Restoring Ray: JALSAGHAR and the geo-politics of preserving cinema – Amrita Biswas (Frankurt)

Who creates and preserves the canon of cinema? If you follow the material history of Satyajit Ray’s JALSAGHAR, which tells the story of the downfall of a music-obsessed landowner, you come across a global power structure for archiving, preserving and restoring films. Using the journey around the world of the camera negative, the “original” of the film, as a guide, it can be shown that the preservation of film heritage in Ray’s case is a highly political process characterized by considerable power imbalances.

Amrita Biswas is a doctoral candidate in the DFG Research Training Group “Configurations of Film” at Goethe University Frankfurt.

Film: JALSAGHAR (The Music Room), India 1958, 94 min.