Kerala State Chalachitra Academy honoured veteran film historian P.K.Nair .

The Kerala State Chalachitra Academy ,organizers of the International Film Festival of Kerala honoured P.K.Nair ,the veteran film historian and first Curator and former Director of National Film Archive of India during the closing ceremony of 19th edition of International Film Festival of Kerala. Thiruvanchoor Radhakrishnan. Minister for Cinema, Rajeevnath, Academy Chairman ,Joshy Mathew ,Vice Chairman, Aryadan Showkath and Ramachandra Babu Executive Board Members participated in the honouring ceremony .

 

“Paramesh Krishnan Nair, better known as PK Nair, is the man responsible for founding and managing the National Film Archive of India (NFAI). Having joined the Film and Television Institute in Pune as a Research Assistant in 1961, he did much of the spade work for an autonomous NFAI, which began in 1964. From 1965, when he was appointed Assistant Curator, till 1991, when he retired after nearly a decade as its Director, Nair acquired 12,000 films — 8000 Indian, the rest foreign. The numbers are impressive in themselves, especially for a government archive in a country where government institutions are notorious for their inefficiency and corruption. But if there is a single thing that Celluloid Man manages to convey, it is that that Nair's accomplishments cannot be measured in 

quantitative terms.

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This is a man who lived his work: who legendarily screened and watched films from the late to the wee hours, and was never to be found in the theatre without his small torch and a notebook in which he meticulously recorded, reel by reel, the content and condition of every single film print. He didn't let his personal taste influence his collecting and he wasn't above making quick overnight copies of loaned international prints to serve the larger cause: as he says with a twinkle in his eye, "a true archivist should have the immunity to overcome such legalities". Nair combined this indefatigable, almost childlike enthusiasm for the cinema with a seriousness that daunted the frivolous student and unfailingly encouraged the genuinely interested. Jaya Bhaduri, for instance, proudly remembers being the only girl at Nair Saab's late-night screenings because he had told the hostel matron she wasn't using them as an excuse to "gallivant" around an almost-wholly male campus. Vidhu Vinod Chopra recounts the thrilling privilege of being allowed a few hours' access to the institute's print ofBreathless so as to figure out how Godard achieved the "smoothness" of his cuts. Then there's the tale of how John Abraham — the late Malayali filmmaker — walked into Mr. Nair's house at 3 am and demanded to watch Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Mathew, and how Nair not just agreed but watched it with him. They then discussed John's plans for Amma Ariyan (it was to be his most remembered film), had breakfast together, and only then parted company”.(The Sunday Guardian)