Habib calls it, a “relic,” it serves a historical function as “trace, index, testimony” and a documentation of its time. A crucial reference to the concept of the monument–document is Michel Foucault’s suggestion regarding the relationship between history, monuments, and documents. For Foucault, traditionally, history aimed to decipher and in fact “memorize” monuments by studying them as traces or documents of the past; it was a time when “archaeology aspired to the condition of history.” In our time, he says, “history is that which transforms documents into monuments…it now deploys a mass of elements that have to be grouped, made relevant, placed in relation to one another to form totalities” (Foucault, 1972). It can consequently be argued that the archive is a strategic place where select documents are made monumental.

In their dedication to the preservation and dissemination of “good” cinema, the NFAI is one among several archives that monumentalize their documents. Acetate copies were decried because they took away the “aura” of the original, divesting the archived object of its antique value. However, it was the process of digitization that decisively demystified the aura around the “original.” NFAI began digitizing films in 2008 and ancillary material including posters, lobby cards, song-booklets, and so on, in 2010. While digital films have always been considered inferior in depth and quality to the celluloid print, the announcement of the digitization of the NFAI and its material was met with approval. By 2010, I&B Minister Ambika Soni announced deliberations over National Film Heritage Mission wherein ` 6.6 billion would be allocated toward the digitization of films and ancillary material at the archive. On the occasion of the centenary of Indian cinema, she announced a budget of 5 billion for digitizing films in the 12th Five-Year Plan.14

Thus far, the NFAI has digitized 600 films. In the process of transferring, each film is scanned at a resolution of 2K as it is the most cost-effective of the resolutions available.15 In most cases, the image



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file and the sound file are stored separately and can be played back to create DVDs. Of the 600, nearly half have undergone a process called auto-restoration wherein removal of basic scratches, dust, adjust-ment of contrast, and brightness happens automatically in the process of scanning. Older films or those that have undergone more damage have to be manually corrected for restoration. On an average, the cost of digitizing a film in good resolution is roughly ` 1.4–1.5 million. More moderate quality prints can be made for half the amount, whereas prints that have undergone serious deterioration can cost up to ` 4 million.16 Kiran Dhiwar, the Film Preservation Officer at the NFAI said in an interview that while the aim is to digitize all the films and all the ancillary material, due to budget constraints, the Archive selected popular and particularly rare films for digitization. He added that the Archive needs a clearance from the production house if the film under consideration is still under copyright.17 Thus films whose copyright owners are not traceable have not yet been digitized. Dhiwar remarks that selecting films to digitize is a complicated process because questions relating to why a particular film is selected are always raised even though they do not have tangible answers (Tanvir, 2012).18

Storage of films on digitally enabled formats, in a virtual space that is potentially limitless, can throw open the question of lack of space in a significant way. If the lack of space for storing film reels was a crucial reason for the preservation (and consequently creation) of a selective history of cinema in India, this change in materiality, from analog to digital, should theoretically alter the scope of film history saved in the archive. While the Archive is open to storing any film in any format, the only films that it actively seeks are National Award winners, that are, in the words of Ambika Soni, “the essence of good and meaningful cinema”.19 They are further limited by the fact that they cannot store or screen films that have not been passed by the Central Board of Film Certification. What becomes evident in the exclusions and the guiding principles framing the Archives is that despite a change of material that is available to them, the nature or the impulse of the Archive and consequently the carefully preserved history of cin-ema in India is not changing. Like any other archive, therefore, the NFAI too is by default curating a selective history that is governed by state-centered laws and a stringent notion of taste and historical and aesthetic value.

In a fascinating thesis on reimaging the archive, the scholars at pad.ma20 reflect upon the irony inbuilt in this “fortress model” (pad.ma, 2010) adopted by most archives. Referring to film archivist Henri Langlois’s statement that “best way to preserve film is to project it” (Ibid.), they suggest that even he, one of the founding film archivists, imagined archiving as an outward model based on use and circula-tion, “on diffusion rather than consolidation” (Ibid.). It is thus somewhat ironic that digitization has not altered the stronghold of state control and strict copyright laws that work to withhold content.

The Logistics of Legacy: Preservation, Digitization, Ownership

Restricted by economics, space and indeed massive technological changes—that include the gradual phasing out of film stock by major manufacturers like Kodak Eastman—film archives are left with little choice but to adopt digital means of storage. Commenting on the NFAI’s digitization project, its Director Prashant Pathrabe stated that digitizing films was necessary to increase the shelf life of films, saying, “After all, the film strip is plastic with chemicals on it. It has a good shelf life, but it starts deteriorating with time.”21 While the change is being hailed by some as a “digital dawn” or more troublingly, a “digital revolution,” film archivists across the world are ridden with anxiety, because as David Walsh, the head



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of the Technical Commission at the International Federation of Film Archive (FIAF) noted, “Unhappily, what we can’t do without film, is find any reliable way of preserving our images. The imminent obsolescence of film is an absolute calamity-in-waiting for the archive of the future. Film may decompose and fade, but at least it can be stabilised through good storage” (Walsh, 2006). A digital copy, once corrupted, can rarely be retrieved and almost never corrected. This is perhaps the reason why many film archives, including the NFAI, make digital copies in an attempt to use those for screenings and circulation (particularly to festivals), while the acetate or polyester prints (and also ancillary material, particularly those that are paper-based) are preserved in an attempt to reduce wear-and-tear (Tanvir, 2011, 2012).22

The change or rather, lack of materiality introduced by digital storage is however a particular con-cern of film archivists. Archivist Dylan Cave’s suggestion that digital data’s appearance of total acces-sibility is ultimately a cultural illusion is a much-needed pause in the unabashed celebration of “technological advancement” that is evident in various sectors. However, suspicions cast on the digital precisely for its disembodied nature and the virtual space it inhabits, seem ironic given that a lack of space to store endless cans of films (in the right temperature and humidity conditions) continues to be the greatest challenge all film archives face. Cave’s own anxieties regarding the future of the archive in the digital age give a possible explanation for this irony, because as he points out, the care and preserva-tion of physical material is one of the archive’s exclusive functions, and without the “artifact” the archive’s role, identity, principles, and methods are shaken (Cave, 2008). In Cave’s argument, a digital archive is not yet a viable form of preservation as it is still plagued by problems of easy destructibility, of the expenses involved in digitizing all existing material, and most significantly, of the complications of copyright and ownership of digital material (Ibid.). This argument lays bare an approach that is engaging with the digital future, but is still firmly embedded in the circumscription of official archives. It is still not engaging with digital forms of cinema that are present on the Internet which ensure a fre-netic activity of transfer and exchanges almost pointedly excluding the power-wielding presence of a centre-heavy archive.

