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The Malayalam classic was recently restored by the Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, Film Heritage Foundation and Cineteca di Bologna.

One of the tragedies of media history is that many have forgotten G Aravindan, who maintained a very low profile, and his rich contribution to Indian cinema since his passing away at a relatively early age in 1991.

Govindan Aravindan was one of India’s greatest filmmakers and a leading light during the golden age of Malayalam cinema in the 1970s and 1980s. He was a man of many talents — painter, cartoonist, musician, theatre director and filmmaker.

The autodidact's films were marked by an entirely original approach to cinema. He has been described as a poet-philosopher with a vision, and he made mystical, transcendental films that showed deep compassion for the eccentric, the marginalized and the alienated. In a career spanning 1974 to 1991, he made 11 films and 10 documentaries with almost all of his works receiving national or state awards.

The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project — a programme created by Martin Scorsese in 2007, Film Heritage Foundation and Cineteca di Bologna have recently restored the legendary filmmaker’s classic Kummatty (Bogeyman). The restored Malayalam film, which was restored at the L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in Bologna, Italy, had its world premiere at the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in late July.

Kummatty, which was released on 12 July 1979, had reached a state of almost total decomposition. Fortunately, it has now been restored to its original quality for international film buffs, reviving the unforgettable creation of this great master who began as a cartoonist, graduating to a wonderful music composer and an artist with a gift for the use of bright colours.

The film is a figment of Malabar folklore about a partly mythic and partly real Pied Piper-like magician called Kummatty. This being materializes from nature one day to mingle with and weave a spell of carefree abandon on the children of the village. Kummatty travels from place to place and entertains children with dancing, singing and performing magic.

Kummatty is a normal human who possesses magical gifts that help create a mesmerizing rapport with the children of whichever village he happens to visit from time to time. The villagers are surprised while the children, initially scared of the weird sight he presents, gradually warm up to him and grow fond of him not knowing that his visit is temporary and he will move on, perhaps to another village to enchant the children therein.

But unlike the Pied Piper, his story has a happy ending. His entry into the village is both colourful and filled with music. He wears a bright red loin cloth below, is bare-bodied above and balances a stick across his shoulders from which hangs a series of animal and human masks. He sings a paean to nature and the peacocks flying in the sky and urges everyone to listen, carefully, if one wishes to hear their ‘voices’ and sounds.

The main quality of the film lies in the way cinematographer Shaji Karun captures the picturesque landscape of the place, including its sunsets and sunrises and the panoramic frames of the greenery, the old and young trees and a small tank in which everyone bathes using his camera like a paintbrush drawing generously from the colourful palette of nature.

There is very little music in the film other than that which accompanies the rituals and the movements of Kummatty and it is suffused with the ambient sounds of the children running, playing hide-and-seek and the sound of the temple bells which is synonymous with the figure of the very old woman who lives alone outside the shrine and sweeps its floors.

His human-ness emerges when he sits under a tree, removes his artificial white beard and shaves before putting his gear back on. The small group of children are very scared by his presence but slowly, he beckons to them with a smile till they warm up to him and become his close friends. The use of nature in all its splendour seeps into the lives of the children whose naivete blends into their friendship with a man who arrives one day from nowhere and disappears only to return the following year.

The school where the children attend classes is shown thrice over the course of the film. This makes a sly sarcastic comment on the system of education where the same teacher teaches them about elections and the right to vote in one lesson, about elementary zoology in the next and in the third asks the children to pick up their respective copies from his table. This time, the children hear the bells and the song of Kummatty and though school is in session, they rush out to see him.

Chindan, who leads the small group of children who get close to Kummatty, finds the latter running a raging fever and calls for the village doctor who comes and nurses this man back to health. As if in a gesture of gratitude, Kummatty displays his magical powers to the boy by producing two dates out of thin air and Chindan merrily shares this tale with his friends of whom, some believe and some do not.

One day, Kummatty goes a bit overboard and with a swing of his stick, turns the children into animals – a goat, a mare, a monkey, an elephant, a peacock and a dog. Chindan is the dog. Before Kummatty can reverse his magic and bring them back to their human form, Chindan is chased away and out of the village by a real dog. As a result, Chindan remains in his dog avatar but only outwardly. He is then rescued by a young girl from an affluent family and given shelter in their home. His desperate parents along with the villagers go through several rituals to bring him back. When all rituals fail, in the dark of the night, the entire village march out with just the torches lighting up the night sky filled with desperate cries of “Chindan, Chindan” which offers a deep glimpse into the feelings of solidarity among the villagers of Malabar.

