The National Film Archive of India has added over 459 glass slides of films to its collection. These slides represent the pictorial history of early Telugu films — from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s — and feature frames tracing the gravitas of Telugu cinema during that era. Last year, the NFAI had acquired nearly 400 glass slides. In total, it now has more than 2,000 such glass slides of Hindi, Gujarati and Telugu cinema in its repertoire.
The newly-acquired glass slides are in black and white and they cover almost six dozen Telugu films like V.V. Rao’s trendsetting film about widow remarriage, Malli Pelli (1939), B.N. Reddi’s Vande Mataram (1939), Akkineni Nageshwara Rao starrer Keelu Gurram (1949), another N.T. Rama Rao starrer Daasi (1952), and Vedantam Raghavaiah’s Devadasu (1953).
The NFAI was established as a media unit of the miistry of information in 1964. It is a member of the International Federation of Film Archives. It has its headquarters in Pune, and it has branch offices in Bangalore, Calcutta and Thiruvananthapuram. Its three principal objectives are to trace, acquire and preserve for posterity the heritage of Indian cinema, to classify and document data and undertake research relating to films, and to act as a centre for the dissemination of film culture.