The most common anxiety against digital material in a film archive relates to questions of piracy, as digital data gives itself more readily to being copied and recopied and travelling across users. Most archivists note that film producers are less than enthusiastic about digital copies of their films being made and stored in the archive as it further complicates an already murky terrain of ownership of archived material (Cave, 2008). In India for instance, the producer holds the copyright of a film and is therefore the legal owner of the document for 60 years from the day it receives a censor certificate. Amrit Gangar brings attention to the complexity of ownership of films in the NFAI by noting that it stores and pre-serves privately produced artifacts spending public money (Gangar, 2003). Despite this, the archive becomes—as Jacques Derrida anticipated—the “guardian” of the document, holding it “in arrest” (Derrida, 1995). The idea of the archive as a guardian holding documents in one “domicile” is of the essence as it illustrates a power relationship wherein the archive does not merely control the document, but also disciplines it by curtailing its usage. The very idea of a domicile—as Derrida posed it—a physical, external space that houses archival material is exploded in the first instance by virtual space and eventually (and more drastically) on the networked space of the Internet. I would argue that the pirate potential of this digital explosion gestures toward a fundamental transformation in the disciplining impulse of the archive on historiographic practices. The power that the archive has in controlling History and curbing its destabilizing heterogeneity undergoes a change in the archival framework of the pirate archive.



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Shadow Images: Cinema’s Pirate Legacy

In Pirate Modernity (2010), Ravi Sundaram defines piracy as a culture of digital or mechanical replica-tion involving the production and circulation of counterfeit products that include films, music, software, and games. Distancing himself from the framework of legal anxieties and the discourse of piracy as crime, Sundaram focuses on the pragmatics of piracy in a developing economy. Piracy then is posed not as a threat, rather, as a symptom of post-colonial modernity and an expression of globalization. Sundaram’s work draws an “immanent” connection between pirate forms and modernity, he says,

Pirate electronic networks are part of a “bleeding” culture, constantly marking and spreading in urban life. This emphasizes its resilience and is a nightmare to classify. In a world where information bleeding is part of the contemporary, pirate culture uses the ruses of the city immanently, not transcendentally. (Sundaram, 2010)

Sundaram’s argument finds a veritable companion in the work done by the Raqs Media Collective on figures of transgression of law in contemporary urban setting. The pirate is a transgressive figure that is “a function of their status as the ‘residue’ of the global capitalist juggernaut” (Raqs Media Collective, 2005).23 Raqs deploys the metaphor of seepage to engage with these transgressive figures and their relationship to legality. This is a valuable metaphor to understand the intertwined, indistin-guishable, and fluid processes that work to circulate pirate forms. It is crucial to note that while seepage needs a stable structure which it can “leach” on, ultimately, it becomes part of the structure. As seepage becomes inseparable from the structure, it also acts on it, redefining it, often weakening or disfiguring it (Ibid.).

While seepage is indeed an evocative metaphor that illustrates the place of piracy in a media culture, its greatest limitation is in the way it poses piracy as an invasion that decays and ultimately destroys the structure, in that it is unable to understand the creative potential of illicit forms. In his work on the pro-duction and consumption of pirate forms in Nigeria, Brian Larkin signals toward the more productive aspects of piracy by posing it as a “technical infrastructure” despite its illicit nature. He says, “Like all infrastructures, it (piracy) influences and shapes forms of sociability, aesthetic production and economic organization that mark urban life” (Larkin, 2007). Not unlike Sundaram, Larkin draws attention not to the content of piracy, but rather on its reasons of existence, its forms and the resultant impact on ways of seeing, forms of leisure, experiences of technologies, etc. (Ibid.).

Digital piracy is a relatively later entrant in the history of cinema’s relationship with piracy. Earlier forms include cheaply printed song-books and film dialogs published by small publishing houses often sold in small towns or on footpath bookshops, along with pirated audio tapes of Hindi film music. It is however with the smuggling of video technology to India in the 1980s that piracy of the film object itself first became possible. By 1983, not only was the import duty on VCRs reduced drastically, but people in India were using the off-air recording facilities afforded by this technology to record films, shows, and cricket matches off television. The video cassette, as a means of accessing cinema, became a “bad” object well before it had become a popular phenomenon in the country.

It was with the economic liberalization policy put in place by the Congress government headed by Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao in 1992 that cable television came to India. In January 1992, Screen India suggested that Star TV’s intention to strike deals with producers to air Hindi films on the channel had opened up “a new source of revenue…(that) generated a lot of interest in the industry—among the producers as well as among exporters and video right holders” (Burman, 1992). In less than six months



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of the arrival of satellite television, Press Trust of India (PTI) reported that representatives from the film industry approached Member of Parliament and former actor Sunil Dutt to urge the government to take steps in order to “check the spreading of video piracy and cable television to help rescue the Indian cin-ema from collapsing.”24 By July 1993, an unsatisfactory Cable Bill was passed that failed to address the issue of small, illegal cable networks mushrooming across the country, causing the industry a severe loss of revenue (Nair, 1993). Cable operators recording films using small digital cameras in film theatres and screening them was a phenomenon that remained unchecked for years. Thus a new film could be seen at home, on TV the very next day after it was released. It was only in 2000 that the then Information and Broadcasting Minister Arun Jaitley passed a bill that required cable operators to show only that content for which they had acquired rights. While the film industry celebrated the move, local cable operators continued to screen recent releases (Desai, 2000).

By the end of 1993, the Video Compact Disc (VCD) technology had made a space for itself in the video market. The VCD was followed by the DVD that offered a much better picture and often bonus features like deleted scenes, interviews, and so on. While the discs proved to be much more space saving than the comparatively bulky VHS, they largely functioned on the same principle, that is, they either had to be bought (legally or pirated versions) or rented.