The tell-tale signs of Chindan in his dog form is that he never barks, lies down quietly in one corner and does not either mingle or fight with the pet dogs of the family. His newfound masters treat him well and also summons a vet to tend to him. The vet says that he is a country dog and nothing is wrong with him. Chindan returns home but all the petting and feeding and cuddling by his mother and sister fail to lift his spirits. Then his pet parakeet begins to flutter its wings in excitement and Chindan as the dog, suddenly wakes up from his stupor to look at the parakeet as if communicating with it. But nothing happens until the sounds of Kummatty’s singing reaches his ears and he runs towards the music and his friend who, recognizing him at once as Chindan, restores him to his former form.

The boy, however, returns to his former masters' home to set his pet parakeet free. He silently opens its cage, catches its claws and releases it. The sky is filled with birds in flight, which silhouette the azure sky, spelling out the essence of the film — freedom. When Chindan turns into a dog, he is trapped in a body in which he never belonged and feels imprisoned. This makes him understand that freedom is more important than anything else.

Scorsese said, “Aravindan was a visionary director and Kummatty is considered among his greatest works. The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project will share this film with the wider audience it deserves, making it a true cinematic discovery."

The cultural awakening of the 1970s in Kerala also saw a cashew exporter and producer, Ravindranathan Nair, patronising both Aravindan and Adoor Gopalakrishnan. The most memorable and remarkable films by Aravindan and Gopalakrishnan were produced by Ravindranathan. Most of Aravindan’s films, including Kachana Sita (1977), Thampu (1978) Esthappan (1980) and the unique musical Pokkuveyil (1982), were all funded by the generous producer. 

Cecilia Cenciarelli of Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna said, “Only two 35mm prints (one with photographed English subtitles) of Kummatty survive and are the result of a not-so-distant past when film negatives were copied and then discarded, sometimes leaving behind only projection prints. The two copies were naturally worn-out, very dirty and deeply scratched, one containing a consistent vertical green line on the right-hand side of the image, which required painstaking frame-by-frame work to remove.

“The film's natural environment, which could be considered one of the main characters of the film, was lit by master cinematographer Shaji N Karun and had completely lost its rich palette that illuminated the skies, grass, foliage and fields, becoming instead a homogeneous magenta. Thanks to Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, L'Immagine Ritrovata laboratory was able to be in contact with G Aravindan’s son, Ramu Aravindan, and Shaji N Karun who helped recapture, as much as possible, the original aesthetics as well as the magical dimensions of the film."

Tadao Sato, one of Japan’s foremost film scholars and critics, described Kummatty as a masterpiece and stated that he had not seen a more beautiful film in his whole life.

Kummatty is about children and their innocence and how a wandering middle-aged man who, more than creating magic, can win the hearts of little children who hardly know him. The film is also about a man who lives life on his own terms but holds on to his innate humaneness. But above everything else, it is about freedom.

Nina Menkes’ films—eight between 1981 and 2012 (+ a CD-ROM) and a new film in progress—are absolutely unclassifiable. They are achronological narratives that go to the limits of fragmentation, with deep roots in the avant garde, in psychodrama, in improvisation, in documentary, in political art, in immersive art, and in raw trauma. The films are entrancing and constantly jarring, mesmerizing the viewer and constantly throwing everything off kilter, prompting us to wake up and re-orient ourselves to another detail, another layer, another reiteration in film time and an echo in poetic time.

Her 1996 film The Bloody Child, recently restored by the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation with funding from the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation, began life in 1982 when Nina traveled to Africa and shot footage of her sister and one-time key collaborator Tinka. Over a decade later, she came across a news item that stunned her: MPs at the Twenty Nine Palms Marine Base, on a routine patrol, happened to find a soldier digging a hole in the Mojave Desert in which he planned to dump the body of his wife, who he’d savagely murdered. Nina cast her sister as one of the MPs, worked closely with real Marines, and created what might be called a series of environments or organisms—the discovery of the grave, the wait by the highway for the authorities to arrive (during which the largely unseen murderer is pummeled and pushed at his wife’s corpse by one of the arresting officers), Marines aggressively picking up women at local bars, the afore-mentioned African footage—held in centrifugal force by the unseen murder itself. These events are matters of light and shadow, posture and behavior, and visual and sonic density. “The film doesn't offer a normal narrative,” said Nina to writer Sara Gilson. “If you go into the film expecting a story about a marine, you're not going to get it. It's like a swirling meditation, structurally… The film is structured so that if you get into it, you actually identify with all of the participants. You identify with the constellation rather than identify with one character or one actor within a constellation.”

