Bouncin' Back to Bollywood: Hum Aapke Hain Koun

It was a snowy February Sunday night in 1995 in Brookfield, WI. My usual bedtime was 9pm, but on this very special night, my mom let me go with her to a very special screening: a film that had been buzzing all over the Bollywood gossip magazines: Hum Aapke Hain Koun. An hour later than scheduled, the lights dimmed, and the loud sold-out crowd cheered in delight as the following title sequence hit the screen:

This was actually what we saw. There are a few logos that are supposed to come before this title sequence, but the print we saw had traveled all over the US, and had come to us incredibly worn, starting with the logos cut, and this number incredibly scratched. Still, green emulsion lines dancing and all, it was a night to remember. Hum Aapke Hain Koun was considered a landmark film in Bollywood for so many reasons. I particularly can take or leave the film today, but do applaud its reverence because of what it did for the Bollywood industry. To see its deterioration over the last 20 years in different releases and to see that it has been beautifully restored in HD and released on home video makes my heart smile, even if I don't agree with it being a particularly good film.

The synopsis of the film is quite simple. Two wealthy Hindu families arrange a marriage between a boy and a girl, and in the process of the lavish traditional Indian wedding, followed by the wife becoming 'expectant', the bride and grooms siblings fall in love, keeping their coy feelings from the family. When tragedy strikes (the bride, finding the two are in love, joyously runs down a flight of stairs, trips into a concussion and dies in a coma), their love is jeopardized as her sister must now marry the bride's widow to care for her nephew instead of marrying the man she loves. Full of over-the-top humor, 14 songs, and incredibly cheesy dialogue, the film may not hold up as well as it did when it hit screens in 1994. But at the time, it was a saving grace for an industry that was starting to fall apart.

Still chugging out roughly 900 films a year, India's film market had a new focus...it seems that all films I remember of this era were romantic-drama-action-comedy-musicals that involved drug lords, cops, scorned love by family members, and a rape scene thrown in for good measure. I kid you not, while kissing on the lips was not seen for another year in Raja Hindustani, a staged rape scene happened more times than it needed to. Hum Aapke Hain Koun (HAHK) decided to be different. It broke box office records selling out for weeks in advanced on a simple story about love and family. If it weren't for this film, so many other classics that followed (Dilwale Dulhuniya Le Jayenge, Dil To Pagal Hain, and Rangeela, to name a few) wouldn't have been made, even in an industry that did release so many titles at a time.

There are three main versions of this film, to date. The first release, not remembered by most, had only 10 songs in it, and ran about 20 minutes shorter than the most common version. A groundbreaking marketing technique, Rajshri films waited until attendance had started to tamper down, and rereleased the film with 4 new songs: "Chocolate, Lime Juice", a reprise to "Diktana, Diktana", "Mujse Jodha Hokar", and "Lo Chali Main", the latter before the climactic coma inducing stair fall. This was the version I remember seeing in theaters as the film traveled around the US, running roughly 3 hrs and 5 min. Beautifully restored, here is the "Chocolate, Lime Juice" number, courtesy of Youtube:

Alas, there is one more version of this film that ran roughly 3 hrs and 20 minutes. For a long time, a person had two choices when purchasing the film. There was the first release, which cut the four numbers I mentioned above, and this long version that was almost unbearable to watch. Included were a number of extra short scenes that had nothing to do with the plot and were obviously put back into the film to market it for perhaps a third release, or one for home video or television broadcasts. Most annoying in this version was the alternation of "Ye Mausum Ka Jadoo". In the first and second versions of the film, the last shot of the number involved Madhuri Dixit ringing a bell at a temple and Salman Khan attempting to do the same but flubbing the process. They both sit to pray as the last line of the song is overheard, before the intermission card appears before the screen. The print we saw which toured the US did not have the original intermission card, being such a worn shabby print, but an inappropriate replacement title card, where a dramatic lightning bolt struck the frame and the word 'intermission' shot out at the audience. I remember my mom, sister, and I being a little disturbed by this. The third extended cut of the film featured a closeup of Madhuri looking on at Salman Khan while the song is heard in the background at a picnic, followed by a full scene at the temple, done a la An Affair to Remember. This was the first addition of scenes in the third version. The majority of them happen in the second act of the film, which is a shame because most people will admit that the second half of the film is what makes it drag.

The film became a landmark in a bad way, too. Video Sound, Asian Video, and Eros Video handled the official international video releases of Bollywood films in their respective territories. These releases weren't without flaws, of course. There would be commercial breaks in the official video releases and the transfers were low quality telecine transfers, usually matted from 2.35 to 1.85, but still of watchable quality and widescreen to a certain degree, nonetheless. When HAHK hit screens and became such a blockbuster, nobody wanted to pay for the rights to officially release the film on video before the crowd was ready to see it, and pirated videos in the US were born. These were common in India already, but a foreign idea to international audiences. It became clear that people were okay with renting pan and scan videos with numbers and sequences cut, advertisements flying across the bottom third of the screen, or films taped at private screenings in theaters with whatever sound was booming in the theater that would hit the camera microphone. It was a pleasure to see the film without the commercial breaks that official video releases had at the time, but this was the only advantage. Most films would, months later, get an official release, but a new precedence was set. A film would be released in India, a bootleg from a theater would hit the home video market, a home video from Pakistan with advertisements on the bottom of the screen would follow, and lastly, sometimes up to a year later, the official release would come out. Thankfully, this film was released in 1994 and the Bollywood industry started going to DVD around 1998, at which point everything was of a better quality. At that point, even the bootleg DVDs were better looking than the VHS releases that came out from the official distributors.

