Preservation of Films as Cultural Heritage of a Nation (Special Reference to Sri Lankan Film Industry)

Abstract

Film is a collective art form, the cinema is a highly synthesized art. It is incorporated with music, dancing, drama, poetry, literature, sculpting, interior designing, painting, martial arts and many other different expressions of human totality. And it communicates through visuals and sounds. Visual is dominant and the sound comes next. What are these visuals and what are these sounds? That’s nothing else, these are the visuals of what we see in our day today lives and what we here every day or these are something we dream, imagine. Films have documented this world for more than one hundred and twenty years. Filmmakers have captured how generations of people have lived, worked, and dreamed. Then the cinema is seemed to be a modern electronic chronicle which is successfully recorded all the complexities, paradoxes, lineal developments or downfalls of country’s human being. Sri Lanka has produced around more than 1310 main stream films & large amount of documentaries and news reels. And Sri Lanka is acclaimed for generating internationally demarcated film makers and their awarded films But Sri Lanka still doesn’t have at least one proper film archive. Forming a film archive is still an unsolved problem in Sri Lanka. The objectives of this study are investigating the existing film preservation practice in Sri Lanka and emphasize the importance of film preservation for a country as their nation heritage. This research was conducted as a desk study. This study has articulated number of secondary data. These materials have sufficiently been utilized for the paper. Preliminary data have been gathered by using personal interviews and did one case study in order to study some important areas of the research. It was found by this study that Sri Lanka does not have a state controlled technically organized system for film preservation. Since the country does not have a national film archive, this entity has been recognized as a lucrative commercial zone by the private entrepreneurship. Initially they were film enthusiastic people and film collectors who did not have a sufficient knowledge or the technology for preservation