Scorsese to restore an Indian classic

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Martin Scorsese, the director of American classics Mean Streets, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver and Good Fellas, and one of the founding members of World Cinema Foundation dedicated to the preservation and restoration of film classics, has decided to take up the cause of Uday Shankar’s dance-ballet on celluloid, Kalpana.

Many Indian filmmakers, including Sanjay Leela Bhansali, consider Kalpana to be the ultimate cinematic dance extravaganza. The 1948 black-and-white classic is written and directed by Uday Shankar (Pandit Ravi Shankar’s brother) and his wife Amala.

There’s no full and complete print of Kalpana available in India.

But now the World Film Foundation is going to take over the job of making Kalpana viewable across the world. Actor-director Satish Kaushik, who recently met Scorsese in Dubai, confirmed, “Martin Scorsese has definite plans of restoring Uday Shankar’s Kalpana. I saw The Mummy, a 1969 Egyptian film that has been restored.

It was fantastic work. Scorsese said he was keenly interested in restoring Kalpana and his company, World Cinema Foundation, was on the job.”

Commented Sanjay Leela Bhansali, “To me, Uday Shankar and his Kalpana are the greatest legacies of dance and dancing. I’ve seen the film, though the negatives are destroyed. Martin Scorsese taking the initiative to restore Kalpana is a major event in Indian cinema. It’s a pity we don’t seem to respect our classics as much as the foreigners.

So many of our classics like Kangan, Kismet and Sant Tukaram have been destroyed and need to be restored. My own negatives of Khamoshi: The Musical have been destroyed.”