Every time this film got a video release, it seemed more worn out. The sound would get grainier and more muffled, the colors would be more faded, and there would be more pesky splices. I am so thrilled that the familiar hybrid version of the film is now released in HD, so all can see its splendor and glory. Looking back, I can say that while I don't care for the film as much as I did when I was 10, I do still feel that it should be preserved and treasured in that it holds an important part in Hindi film history. Now, let's work on getting a 20th anniversary rerelease theatrically!

Signed,

The Celluloid Avenger

My cinefile moment through Yaarana

Welcome to my brand new blog. I have been thinking about starting one for a long time, but today, the power of the Madhuri Dixit Youtube frenzy I got stuck in inspired me to actually start jotting down a few words. Who knows where it will take me? If this starts to ramble, apologies.

Let me introduce myself. I call myself the Celluloid Avenger. I have been working in the film and video preservation world for roughly 10 years. Film and video images mean the world to me. There is nothing like the moving image as a historical document to take you into a specific time and place. And it all started with Bollywood.

My grandfather owned two second-run movie theaters in Pune, India. My mother would go to the theaters every day and catch whatever films were running in the theater and knows more about Indian cinema than most people would, as she has seen practically every Hindi film that has come out from the 1950s to today. While I was growing up, most of my friends were renting VHS tapes from Blockbuster or Hollywood Video. Mom, insistent that my sister and I get in touch with our Indian roots, would rent Bollywood films from the local Indian store. Of course, these films would not be subtitled. My mom would sit next to us on a Sunday afternoon, after working a 50+ hour week as an OB/GYN, and with very little sleep, would translate the films to us line for line as the actors spoke them on the screen. Now that, my friends, is dedicated motherhood.

Of course, there was the occasional Bollywood screening at the local theater. My mom would take us and whisper through the lines of the film, my sister sitting on her left and me on her right. I will never forget these precious memories, and the night we went to see Yaraana was one of the most influential evenings of my life, paving the road for what would eventually become my profession. I remember distinctly that when the film started, the projectionist had put the wrong lens on the projector (1.85 instead of 2.35) and my mom was the first to notice. Soon, other people noticed and a near riot started in the middle of the theater (thanks Mom). An important moment in my film education, however, as it taught me the difference in aspect ratios and what anamorphic prints look like. Tweaking the focus throughout the film, the projectionist obviously had no clue what kind of audience he was dealing with. Indian film audiences are known for their loud interaction with the film...cheering after epic monologues, whistling and dancing in the aisles during songs, and shouting randomly at the screen for no apparent reason. Rocky Horror Picture Show has nothing on a Bollywood audience.

The number that you see at the top of this post had a huge impact on me. Hindi films are shot on a cheaper film stock than Hollywood uses. The film gets scratched and worn quite easily as a result. In addition, it is not uncommon, to this day, for 70mm blowup prints to be made. To compensate for the grain of the blowup, plus the fast deterioration of the prints, Indian filmmakers will use EXTREMELY bright colors in the costumes and sets. When the "Mera Piya Ghar Aaya" song came on the screen, it was unlike anything I had seen before. The colors on Madhuri Dixit's orange dress and the dreamlike quality of smoke against the neon pink outfit she wears jumped out on the screen. It was unlike anything I had ever seen before. That sharp image quality seemed so 3D, and the music was blaring through the speakers, making my soul dance. Years later, I would learn that the quality of watching a film print, when shot with the perfect exposure and color saturation, can do this. At the mere age at 11, though, all I knew was that I was seeing something special.

The video included above cannot do it justice. Watching it actually pisses me off because I remember what it was like to see a mint print, compared to the shoddy faded piece of crap I included. Sadly, being nearly 20 years old and a B picture, I doubt that the film has been preserved to its glory and that memory will stay as that....a faded memory. Indian cinema is not treasured as much as American cinema. While there is a national archive in Pune, many negatives are stored with the original producers and directors. Every time a print is made, it is taken directly off of the original negative, as confirmed by my sources from the Association of Moving Image Archivists. You can see it too, if you look carefully. The splice marks are always present on every shot on a Bollywood film if it's shot on 35. A proper preservation of internegatives and dupe negatives is never done, which is probably why the colors on the print I saw were so sharp.

While Yaraana is far from a perfect film, it would be a joy to see it on film once more, if anything just to catch this beautiful dance number. Video releases, which we'll discuss on another day, were horrendous before DVDs hit the market, and when they did, a lot of older films were already on the road to decaying. I cannot stress enough how important it is for people to invest in helping the Indian film market in saving their films. From talking to representatives of restoration facilities, it appears that people aren't going off of prints and negatives for restorations. An SD video source is touched up for an HD video release, and the product is then schlopped on the market with no regard to how the image is supposed to look. I hope and pray that an intervention is done at some point, or those of us who treasured these images when they first came out are in serious trouble.

Signed,

The Celluloid Avenger