The material engagement with home entertainment saw a decisive transformation with the coming of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing. The first P2P that appeared on the Internet was Napster in 1999 that allowed users to share music files virtually and free of cost. Run by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, Napster arguably changed the landscape of accessing and sharing music.25 The fame of this miraculously free and seemingly limitless database of music spread and Napster found users in India in 1999 itself, despite slower dial-up Internet connections. Gradually, Napster’s repertoire of Hindi film music grew as more users copied songs from their music CDs and shared it online. Gradually, it became all too evident that most exchanges via this forum involved copyright infringement. A lawsuit was filed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in December the same year. It was only in February 2001 that an injunction ordered the shutting down of Napster (see also Bollier, 2008). However, Napster had man-aged to open the doors to the idea of P2P file sharing.

As early as 2000, Screen India reported the burgeoning “menace” that was online piracy of films, reporting that nearly 350,000 films were being downloaded per day (Screen India, 2000, p. 22). In the wake of Napster, sites such as Gnutella, LimeWire, e-mule, Kazaa, and Morpheus emerged, facilitating film downloads. Even as these sites were in various stages of popularity, there came BitTorrent, a P2P software that managed to change the file sharing protocol in a fundamental way. While the likes of LimeWire followed a single-source sharing system,26 BitTorrent decentralized the process by breaking up a file into bits, and allowing every downloader to access bits of the file from an entire community of seeders.27 BitTorrent itself is a software that becomes the surface on which a file transfer takes place; the community of users involved in every download is created via individual sites that use this software and host torrent links.28 With the arrival of broadband Internet in India in 1999, downloading films became easier and faster. P2P sites are based primarily on the idea of a community of users who share their mate-rial; the community, however, is a community of strangers where the only interaction one is likely to have is a virtual, often non-verbal one—where the only communication is the silent exchange of files or rather, pieces of files. As a result, there is a relationship of trust between users, where one expects fellow “pirates” to upload files of good video and audio quality; alternatively one depends on the community to indicate the flaws in any file. Torrent sites too have faced regular legal trouble, with nearly 200,000 people being sued for using torrents to illegally downloading copyrighted material.29 A number



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of these sites have shut down after long legal battles, others, like PirateBay have so far been resilient and seem determined to stay on despite losing a key lawsuit in 2009.

A site that has a somewhat different relationship to the legal framework of copyright is YouTube. Released in 2005, YouTube is arguably the world’s most popular video sharing site as of now. A signifi-cant amount of material on YouTube consists of clips from films, TV shows, and most importantly songs. Almost every video is followed by viewer comments. There are also options of sharing the video via online social media, on email or by using the video embed code.30 YouTube presents itself not as a dis-tributor but rather a “platform” for people to share videos and articulate themselves (Vonderau and Snickars, 2009); thus, theoretically, it functions much like a blank DVD that is in itself not illegal and the legality of the content put on it depends on the user. The site describes itself thus, “YouTube provides a forum for people to connect, inform, and inspire others across the globe and acts as a distribution plat-form for original content creators and advertisers” (emphasis added).31 Further, when it began, YouTube only allowed videos that were 10 minutes long, thus the question of “stealing” entire films never arose.

The enormous popularity of YouTube has illustrated a new viewing culture that is now in place. Despite the fact that the YouTube phenomenon is less than a decade old, its place in visual and cinematic cultures has been the subject of debate among several media theorists. Sustained work on the new media landscape was done by the Institute of Network Cultures (INC), conceptualized by Geert Lovink. In the Introduction to the Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube (Lovink and Niederer, 2008), Lovink says, “we no longer watch films or TV; we watch databases. Instead of well-defined programmes, we search one list after another” (Lovink and Niederer, 2008).32 In the same anthology, Lev Manovich notes that the first decade of the twenty-first century saw a “gradual shift from the majority of Internet users accessing content produced by a much smaller number of professional producers to user increasingly accessing content produced by other non-professional users” (Manovich, 2008). Manovich suggests that while a majority of user-generated content on sites like YouTube follows established forms like music videos, animated videos, interviews, films, etc., the sheer number of users generating content ensures that such platforms make way for innovation. For Manovich, the contours of innovation include the interactive aspects that allow communication not just between the producers of content and the audience, but also among various members of the audience. The new media universe that Manovich illustrates is one that is bursting with users online who are making videos, watching videos, editing, sharing, and discussing them at breathless speed, creating new communities as they go along.

New technology responded to and simultaneously created the need for more surfaces that would allow viewing on-the-go. Today, along with laptops and desktops, almost all cell phones and tablets cater to this culture by applications for video sharing sites like YouTube. It then became an economic impera-tive for producers and distributors of films to respond to this “cultural fact.” In 2008, MGM announced a partnership with YouTube wherein it would post entire films as well as complete episodes of old televi-sion shows for users to watch free of cost. By 2010 Indian production houses and distributors like Rajshree Pictures and Eros had created channels on YouTube that had entire films, long clips, and songs available free of cost. Films like Pyaasa (Dutt, 1957), Gol Maal (Mukherjee, 1979), Hum Aapke Hain Kaun (Barjatya, 1994) have been posted to watch not just freely but legally. In June 2011, YouTube announced the launch of YouTube Box Office that offered recent Indian films in complete form. Films like Band Baaja Baraat (Sharma, 2010), Ready (Bazmee, 2011) and Aarakshan (Jha, 2010) are part of the Box Office archives on YouTube.33 Legal online distribution is not limited to Hindi films, as distribu-tors like Shemaroo have individual channels for Punjabi, Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam, and Telugu films as well.



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It is necessary to reemphasize that by themselves, outlets like downloadable torrents or even databases like YouTube are not intended as archives nor are they always aware of their archival potential.34 What I am posing as the pirate archive thus constitutes clusters of cinematic material that are made of one or several such virtual, pirate forms. The presence of the network is crucial to this archive not only because it facilitates the movement of content, but because the pirate archive transforms from a private collection into an archive only as a collectivity, in other words, as a network of archives. An archival impulse is ascribed to it by the presence and intervention of the user or the cinephile.

This new cinematic culture is thus at the centre of a new cinephilia that is sustained by a community which is involved in a day-to-day exchange of the film object, as well as information and opinions, giving rise to a loose but definitely productive form of discourse around cinema. This discourse relies more heavily on the function of memory, creating an archive that is pirate, incomplete, and definitely unofficial.

