Gemini colour laboratory
This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content. |
1940-2015
Jan 23 2015
U Tejonmayam
The last surviving film processing laboratory in Chennai, Gemini Colour Lab, has shut down, signalling an end to an era that began with the advent of cinema in south India in the 1910s. The transi tion to a digital world, which began a decade ago with the Kamal Hassan-starrer `Mumbai Express', is now complete. “In the past year, there's been a drastic change in the number of filmmakers using digital cameras. We realized that bringing back the analog film format will not work,“ said an official of Gemini Industries and Imaging Ltd, who did not want to be named. He said the celluloid lab was shut down at the end of December 2014.The last big Tamil film it handled was director Shankar's `I'. Gemini Lab was set up as a film processing division of Ge mini Industries in 1958 and developed close to 6,000 films in several Indian languages. The Gemini group was founded in 1940 by S S Vasan, one of the big studio owners of Chennai who held sway during Indian cinema's golden age in the 1950s and 1960s. At one point, the lab was one of three such facilities in the city which processed and printed motion pictures, the others being Vi jaya Labs and L V Prasad Film Lab, both of which have shut.
The company, which has changed hands, now caters to filmmakers through its digital post-production division. With the shutting down of Gemini Colour Lab, a vault with close to 6,000 master negatives of films will open. These were processed at the lab and stored here for many years.The negatives, some dating to the lab's inception in 1958, would now be handed over to the films' producers. “The repository includes master negatives of films in Telugu, Malayalam and Tamil stored at a certain temperature. They were taken out only when the producer wanted a new print to be made. We have asked the producers to take them. However, we will continue to, store negatives of big film banners who are still our customers in the digital production t division,“ a representative of Gemini In. dustries and Imaging Ltd told TOI. The Kerala government has agreed to take back the negatives of Malayalam films and create an archive of old films, following a request from the Malayalam film industry. Film historians are concerned if any one else can preserve the master negatives which need a proper storage system. The way out, they suggest, would be digital conversion. “In 90% of films, it is the distributor who owns the right for the master negative as they finance the project. But once the distributors exploit the film, they forget about the master. As for the negative, the biggest enemy is humidity. So unless they don't spend money and preserve it properly or convert in to digital format, it will rot. We do have many labs that convert film to digital in Chennai,” said K Hariharan, film historian.
