Kalpana

Uday Shankar

T. int.: Imagination; Scen.: Uday Shankar, Amritlal Nagar. F.: K. Ramnoth. Mo.: N.K. Gopal. Scgf.: K.R. Sharma. Int.: Uday Shankar (Udayan / lo scrittore), Amala Uday Shankar (Uma), Lakhmt Kanta (Kamini), Dr. G.V. Subbarao (maestro), Brijo Behari Banerji (padre di Uma) Prod.: Udai Shankar Production. DCP. D.: 155’.

info_outline
T. it.: Italian title. T. int.: International title. T. alt.: Alternative title. Sog.: Story. Scen.: Screenplay. F.: Cinematography. M.: Editing. Scgf.: Set Design. Mus.: Music. Int.: Cast. Prod.: Production Company. L.: Length. D.: Running Time. f/s: Frames per second. Bn.: Black e White. Col.: Color. Da: Print source

Film Notes

A great work of hallucinatory, homemade expressionism and ecstatic beauty, Uday Shankar’s Kalpana is one of the enduring classics of Indian cinema. Shankar, the brother of the great Ravi Shankar, was one of the central figures in the history of Indian dance, fusing Indian classical forms with western techniques. In the late 30s, he established his own dance acad­emy in the Himalayas, whose students included his brother Ravi and future film­maker Guru Dutt (who worked as an as­sistant on Kalpana). After the closure of the academy in the early 40s, Shankar started preparations on his one and only film, many years in the making.
Kalpana, with an autobiographical nar­rative of a dancer who dreams of estab­lishing his own academy (starring Uday Shankar and his wife, the great Amala Shankar – the film also marks the de­but of Padmini, who was 17 years old at the time), is one of the few real ‘dance films’ – in other words, a film that doesn’t just include dance sequences, but whose primary physical vocabulary is dance. A commercial failure when it was released, the film is now regarded, justifiably, as a creative peak in the history of indepen­dent Indian filmmaking.
Kalpana has been digitally restored by the World Cinema Foundation at Cineteca di Bologna/L’Immagine Ritrovata Laboratory using a combined dupe negative and a positive print held at the National Film Archive of India.
The combined dupe negative was badly damaged and marked by lines, tears, dirt, dust, white marks and poor definition. The restoration required a considerable amount of both physical and digital repair in order to recover the beauty of faces, movements and costumes, and to reduce the aforementioned issues.
The original sound was digitally trans­ferred from the combined dupe negative. Digital cleaning and background noise re­duction was applied. The restoration has generated a duplicate negative, new opti­cal soundtrack negative for preservation as well as a complete back-up of all the files produced by the digital restoration.

Copy From

Restored in 2012 by the World Cinema Foundation at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory (Cineteca di Bologna) from original lm elements preserved at the National Film Archive of India. Special thanks to Shivendra Singh and the family of Uday Shankar