The Pirate Archive

In Pirate Modernity, Sundaram forwards the argument that while piracy may indicate a loss of space and markets, it allows “distributors” to become creators of media, leading to a cycle of production where “piracy bred further piracy” (Sundaram, 2010, p. 116). This cycle of piracy is fundamentally based on the give and take of content between different technologies. Thus shows and films could be recorded from television onto a video cassette, which in turn became the raw material for a number of VCDs or later DVDs that were then ripped and stored as data files to be available on video hosting and torrent sites. Simultaneously, file sharing sites from its Napster days have always anchored themselves in the offer of allowing the user to own the song or film by downloading it. Once downloaded, the file becomes part of a person’s personal collection, giving them the freedom to use it as they deem fit. Unlike VHSs, VCDs, and DVDs, the downloaded file is free to anyone with an Internet connection. What emerges from this environment of cross-technological interaction is an archive that is ephemeral, vulnerable, and inherently destructible at one level, but indelibly persistent at another.

The archive that is created from this oft-illegal online material is not just unintentional and accidental, but is in fact a pirate archive. The issue of intentionality is an important one because it questions the very use of the word archive for this ephemeral collection that is not just “immaterial,” but also lacks a physi-cal location, quite in contrast to the archive that insistently protects its material, in effect holding them “in arrest.” The use of “archive” is the appropriate metaphor for material available and acquired from the Internet because its myriad sites and the varied forms of cinematic data that it provides may be individual collections at one level, but form part of a rhizomatic, networked supra-collection at another. Interestingly, it is when a film object enters the alternative, barely-legal market economy of torrents and video sharing that it also enters a pirate archive or rather, several pirate archives.

Made almost exclusively of pirated films, the pirate archive is, for a large part, an archive of the “poor image,” one that is illicit, defies patrimony and national culture and copyright. In her influential essay, “In Defense of the Poor Image”, Hito Steyerl (2009) marks the poor image as a symptom of digital culture especially as it travels across media almost in relay form, with its quality deteriorating with each passing generation. The poorness of this image, says Steyerl, “(testifies) to the violent dislocation, transferrals, and displacement of images—their acceleration and circulation within the vicious cycles of audiovisual capitalism” (Steyerl, 2009). The poorness therefore is first, a description of the quality of the



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image, its resolution and its proximity to an almost mythical “original.” Second, it is a reflection of the pedigree of the image, its exclusion from the archive and the prestige of “national” culture. Steyerl is one among several scholars of digital media who read in the poorness an unmistakable sense of liberation into “digital uncertainty” (Ibid.). Much like the poor image, the pirate archive too is predicated on transforming “quality into accessibility,” in the process acquiring a demystified form. The democratic appearance of this archive, creates a visible distinction between itself—accessible, free of cost and paper-work—and the state archive whose claims to quality images mean little in the face of its aura of inaccessibility.

Thus, the pirate archive is so not merely because of the illegal nature of its elements, but also because of its tense relationship with the existing film archive that is centrifugal and more dedicated to its per-formance of stability. No film archive can lay a claim to complete stability as the minerals that go into the making of celluloid necessarily change over time. Despite the easy and non-flammable storage options afforded by the digitization of an archive, this too is merely another format, another technology that archives can or have adopted. On its own, digitization does not alter the power relations that bind an archive. It is only when films take an immaterial form (as a result of digitization), and these immaterial objects enter an alternative circuit, that the very notion of an archive changes at a fundamental level. The instability that defines virtual space is a symptom of the mobility it offers, which in turn impacts the curve of access in a definitive way as not just the film, but all its paraphernalia, is constantly moving between users, occupying a spectral presence in a number of different “locations” through different interfaces.

At the heart of this cheerful instability is the diffusion of control that occurs as the role of the “user” or the receiver of the archive, as well as the creator of the archive undergoes significant reconfiguration. The official archive is embedded with a sense of responsibility toward the historical material it contains and needs to preserve. It is this notion of responsibility that is altered by the pirate archive that situates the users as producers, curators, and consumers simultaneously, thereby decentralizing control in its very conception. These two models of the archive effectively present two different information economies, namely the industrial information economy, and the networked information economy. Yochai Benkler celebrates the latter as an outcome of the “Internet revolution” (Benkler, 2006). Threatening the “incum-bents of industry [. . .] the networked environment makes possible a new modality of organizing produc-tion: radically decentralized, collaborative, and nonproprietary; based on sharing resources and outputs among widely distributed, loosely connected individuals who cooperate with each other without relying on either market signals or managerial commands” (Ibid.). He calls this “commons-based peer produc-tion” (Ibid.). The attempt then is to reimagine culture by pulling it out of the confines of property law that limits control to one individual, the “owner,” who has the sole right to sell, alter or use the property in any way that he deems appropriate. In other words, the exclusive regime of property is replaced by the more inclusive and indeed fluid framework of commons that is structurally more interactive and is always emergent.

The tenuous issue of ownership is further complicated by the pirate archive that readily makes itself available to multiple copies and thus multiple owners. While an individual seemingly owns a virtual copy of a film, the legal framework of intellectual property law does not allow them to alter the content or to distribute it, particularly for profit. Despite the legal confusion around it, YouTube is overloaded not just with clips from films (including complete films in as many as 20 individual clips), but more interestingly, parts of films that have been edited by users to reflect their own taste, their relationships and in many cases their idiosyncrasies. Consider for instance a clip on YouTube that is titled “Shahrukh’s



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sad moment” which is a seven minute collection of scenes of actor Shah Rukh Khan crying (Image 1).35 No dialog or soundtrack that has been retained. There is instead a running track of a song from a film that does not star Khan. The clip that has been uploaded by a generic, unidentifiable name (Nudeldidudel) has basic information from the uploader in German. There are several opposing responses to this video, including one in German that loosely translates to “This man is simply God,” one who thinks the video is “hilarious,” and one who calls the video “gay.”36 While most comments reflect upon the video and on the actor, several others are directed to Nudeldidudel in order to thank him for creating and sharing something beautiful. Yet another montage of pictures of Khan appears with the dedication, “for my bes-tie sillybutt Tasnia!!”37 This is clearly a collage that has been tailor-made for a particular person, but is part of the enormous archive not just of Shah Rukh Khan, but also of the Bombay film industry that resides online.