The restored version of The Bloody Child will be screening at this year’s New York Film Festival and at different venues and festivals round the country. The term “independent film” now stands for a vague, hazy sort of affective quality or feeling, several hundred miles away from a truly independent film, on every level, like The Bloody Child.

- Kent Jones

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THE BLOODY CHILD (1996, d. Nina Menkes)
Restored by the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. 

Sambizanga, newly and immaculately restored by the Cineteca di Bologna and The Film Foundation, is a movie that will probably be new to many people. For anyone who cares about the cinema, for anyone who wants to make cinema, it is as essential to know well as Sunrise or Vertigo or 2001. It is “noteworthy” because it is the very first African feature directed by a woman, Sarah Maldoror, and it is a touchstone in surveys of political and revolutionary cinema. But those are official historic and academic categories that are worlds away from the immediate experience of the film itself, which is totalizing: it comes at the viewer from all directions at once. It is grounded in life as lived, and every single scene develops with layer upon layer of intimate homebound gestural and visual detail—the preparation of food, the calming of a baby resisting sleep, the baiting of a fishhook all become living events. And the story of dueling searches for an Angolan freedom fighter during the very early days of the resistance who’s been seized from his home unfolds by way of constant cross-cutting that operates at the pace of the characters, who must walk everywhere to share news and messages: on the one hand, a lifelike tension is built; on the other hand, a portrait of a community at a particular moment in time is created. And the cross-cutting also becomes a matter of rhythm: like all great films, Sambizanga has a heartbeat. And it constantly pulses with beauty. It is an experience of colors and textures, visual and sonic. The wife’s long journey with her baby on her back is an event—visually, musically, dramatically—as is the often-cited scene where a tailor who works in the movement speaks a simple truth while he cuts fabric: “There are no whites, neither mulattos nor blacks. Only the rich and the poor. The rich are the poor’s enemies, they see to it that the poor stay poor.” The speech is extremely quotable and Maldoror would echo the sentiment in public (“The color of a person’s skin is of no interest to me,” she said in a 1991 interview, and added: “For me, there are only the exploiters and the exploited, that’s all”), but it only comes fully alive as part of the whole. The political, the dramatic and the aesthetic are not just interwoven in Sambizanga—they are one in the same.

A few words about Sarah Maldoror, a remarkable artist. She was born in France in 1929 with the family name Ducados, and she later named herself after the hero of the Comte de Lautréamont’s novel Les Chants de Maldoror. Like the Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty, she began in theatre. When she was in her 20s she co-founded Les Griots, the first all-black theatre company in France. She was drawn to the cinema by her first viewing of Battleship Potemkin, and she studied film at VGIK in Moscow alongside Ousmane Sembène (they would be followed later by Souleymane Cissé and Abderrahmane Sissako). Maldoror went to live in Algeria during the crucial years after the eight-year war for independence, and she worked as an assistant to William Klein and Gillo Pontecorvo—on The Battle of Algiers—before embarking on her first short, Monangambeee, co-written by her husband Mário Coelho Pinto de Andrade, one of the key figures in the Angolan liberation movement. The first feature she actually shot, Guns for Banta, was financed by the Algerian FLN (National Liberation Front), whose representatives seized the film from the editing room because Maldoror was driving the focus toward the women’s point of view—“In the end, wars only work when women take part—they don’t have to hold a bazooka but they have to be present” she later said as she reflected on the experience, which ended with her leaving Algeria. Sambizanga, an adaptation of José Luandino Vieira’s 1961 novel The Real Life of Domingos Xavier (also co-written by Andrade), was shot in forty days with a cast largely comprised of Angolan militants. It was impossible to work in Angola at the time, so the film was shot in the neighboring Congo. Sambizanga was released to considerable international acclaim (it was picked up for distribution here by New Yorker Films and favorably reviewed in the then all-powerful New York Times), but for all African and Africa-based filmmakers the international acclaim is bittersweet at best. Maldoror, like Sembène, like Cissé and Sissako, like Safi Faye and Mati Diop, made her films “first of all for Africans, for African people, those who know what Africa is and those who don’t know, although they think they do.” Making the films was only one step—getting them shown on a grand scale was another matter entirely.

