The 16MM Giant

PA Salam (66) describes his youth as one with inexhaustible amounts of restless energy. He grew up in the most orthodox of Malayali Muslim families in Alapuzha, with a strict uncle who didn’t want his nephew to waste a minute. “Listening to radio itself was a sin. Watching movies…next to impossible,” Salam recalls. Not that this stopped him. He kept aside loose change and whatever extra he saved from his chores to run straight to the theater. He hung around his hometown in Alapuzha until his late teens without knowing what he wanted to do, moving from one job to another. His older brother, who was a government employee working in the administrative side of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), brought him to Pune back in 1973 (“exactly on the 15th of August”) to find him some direction. 

“I worked three jobs in and around Pune, one after the other, but I could never hold on to any of them for more than a few months,” Salam says. “I was once asked to help with clearing the forest behind the FTII Boys Hostel and I refused to do that kind of manual labour. I was always a little angry, but because my brother was around, I kept finding some work in and around the campus.” 

This was when he found a “cure” to this uncontrollable energy. As he moved into his fourth job, this time as a security guard working within the FTII compound, he found peace in what the world calls “slow” cinema. “My shift started in the evening but I would be around for the 5PM and the 9PM shows that were screened in the theatre, back when NFAI was part of the main FTII campus. Along with students and teachers who came in to watch the screening, I too formed the habit of watching all these classics.” 

This became a part of his routine, so much so that he admits to falling asleep right after the 9PM show ended. “Those shows would end after midnight and I would find a spot outside the hall to sleep. One morning I woke up to realise that some thieves had broken into the campus and stolen construction material I was tasked to protect.” 

Call it luck or destiny, Salam was able stick around without losing his job again, thanks in part to how the thieves had decided to dump the material without taking it too far away. The other reason he held on was his closeness to archivist PK Nair, India’s Celluloid Man. “Nair saar would make it a point to watch at least one film everyday and I started to join him. It was a long association that took me around the country and he was instrumental in making me an employee of NFAI when he got the chance.” 

It was around this time that Salam began travelling along with PK Nair and other senior archivists for screenings around the country. Long before films became digital, Salam had to travel in trains or buses carrying these heavy boxes of film to festivals, lectures or film appreciation courses. “Nair saar was extremely particular about the way we handled these films. He wont let you touch parts of it and he didn’t like us showing it to outsiders. We took a lot of care but we had to travel with five to six boxes at a time. In the 70s, this would be a particular town in Kerala or in Karnataka, even though we later started to travel to the north too. In other instances, we moved with these boxes from one district, say Thiruvananthapuram to Kollam and then on to Alapuzha, showing these films as we went along.” 

Although he was on duty strictly as a handler, it was a little bit of movie magic that got him promoted to the position of a projectionist. Back then, when he travelled to newer towns with the 16MM reels, the local projector operators would be petrified of handling them. “In UC College in Aluva, we were working with an operator who had only worked with 35MM. He had not handled 16MM, that too of such films that were being brought here from Poona. He washed his hands off that responsibility and it fell upon me to figure it out.”

Not that Salaam didn’t get some help. “A hall full of dignitaries and students were already waiting for the screening to begin and we didn’t know what to do. Adoor sir (Adoor Gopalakrishnan) walked up to the projector and asked me to play a reel of Elements of the Film, a video that explained the technical aspects of filmmaking. He probably understood that I wasn’t very sure about what had to be done, and with his help, I managed to learn the bare minimum that needed to get it working.”

After a few more tries on the same day and Salam wasn’t nervous anymore. What helped was how he too serendipitously became one of Adoor’s students. “That same night, I also screened my first ever feature.” Which film? “Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960)”. Ghatak and Adoor for a start! 

He learnt the art of projecting 35MM films by the time he finished this tour and all the other formats soon after. The man also witnessed many evolutions that happened in and around world cinema, from his vantage point on Law College Road, Pune. From inside the FTII campus, NFAI moved next door and in to a full building. Salam also became an NFAI fixture, having handled thousands of films in his many decades there. “I started working with projectors back when we had to deal with carbon rods and manual winders. You had to keep adjusting the reel as you watched the screen and you also had to change reels. A three-hour film meant that you had to change the reel 17 to 18 times. It was tiring and you could hardly focus on the story.”

Between festivals, screenings and lectures, Salam believes he’s seen a good chunk of some of the world’s best movies. “But you cannot ask me to pick a favourite. Kodiyettam (Adoor Gopalakrishnan's 1978 film) is a film I think I have seen at least once every year since I joined. That itself means I’ve seen it more than 40 times. I also never get tired of watching Pather Panchali (1955) or Bicycle Thieves (1948). Some time ago, I screened Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam (1962) …I’d seen it many times before but it still managed to keep me arrested.”

Among directors, he names Shyam Benegal and Ghatak as his favourites, with a special love for, Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome (1969). “Then there are films like Battleship Potemkin and Rondo that I keep watching. I recently enjoyed a Czech film called Adrift (1971), but that I think is because it had a little bit of nudity,” he laughs.  

He says he can no longer keep watching movies like he was once able to. With physical strain and with age catching on, the best movies are those that play most clearly in his mind’s eye. Earlier considered one of the lucky ones for being able to continue working for NFAI, even after his official retirement, this time though his luck seems to have run out. As several contracted employees find that they have run their course, Salam too became expendable in NFAI’s merger with NFDC. Not that he’s worried. “Every day I got to work after my first retirement was already a bonus. If I get my contract extended, I’d be happy to keep working. If I don’t, I think I’ll still be a happy man,” describing how his contract ran out on January 5, 2023…many matinees past the Independence Day of 1973.