Another star with an enormously diverse presence on the Internet, particularly on YouTube, is Rajinikanth, with videos of Rajini-jokes, collages of Rajini’s style, and Rajini’s action scenes dominating search results (Image 2). While there is an abundance of worship for the super star, there is also improvised

Image 1. Shah Rukh Khan Crying

Source: Author’s personal collection.



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information about him that floods the comments section of these videos. For instance, a user idenitifying himself as Raghu Nadh posted a comment saying,

He is the second highest paid Asian actor behind Jackie Chan.

And is a great entertainer. He is also a good actor of great variations. But Huge Mass following made him to show only styles and Charishma and no scope for acting.

He spends 3/4 of his wealth for charity and leads spiritual life unlike Hollywood heroes who roam in BMW booze in Bar, yet scared about losing their wealth.

Now laugh at ur own life.

This comment is followed by what can appear to be a direct response by Fabio Cortez who simply states:

I’ve read about him a little after seeing some of his movie clips. seems like an awesome guy.38

What is evident in these comments and several others like this is that along with devotion and abuse that is directed to the star, there is a system of communication that the forum makes way for. The righteous tone of the first commentator above is directed to no one in particular and yet seems to admonish anyone who reads the comments accompanying a video of Rajinikanth’s famous style sequences.

Image 2. Rajni Jokes

Source: https://www.facebook.com/Rajinikanth.Jokes



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The authorial, productive capacity of the user(s) in these cases is in visible contrast to the users of the official archive, where the user is actually not a user at all, and is instead just a receiver who requests specific films and is allowed access in a highly circumscribed and controlled manner.39 Tampering with the film, or even touching it for that matter, is not a possibility. The pirate archive on the other hand freely borrows material from various sources—be it television, sites that provide films to download, YouTube, Flickr, and several others—allowing users to become producers in several capacities, that is, either a host on a torrent site, a curator of video collages, and so on. The authorial input alters the film object in different ways, giving it, in some cases like the videos described above, an entirely new context and a new intent. Not only is the film being “re-produced” by virtue of making it available in a pirate, digital format, but is also being reimagined and recrafted. In other words, the pirate archive holds not just the film in its entirety, but also products made using the film as raw content.

Every archive is, as Arlette Farge says, “always a lack,” and while this is true of a state-run cinema archive that is dedicated to the framework of “national heritage,” it is also true of the seemingly complete archive of cinema online (Arlette Farge, Le goût de l’archive, 1997 [1989], quoted in Andre Habib, 2006). The online archive, precisely by virtue of its pirate nature and diffused sense of control is more inclusive and consequently much vaster. Despite this comparative richness and the apparent democratic outlook and potential of this venture, it is as open to errors, erasures, and gaps as an official archive, if not more. Constantly undermining the cultural logic of plenitude, the myth of the ubiquitous online archive, is the qualitative difference between digital files and their analog “originals” in the first instance. Archivists have been critical of the lack of format specificity in a digital film archive (Usai, 2002; Chhabria, 2003; Nair, 2003; Cave, 2008).40 The argument of qualitative loss is furthered in the context of video sharing sites like YouTube that by default hold videos of lower resolutions. Film theorist Trond Lundemo (2009) counters this myth of completeness by highlighting the qualitative reduction of move-ment that occurs as a result of video compression that is essential for uploading videos onto digital platforms like YouTube and Vimeo.41 Speaking of digital video as a mere shadow of cinematic move-ment, Lundemo argues that the low resolution and often incomplete nature of digital videos on forums like YouTube persistently gesture toward more pristine, sharper, and complete analog versions that pos-sibly exist somewhere. Thus, films on YouTube and Vimeo form an archive that is digital in its material but is perennially haunted by the specter of analog that in its absence seems more mysterious, and in an abstract way, much purer. While this is true to an extent, and certainly was true in the early years of an archive like YouTube, the validity of this statement has undergone a significant alteration with the chang-ing scope of video sharing sites as well as increasing bandwidth and Internet speeds.42 Added to this is the enormous collection of film archives created by default by torrent users who download and store films on their computers, external hard-drives, and other digital media, as well as YouTube’s official and unofficial movie channels that allow long clips of entire films. Thus while the digital pirate archive might not be complete with reference to content, it is complete in itself, as in, it can function as a stand-alone archive, rather than a referent to a more solid, more approved official archive.

The Internet and consequently the pirate archive works at two levels, first, it allows users to seize the reins of global media from their “rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement recording rooms[…]working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game” (Benkler, 2006). Thus in the first instance, it attempts to level the playing field by elevating “ordinary citizens” from their ordinary spaces and mundane lives by providing means for them to become producers of their own filmic material. Conversely, however, the “democratic impulse” is also enforced by undoing the monumental status of select existing material. This stripping of monumentality happens almost by default on the Internet as each film exists



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merely as a file to be downloaded. The file is simply digital data that has no relationship to the sacredness or the aura of a film or its players. In the case of torrents, each film file appears on a page that is made on a template. While torrents are free of cost, a number of such sites are supported by advertisements; since torrents are mostly illegal, it is other illegal or barely legal outfits like porn sites, semi-porn game sites, and unknown sites offering freelance work (particularly to women) that advertise with torrent websites. In the archival landscape shaped by a pirate form like a torrent, the film becomes one among a cluster of offerings.

The distinct perceptions and histories of a film that can be impacted by the nature of the archives they emerge from can usefully be illustrated by two (of many) archival habitats of Mehboob Khan’s epic film Mother India (1957). Decorated with several accolades, including numerous National Awards in India, the film is considered a milestone for its portrayal of Radha (Nargis) as the ideal Indian (Hindu) woman who suffered hardships throughout her life as she single-handedly brought up her two sons. The film hinged upon Radha’s determination to abide by her “virtue” even as she faced dire poverty and no support. The figure of Mother India became symbolic of Indian womanhood and was equated with the mother goddess not just within the film text, but subsequently by political parties. This historical baggage of the film is curated and preserved by the state archive in its guiding framework of cinematic heritage. The film torrent, however, is available right next to an eye-catching banner with an advertisement for a porn website called virtualgirlhd.com (Image 3). The banner, with a GIF of a semi-naked girl, reads, “She lives and strips on your desktop.”43 The absence of a single curator and a guard in the form of a national institution indicates the pirate archive’s lack of regard for the monumentality of these documents. Stripped of its aura, Mother India is not only a mere file, but also shares the stage with anonymous and possibly illegal porn. In contrast with its original circuit of grand theatrical releases, film festivals, and film heritage narratives, in its pirate form, Mother India enters another distribution circuit and another consumption economy, one that is illegal, underground, and “shameful.”

