THE HOUSE OF MEMORIES

FROM UTTAM KUMAR'S BHAWANIPORE ADDRESS TO SATYAJIT RAY'S LAKE TEMPLE ROAD FLAT, DISCOVER HOW BENGAL FILM ARCHIVE KEEPS THESE SACRED SPACES ALIVE IN PUBLIC MEMORY

-  ANASUYA BASU

WOMEN CINEGOERS WHO ARE IN THEIR SIXTIES TODAY would remember a time when they were torn between two of the most celebrated matinee idols of Bengali cinema in their 20s. The phrase matinee idol itself is obsolete in this age of OTT binge-ing. It harks back to the era when matinee (3 pm) shows at cinema halls would make or break a cine star.

There would be two teams of fans, one backing actor-director-screenwriter-composer-playback singer Uttam Kumar, whose career spanned over three decades from the late 40s to his death in 1980, and another cheering on Soumitra Chatterjee, a playwright, play director, writer, POet and film star known for his stellar peformances in Satyajit Ray films like "Apur Sansar" (1959) and "Shakha Prashakha" (1990).

On July 24, 1980, Kumar had a fatal heart attack when he was only 53. The press carried stories of how, after having felt discomfort at the Moira Street flat, Kumar had walked over to Belle Vue, a nursing home, a stone's throw away. When the news broke, it seemed as if the whole of Kolkata was struck with an intense grief. His fans lined the streets from his Moira Street residence to his ancestral Bhawanipore home to the crematorium.

All these memories come back in a flash when browsing through Bengal Film Archive (BFA)'s website. It is an archive of important and often neglected nuggets of information, photographs, detailed filmography from the talkies to the 2000s, short biographies of stars, directors, technicians, musicians, stories of cinema houses, studios, distribution houses and laboratories. It is an exhaustive, virtual repository of Tollywood, as the Bengali film industry is often called.