“African women must be everywhere,” said Maldoror, who passed away in March of 2020 at the age of 90, from COVID. “They must be in the images, behind the camera, in the editing room and involved in every stage of the making of a film. They must be the ones to talk about their problems.” Like Agnès Varda, she had no patience for empty gestures or half-measures. She made 42 films in all, shorts and features and documentaries, films of all shapes and sizes and orientations. She made her last public appearance in May of 2019, at retrospectives of her work in Spain, and she said something so simple, direct and true that it takes my breath away: “Education doesn't begin with a book, but rather with an image. Children experience cinema and that makes them dream. To help them, we need to get back to poetry, theater and cinema…

Children must, from a very young age, go to the movies and read poetry, to build a better world.”

- Kent Jones

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SAMBIZANGA (Angola/France, 1972, d. Sarah Maldoror)
Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Image Retrouvée in association with Éditions René Chateau and the family of Sarah Maldoror. Funding provided by Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. 

This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers and UNESCO – in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna – to help locate, restore, and disseminate African cinema.

What are the differences between seeing a movie at home and seeing it projected on a big screen? Back in the 80s, when the film critic Serge Daney decided that a VHS was the equivalent of a photographed reproduction of a painting, the answer was clear. Now, not so much.

The first answer that comes to mind for many people is “community,” the feeling of sharing a viewing experience with strangers. Even before the pandemic, the tendency has been to skew the theatrical experience closer to the convenience and coziness of home viewing, and to skew home viewing further in the direction of sensorial richness. On the one hand, reserved stadium seating; on the other hand, bigger screens and more elaborate sound systems and higher and higher resolution.

And now, of course, it’s possible to see films at home while they’re still playing on big screens. Of course, this has been true of older films for a long time. For those of us lucky enough to live in cities with repertory houses, the majority of the programming can be duplicated at home.

But can it really be duplicated?

What is the difference creating a new HD master of a film and actually restoring it?

On the one hand, this is a technical matter. “Technically, there are significant differences in sound and picture processes,” writes Schawn Belston, my old friend and one of the real heroes of film restoration. “HD color space is different than Theatrical, so we usually work in the theatrical (P3) space and then create r709 (HD) after. Similarly, audio dynamics are different between Theatrical and Home, requiring mixes specifically creatively imagined for the different experiences.”

“HD remasters can be beautiful and are frequently made with great care and artistry,” he elaborates, “and they can even be used to create DCPs for distribution. The line between ‘HD master’ and ‘restoration’ has definitely gotten blurrier as technology and creative savvy have improved.” Anyone who has paid close attention to the extraordinary work done by Lee Kline at Criterion will agree with Schawn, although not everyone has Lee’s sensitivity or attention to detail.

“We really need to understand that an HD transfer and a 4K restoration do not simply differ in terms of quality and information, but they serve completely different purposes,” writes the Cineteca di Bologna’s Cecilia Cenciarelli—another good friend, another true hero(ine). “Restoration, in the way we intend it, draws from figurative art. In Europe the urge to ‘restore’ emerged in the mid-eighteenth century (although we know that Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel was repaired as early as the sixteenth century due to water damage), but it was not before the 1930s that this field was fully theorized, assigning a new status to in-depth research and study.”

“A proper restoration should have an eye to longevity as well as all types of viewing experiences,” says Schawn, “notably the original experience of seeing a film on a large screen in a theater.”

“Restoring entails researching the history of the piece of art (the film),” says Cecilia, “its color, texture, style, just as you would with an ancient fresco. The final objective is always two-fold: immediate accessibility (through home video release, which today means many different things, of course) and long-term preservation: creating film elements that can last and extend the film's life for 50-80 years.” It’s worth reiterating that film is still the only proven long-term preservation medium.

Another obvious but important point: the work of actual restoration costs money. It is labor-intensive and time-consuming, it is logistically complex, and it stands or falls on the presence of people with the knowledge and sensitivity of Schawn and Cecilia and their dedicated co-workers and peers.

Whenever I’ve written about any given title in this series of posts, it’s been with the underlying thought that whoever reads them will try their best to see those titles on a big screen, whenever possible. That goes for The Film Foundation’s two most recent restorations, funded by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation—All That Money Can Buy, otherwise known as The Devil and Daniel Webster (a collaborative effort undertaken by UCLA, with Janus Films, MoMA and the Library of Congress) and King Vidor’s Hallelujah (Library of Congress). When you watch the restorations of these two extraordinary films, think of the work that, to paraphrase Dickens, recalled them to life.

- Kent Jones

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ALL THAT MONEY CAN BUY (1941, d. William Dieterle) 
Restored by UCLA Film and Television Archive and The Film Foundation in collaboration with Janus Films, The Museum of Modern Art and the Library of Congress. Restoration funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. 

HALLELUJAH (1929, d. King Vidor)
Restored by the Library of Congress and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.