Image 3. Mother India, Torrent

Source: Author’s personal collection.



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Pornography finds no place in the state archive’s narrative of the historical triumphs of Indian cinema, and its absence from the archive can in most ways result in its absence in history. To be sure, it is not just pornography that is pushed away from the historical narrative, but as I mentioned earlier, any film that does not have a censor certificate is kept out of the sacred space of the archive. The pirate archive on the other hand, not only provides means to include the “shameful” in its version of history, but is in fact sustained by it in several cases, particularly in the financial agreement that it has with various torrent sites.44 The inclusion of the shameful then is not limited to an inclusion of “illicit” content, but also of an “illicit” viewership. An illicit viewership is by no means a well-defined group that is determined by gender, class, or any other particular social parameter. It is instead a nebulous group that interacts and overlaps with several others, sharing an audience, and sharing, perhaps secretly, archival space.

The tampered film object forms just one part of the pirate archive, while the other consists of alterna-tive forms of historiography that intervene in film history as it currently stands (supported by the state archive). At the centre of this alternative history is the community that creates and supports the pirate archive. While one part of the community creates and shares content, there is another part that consumes the content. It bears repeating that these two groups do not necessarily function independent of each other. Consider for instance a video on YouTube of the song “Mera joota hai Japani,” from Raj Kapoor’s Shri 420.45 The uploader, which seems to be the DVD distribution company Shemaroo, has given some basic information regarding the film and in particular the song, namely the title of the film, the singer, director, and song writer. The latest comment is directed toward the uploader and it says, “This song is written by Shailendra, not Hasrat Jaipuri...Please correct it...” It bodes well for this argu-ment that this correction is issued by a user who identifies himself/herself as “tomdick0705harry,” high-lighting the option of correcting history that is made available to “anyone.” Another user, who locates herself in Trinidad and Tobago on her YouTube account, has left a comment saying, “My dad had said Raj was so popular among Europeans because he was talented and looked like a European himself.” And another is ostensibly from Turkey, “I am from Turkey. I have grown with films of Raj Kapoor. I send a lot of love to India.” The circulation of Raj Kapoor’s films to Russia and China and their popularity there has been documented in some Indian cinema histories, but the open and unlimited nature of a platform like YouTube has space not just for history, but also an essentially personal memory as it is suggested by the anecdotes of people’s childhood and the relationship with their parents, and their chance encounters with the song. There is also a visibly distinct order of formality of language that is utilized here. Most important however, is the very fact that this platform remains open to more and more anecdotes and accounts, thereby keeping itself open to a constantly changing, uncontrollable history.

While this new surface of history is deviant, disruptive, and more inclusive at one level, it is as open to erasures as the official archive, if not more. This can be for several reasons, not least of which is its virtual, disembodied nature. In other words, while it is less space consuming, it is ultimately ephemeral. Every digital byte is open to bugs, viruses, and corruption that leave it vulnerable to partial or total destruction. Further, webpages themselves can often be bound by an embargo wherein they expire after a particular number of months or years have passed. Of course, most expired pages are retrievable, but that could well depend on the decision of the page owner. And while the crowd-sourced, community driven nature of torrents and video sharing platforms are its strength, they also prove to be the greatest weakness of this pirate archive, because behind every node is an “ordinary person” who might decide to go offline, delete his or her account, remove or edit the video. The pitfall of an unintentional archive is precisely that it does not always know its own archival contribution and historical value. The act of deletion in this archive then does not always constitute a political decision that can have socio-historical



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consequences; it is instead, an ordinary act of an ordinary person. The conscious or unconscious erasures that go on almost continuously on the Internet then interrupt this unproblemtized celebration of the ubiquity of the Internet. A need to hold on to material that is ephemeral has created a different and definitely more urgent archival impulse. Against the logic of cloud-archiving, digital drop-boxes, and the ubiquitous, always available, all-encompassing Internet archive, there is a desperate need to constantly download, record, copy, and grab material off the Internet and onto a seemingly more stable personal archive on the computer, on pen-drives, and DVDs.

Disciplining the Archive

The disciplining impulse of the archive is twofold—while one aspect consists of preservation and index-ing, the other is censorship. The relationship between the film archive and censorship is by no means uniform in different archiving cultures and institutions. The NFAI follows the lead of the BFI in the default relationship that this archive has with the Censor Board. It follows that what the archive presents as film history is limited to the guiding principles of the most contentious governmental body that exists in the cultural field. For instance, clause 5B (1) of the Cinematograph Act of 1952 that continues to be the bedrock of film censorship in India states that,

5B. (1) A film shall not be certified for public exhibition if, in the opinion of the authority competent to grant the certificate, the film or any part of it is against the interests of 1[the sovereignty and integrity of India] the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, or involves defamation or contempt of court or is likely to incite the commission of any offence.46

What this clause indicates is the authority that the Board has in rejecting films for public consump-tion, consequently also keeping them out of the archive.

The pirate archive may be unconscious of itself as an archive, but it is quite aware of its potential to disrupt and undermine the authority that controls the state archive. In this awareness, it does not just supplement the state archive, but it challenges its lack by defiantly including films that are consciously excluded from the state archive. A case in point would be Amrit Nahta’s 1977 political satire Kissa Kursi Ka, which was not only banned by the Indira Gandhi government for exposing the corruption of her son Sanjay Gandhi, but all of its prints were confiscated and reportedly burned and destroyed. A fairly good print of the entire film is available on YouTube; it was uploaded by an individual who recorded a stray screening on Zee TV some years ago.47 Free software like YouTube Downloader allow the user to down-load the clips and if they so wish, to suture them together using a software like Windows Movie Maker.

