希拉兹

"Shiraz: A Romance in India" was adapted from Niranjan Pal's stage play of the same name and is based on the story of the commissioning of the Taj Mahal.

The restoration process for SHIRAZ started with the BFI National Archive scouring the world for any surviving copies of the film. SHIRAZ was made in a number of versions. An English version which you’ll see today. A German version. And Indian versions with titles in several Indian languages. It became clear that only the English version exists. And all copies that we discovered derived from materials held in the BFI National Archive.

We are lucky enough to look after the original camera negative from 1928. In other words, the very piece of film that whirred through the camera in India. It’s the holy grail of film restoration as it’s the negative that is usually going to give us the clearest images.

However, like all films of the period, the negative was shot on unstable nitrate stock and had already started to decompose when it arrived at the BFI in the 1950s.

We made a positive copy of the film so that we had new master materials before any further nitrate damage took place. However, in the perverse world of film preservation, this contains its own set of inherent problems not present in the original negative.

It was on these 2 elements – neither exactly in their prime – that the new restoration was created. Each copy had different damage and decomposition in different sections, so my colleague Kirsty Shanks had to select the best source shot-by-shot - wherever possible using the negative, given the superior underlying image.

All of this work, of course, is undertaken in the analogue world. It is not until the film is scanned – itself a highly skilled and sometimes painstaking process – that the film starts its journey into the digital world.

(Robin Baker, BFI National Archive)