National Film Archive of India acquires 450 glass slides of early Telugu cinema

In a major acquisition, the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) has added more than 450 glass slides that represent the pictorial history of early Telugu cinema from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s, to its collection. All of them are in black and white covering 70 Telugu films, according to an official release.

These glass slides include several important films like V.V. Rao’s trendsetting social drama about widow remarriage Malli Pelli (1939), B.N. Reddi’s Vande Mataram (1939) starring Chittor V. Nagaiah, popular hit Keelu Gurram (1949) featuring Akkineni Nageswara Rao and Anjali Devi, N.T. Rama Rao starrer Daasi (1952) and critically acclaimed adaptation of Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s classic Vedantam Raghavaiah’s Devadasu (1953) starring Akkineni Nageswara Rao, Savitri and Lalitha in the lead roles and many more.

The slides are made by pressing film positives (miniatures of the film posters or publicity material for newspapers and magazines) between two thin glass squares and they are used for announcing new attractions before the commencement of a film or during the intervals in theatres.

Presently, the NFAI has over 2,000 such glass slides of Hindi, Gujarati and Telugu films in its collection.

NFAI Director Prakash Magdum stated in the press release that the glass slides were exquisite records of Indian cinematic heritage that should be preserved. He appealed to film lovers to come forward and deposit film footage, photographs, posters, lobby cards and other such material with the NFAI so that they could be preserved.

Arti Karkhanis, in-charge of documentation at NFAI, said these glass slides gave a bird’s eye view of the publicity scenario in the Telugu film industry in its formative years and they had a great reference value for film researchers. The slides would be digitised soon.