Even while decrying the pirate potential of the Internet, mainstream production houses like Yash Chopra’s Yash Raj Films and Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions utilize the online space for promotions of their films. In the first instance, this online activity is legal as it is part of the advertising and promotional strategy of a film. However, these mainstream production houses also often utilize the Internet in some ways, to somewhat slyly defy some of the directives of the Censor Board. A pertinent example would be the controversial last minute decision by the CBFC to disallow the television premiere of Milan Luthria’s The Dirty Picture (2011). The film, which was based on the life of soft-porn actress Silk Smitha had been awarded an Adult rating for theatrical screenings, and had to undergo a reported 52 cuts to be considered appropriate for a television screening. Despite the 52 cuts, the Board along with



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the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting made a last minute decision to pull the screening with the argument, “Adult content remains adult no matter how many cuts are ordered.”48 Undercutting the directive of the Ministry, the official channel of the film on YouTube—hosted by ALT Entertainment—has videos of the most controversial parts of the film up as alternative trailers, including a scene with Vidya Balan in a bath tub, sitting opposite a journalist, confidently saying about herself, “Silk bani hai mazaa dene ke liye” (Silk has been made to give pleasure).49 Other production houses like Yash Raj Films also have an entire series of videos on their official website that are collages of deleted scenes from their films.50 This material then becomes part of the online archive of a film that is available for people to see even though it never received censor clearance.

As laws like SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) in the United States of America, the current John Doe injunction in India that has asked for a blanket ban on all torrent sites, and the AACT (Alliance Against Copyright Theft, which is a joint venture between the Bombay film industry and their Hollywood counterparts), all become more stringent, the pirate archive is no longer just a symbolic rebel. The threat that this seemingly ubiquitous and very appealing archive poses to the market’s control over creativity has led to piracy acquiring momentum as the “language of global fear,” second only to terrorism (Sundaram, 2010). Consequently, the level of activity that attempts to curb piracy has reached a fever pitch with fines, court orders, and a number of high-profile arrests whose documentation and circulation have instilled a hesitation if not fear in the heart of professional as well as ordinary pirates. So far, this community of “delinquents” has found ways to perpetuate themselves and the pirate archives. Yet, the current environment has led to doubts regarding the future of the pirate archive. While governments and the market are espousing the amorality of the pirate archive, the question that needs to be asked is, can film cultures, cinephilia, research, and indeed the state archive exist without the pirate archive today?

Notes

1. “You won’t be able to forget me so easily.” Page available at: https://www.facebook.com/shammikapoor.fanpage

2. The link to one part is available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T25JhZ0Rwts&feature=plcp 3. Also see Pierre Nora’s (1989) influential theorization of the distinction between History and memory. 4. All quotations regarding the BFI and the National Archive have been sourced from their website, available at:

http://www.bfi.org.uk/nationalarchive/about/whatwedo/history.html Accessed on May 17, 2012. 5. Available at: http://nfaipune.nic.in/pdf/CitizenCharter.pdf Accessed on May 17, 2012. 6. Available at: http://nfaipune.nic.in/pdf/depo_agree.PDF Accessed on May 17, 2012. 7. The National Awards were instituted by the Government of India in 1954 and are administered by the

Directorate of Film Festivals (DFF). Every year, the DFF institutes a jury that includes members from within the film industry, journalists, and scholars on Indian cinema. The awards are given in a number of categories, including Best Feature Film (this award is then further divided into best films in various individual regional languages), Best Documentary, Best Children’s Film, Best Film on Social Issues, etc.

8. In 1976, P.K Nair, then assistant curator (and subsequently director of the NFAI) revealed in an interview that the Government of India pays producers of National Award winning films in order to obtain prints for the Archive. The interview was conducted by Himanti Banerjee and appeared in The Times of India on July 18, 1976, on page 12.

9. From the official website of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. Available at: http://www.mib.nic.in/ShowContent.aspx?uid1=4&uid2=16&uid3=0&uid4=0&uid5=0&uid6=0&uid7=0 Accessed on May 18, 2012.



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10. The Film Finance Corporation was set up in 1960 in order to facilitate directors to make non-commercial films. Often graduates from the FTII received funds from the FFC to make films. Filmmakers like John Abraham and Mani Kaul were among the graduates of FTII, who went on to make a number of films that were actively against the popular grain in terms of the stories they told, but more significantly in their cinematic and aesthetic experiments. A number of their films are considered to be a part of the Indian New Wave that began roughly in the late 1950s and went on till the early 1980s.

11. I interviewed Kiran Dhiwar, the Film Preservation Officer as well as Arti Karkhanis, the Library and Information Assistant who is looking after documentation and digitization of ancillary material, and they mentioned the preservation of “good cinema” as a key mission of the NFAI. Interviewed in April 2012.

12. In 2002, when the Archive was under threat of disbandment, actor Amol Palekar made a statement to the press, saying, “If only people like Jaya Bachchan, Subhash Ghai or Shatrughan Sinha—who have benefitted so much from the NFAI—donated even a small fraction of their rich earnings to NFAI, it would help in its maintenance and upkeep” (emphasis added) (The Times of India, 2002, p. 12). Ironically, the three personalities named by Palekar are alumni of the FTII and have little to do as such with NFAI.

13. The numbers vary drastically from one report to the next. While Frontline (2003, January 18–31) quoted the number to be 1,700, The Times of India (2003, January 9, p. 5) quoted “over 3,000,” while Mid-Day (2003, January 11) said 619 films were destroyed.

14. From Ambika Soni’s speech at the National Awards Ceremony May 3, 2012. Official press release by the Ministry is available at: http://pib.nic.in/newsite/erelease.aspx?relid=83059 (Accessed on May 3, 2012).

15. Film stock can be scanned using a motion picture film scanner. The MPFS scan resolutions vary between 2K which is 2048X1556 pixels, 4K (4096×3112 pixels) ordinarily. The cost of scanning at a higher resolution is more.

16. Information acquired from Kiran Dhiwar at the NFAI in an interview conducted by me on April 11, 2012.17. According to the Indian Copyright Act 1957, “In the case of a cinematograph film, copyright shall subsist until

[sixty] years from the beginning of the calendar year next following the year in which the film is published.” Available at: http://copyright.gov.in/Documents/CopyrightRules1957.pdf Accessed on April 29, 2012.

