Dev Benegal‘s “English, August” almost didn’t survive to be restored. Its original camera negative had melted. All that was left were two surviving 35mm prints – and, it turned out, a box of DAT tapes nobody expected to matter three decades later.
It was in terrible condition,” says Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, founder of the Film Heritage Foundation (FHF), the organization that took on the restoration. FHF was left to rebuild the film from whatever prints remained. What remained were two 35mm release prints: one Benegal had personally kept and donated to FHF, the other preserved by the NFDC-National Film Archive of India, the government body that houses India’s official film archive.
Both prints, he says, were in decent condition – a stroke of luck given how little else of the film had survived. Released in 1994, “English, August” follows Agastya Sen, a young, Westernized trainee nicknamed “August,” sent to a remote provincial town for a year of civil-service training in India’s elite administrative cadre. Adrift among Bob Dylan records, Marcus Aurelius and a bureaucracy he can barely stomach, Agastya finds himself a stranger in a country that is technically his own.
The film is adapted from Upamanyu Chatterjee’s 1988 novel of the same name, a book that became a defining portrait of a certain post-colonial, urban Indian generation. Benegal says the screenplay only became the film in the editing room. I am a firm believer that’s where movies are actually written,” he says.
We are writing the film right here.'” The soundtrack turned out to be the restoration’s unlikely triumph. Benegal recalls the constraints under which the film was originally mixed. Ignoring industry advice not to do that!” he says.
Those were days of the License Raj, where we had to secure special permission to import six reels of Kodak Optical Sound Negative. Even after that we only had outdated equipment to make a flat mono mix.” What survived instead was a set of DAT tapes Benegal had quietly kept for thirty years. Dungarpur says the palette was set by cinematographer Anoop Jotwani, who tested a single reel before the rest of the film followed his lead, with Benegal weighing in throughout from New York as the restoration work itself took place at L’Immagine Ritrovata, the film lab in Bologna, Italy.
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