Alas, Nitrate didn’t Wait, but does it Really Matter?

Abstract

This article analyzes the nitrate film fire that took place at the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) in 2003 by locating it in the larger schema of nitrate film fires from across the world. It takes stock of the losses incurred in the fire, and the State’s response to the incident, to observe that despite the best of intentions of the people working at the institution, the losses were perhaps eventually inevitable owing to three reasons: the NFAI’s less-than-ideal working through the years, the idiosyncratic functioning of the Indian bureaucratic machinery, and the nitrate film reel’s ephemerality. Dis-cussing the global fetishization of the nitrate film reel as an artifact in and by itself, it observes how for various reasons, the same never became true for the NFAI and India; and analyzing the trends in Indian film scholarship so far, especially on silent cinema, it argues that the losses were less consequential for Indian film historiography than might have been expected, for the Indian film scholar has long moved beyond the nitrate film reel as the “basic source material” toward the writing of imaginative social and cultural histories achieved through mobilizing a host of ancillary sources.