18. Interview with Kiran Dhiwar, Chief Preservation Officer, NFAI.19. From Ambika Soni’s speech at the National Awards Ceremony May 3, 2012. Official press release by the

Ministry is available at: http://pib.nic.in/newsite/erelease.aspx?relid=83059 (Accessed on May 3, 2012).20. Pad.ma is the acronym of Public Access Media Archive that is made of archivists and scholars from different

forums. Apart from annotated videos, they also have a section dedicated to scholarship on film and media. From: http://pad.ma/about

21. From “By nurturing Indian cinema, NFAI has become a shrine for cinephiles,” available at: http://www.dnaindia.com/pune/1840455/report-by-nurturing-indian-cinema-nfai-has-become-a-shrine-for-cinephiles

22. Based on email interviews with Urmila Joshi and Arti Karkhanis, former head librarian and the library and information assistant at NFAI respectively, in 2011 and 2012. Karkhanis also told me that the documentation section was in the last stages of digitalizing the ancillary material which was uploaded on a website but is only available on a local server and hence not accessible to the public.

23. The article goes on to explain the usage of the word residue as “the elements of the world that are engulfed by the processes of Capital, turned into ‘waste’ or ‘leftovers’, left behind, even thrown away” (Raqs Media Collective, 2005).

24. July 8, 1992.25. Globally, the number of users downloading and sharing files via Napster is estimated to be 70 million between

1999 and 2001 (Taylor et al., 2002), with roughly 3 billion files shared per month (Ibid.).26. According to this system, there was a unique connection between the person sharing a file and the person

downloading it. In other words, the downloader and the source had to be online simultaneously for the transfer to be underway.



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27. Seeders and Leechers are the two broad parties involved in any download. Seeders are those who provide bits of the file being downloaded, leechers are those who are downloading. The number of seeds for any potential download is important as it indicates how easy it can be to download that particular file (as it has more people offering bits of the file).

28. Sites like the recently shut-down BTJunkie, Mininova, and arguably the most controversial of the lot, PirateBay, are some examples of torrent hosts.

29. This figure is reported by a number of sites, including http://www.pcworld.com/article/237593/copyright_trolls_200000_bittorrent_users_sued_since_2010.html and has become a legend of sorts. While all the con-nected sites that cite this number say that these figures reflect activity between 2010 and 2011, none say whether this number is limited to the US or is a more pervasive reflection.

30. Using the video embed code allows users to embed the player and the content on their own website or blog.31. From: http://www.youtube.com/t/about_youtube. The site also painstakingly details their mission against copy-

right infringement and all the safeguards that they have adopted (http://www.youtube.com/yt/copyright/), and yet its legality has remained a grey area with some production companies bringing successful suits against them for copyright infringement. See for instance this report on Viacom Inc’s suit against YouTube in 2007: http://articles.latimes.com/2007/mar/20/opinion/oe-lichtman20

32. The Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube is a collection of papers that were presented at two Video Vortex conferences organized by the INC in 2007. The volume has jointly been edited by Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer.

33. From http://www.indianexpress.com/news/latest-blockbusters-now-on-youtube/800540/ Accessed on May 29, 2012.

34. There are however, a few examples of forums that are in fact aware of their role in facilitating access to rare and good quality material, and indeed of their archival value. Karagarga.net is one such forum. Unlike other torrent sites, it is a closed group that is accessible only to members (who can join only upon invitation and only those with enough download and upload credit are allowed to invite users). There is a much greater sense of qual-ity control on this site as their policy is to not allow popular films, particularly “Bollywood and Hollywood,” and remain instead a collection of “arthouse, cult, classic, experimental and rare movies…” From: https://karagarga.net/manifesto.php

35. Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZC_XrPOkDM accessed on May 31, 2012.36. The actual comment in German is “Dieser mann ist einfach Gott…” and the translation is from Google

Translate. All comments mentioned here are available on the video page.37. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eME15rwsooE Accessed on May 31, 2012.38. Both comments are available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvtvUuqT62w Accessed on July 1, 2013.39. For instance, anyone who wants to access the NFAI has to sign in and show identification at the gate. To access

films, one has to put in written requests that are accompanied by a screening fee. The screening itself can take place only on the NFAI premises.

40. See Notes 14–16.41. It needs to be pointed out that while resolutions on video sharing sites are lower resolutions than analog formats

and in most cases even compared to other digital formats like DVDs and Blu-Ray, most sites have enabled a High-Definition (HD) option for videos. It takes more bandwidth and it takes longer to upload and view, but it is possible.

42. As early as 2007, Vimeo had already activated a High Definition option on its site. In 2009, the creators of YouTube announced on their official blog the arrival of 1080p HD resolution for videos. This was also the year they introduced a 3D feature on some of their videos. An interview with YouTube team members Pete Bradshaw and Chris Dale who were the brains behind the 3D feature, can be found at: http://gizmodo.com/5536385/how-youtube-3d-came-to-be accessed on June 1, 2012.

43. Available at: http://www.btmon.com/Video/Unsorted/Mother_India_1957_Hindi_DvDRip_XviD_MeN.torrent.html Accessed on April 15, 2011.



BioScope, 4, 2 (2013): 115–136

Kuhu Tanvir �3�

44. The Pirate Bay offers downloadables in five distinct categories: Audio, Video, Applications, Games, and Porn. See http://thepiratebay.se/recent

45. Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wjGc1zGWBc Accessed June 2, 2012.46. Available at: http://cbfcindia.gov.in/html/uniquepage.aspx?unique_page_id=26 Accessed on June 2, 2012.47. Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=e9y3xIDnwsE Accessed on June

3, 2012.48. From http://www.rediff.com/movies/report/why-the-dirty-picture-is-not-fit-for-tv/20120423.htm Accessed on

June 3, 2012.49. Video available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTynPTDDxpM&feature=BFa&list=UUexAo_

BgafNqqrxG7OLB1qw50. Deleted scenes from Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xDrReGMJWY,

deleted scenes from Dhoom 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49skfR_ifaY&feature=relmfu Both these videos are hosted by YRF and carry the company logo and name.

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Pirate Histories: Rethinking the Indian Film Archive

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