The project of Oral History is part of the NFAI Research Programme to conduct interviews of pioneering film artists who have contributed to the growth and evelopment of Cinema in India. Veteran artists from Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, and Bengali film industries have been interviewed as part of this project. These are narrations of their career life and stories highlighting his/her contributions.
The Oral History Project was started in 1983, where the interviews were recorded on audio cassettes. Later, with the shift in technology, this project was converted into the Audio-Visual History Project in 2008, where a film/video was recorded interspersed with clippings from related films and other visual material like photos, posters, etc. to illustrate the interview
These interviews were conducted by film scholars as a part of this project with meagre budgets, hence you may find usage of a single microphone by both the interviewer and the interviewee. Thus, the recordings of conversations are of very moderate quality. These interviews were taped in the artist’s house hence there are inadvertently ambient sounds creeping in during the conversations. Moreover, these artists were frail and too old and hence some of the voices are feeble and inaudible.
As most of the interviews are almost four decades old, NFAI digitized them. Then wherever possible, enhancement of the audio was done with the help of the Sound Dept of FTII. These audio-video files have now been uploaded to our website. A total of 53 interviews have been digitized totalling about 8000 minutes duration.
All the interviews carry a translation in English which would help film lovers and scholars to delve into the history of Indian Cinema and are now made available to students and researchers of Indian Cinema
We would love to hear back your reactions. Kindly mail it to the nfaidocumentation@gmail.com
