How a retired fisherman from Hawaii found a community of Hindi film buffs

While speaking little Hindi or Urdu himself, Daniel has slowly gained command of the history of early films in these languages

When Thomas Daniel first travelled to India, the country did not capture his imagination in the best way. He spent a short week here during a trans-Asian journey with a pal from school, with flying visits to West Bengal, Delhi and the Taj Mahal in Agra. The sights, sounds and swarms of people had overwhelmed him. He remembers waiting in line to buy a train ticket to Delhi as a malnourished woman with a baby in her arms touched his feet, asking for money. He also vividly recalls crossing the landmark Howrah Bridge in Kolkata. Years later, he would come to love a film by that name, Howrah Bridge (1958), starring Madhubala and Ashok Kumar, and Hindi and Urdu movies eventually became, for him, a quite favourable vehicle to traverse the Indian subcontinent. 

 Daniel now lives in rural Hawaii where, having retired from commercial fishing and driving tour buses, he devotes the majority of his time to painstakingly restoring classic films from India and Pakistan, mainly from the 1930s to the early 1950s. He has so far worked on more than 120 titles that are in the public domain and made them available on his YouTube channel (tommydan55) to some 30,000 subscribers. The American spends nearly 40 hours on each film to arduously filter out scratches, flickering and humming. The result is often fairly close to how the film may have looked at the time of release, prompting old-timers to leave messages of “God bless you” in the comments section.

Growing up, Daniel did not have much access to films, only the odd television screening of The Wizard of Oz (1939). He was exposed to foreign cinema when going on dates to an art theatre in Washington DC near where he was raised. With the launch of cable TV, his appetite for classics developed as the Turner Classic Movies channel played early Hollywood sound and silent films. He first experienced Indian vintage films through Netflix’s DVD rental service, starting with Guru Dutt’s Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam (1962). “And I was hooked,” he writes in an e-mail. He began collecting old Indian films, even though they tend to be more expensive for American buyers.

This gravitation towards cinema of the subcontinent might have in part to do with “liking something others either know nothing about, or actively dislike”. His wife may not yet have warmed up to the high-pitched singing in Hindi classics but for Daniel, the older a film the better. “They say that the years 1950-1965 were the golden age of Indian film, but there are earlier films simply astonishing in their virtuosity and quality.” 

Grainy damage across the visuals of Jairaj in Bhabhi (1938) was removed during restoration

He grew his understanding of the films by reading reviews by Philip Lutgendorf, a professor of Modern Indian Studies who, aside from critiquing films, would also include notes on the standard of existing copies. For instance, “tolerable image quality” or “marred by numerous abrupt cuts”. As Daniel saw more early films, he realised the quality of images was regularly poor; the makers of VHS tapes or DVDs had not always taken care to preserve their beauty. He decided not to watch them until he had fixed them up at least a little. Thus started his experiments with free video and sound editing software such as AviSynth and Audacity. These, he reckons, can do a lot of what the “$10,000 programs” used by Hollywood restorers do, and in some cases even more. 

The scrolling ads or clumsy logos that crowded the screen in outmoded copies, and which so annoyed Daniel, could be removed. He was able to steady a gloomy, shaky print of Tansen (1943) using an easy combination of filters. But this process takes time and care. He creates separate codes for the filtering of the film as a whole, as well as repairs for each frame. This means going through a single film three times over, frame by frame. “And the films average roughly 200,000 frames each,” he observes.

In this way, he could carefully get rid of a wave of grainy damage splashed across a copy of the Bombay Talkies’ Bhabhi (1938). Elsewhere, in a copy of Dilip Kumar and Nargis-starrer Andaz (1949), he erased a constant rain of white spots that was ruining the right side of the frame. He sometimes explains his efforts through ‘before and after’ videos.

The self-taught film restorer believes he is “pretty anti-social”, especially as few people around him share such unusual interests. However, by way of YouTube and a select number of blogs that he frequents, he discovered an international community of film enthusiasts. It includes London-based Edwina, a 1950s background dancer in Hindi films, for whose songs and dances he created a channel, and the resourceful Surjit Singh in India, a retired physicist who writes about and ardently collects old film tapes, as well as another friend of Pakistani origin who, while growing up in London, had taped everything from India and Pakistan that ever aired on the television. It is this circle that obtains and mails films to him. 

Such crowd-sourcing has resulted in finding rare films, such as the 1933’s Lal-e Yaman, which Daniel restored from a Doordarshan taping shared by one of his followers. Even after restoration, the videos are not always high-definition, given that the salvaged digital sources are usually heavily worn out. Still, the pictures seem clearly defined, with legible titles and superior subtitles where available. Over the course of this work, he has learnt that VHS tapes are better, more complete sources with the right aspect ratios, as opposed to DVDs and VCDs, even if the latter two have higher resolutions.

While speaking little Hindi or Urdu himself, he has slowly gained command of the history of early films in these languages. So he can tell you that Shammi Kapoor’s Chor Bazaar (1954) is an Errol Flynn-ish swashbuckler, or how in Baazi (1951), Dev Anand is seen without the pompadour hair and stylised delivery of dialogue he would acquire by the time he starred in Guide (1965). Certainly in the matter of films, he finds that “in India, liking easily turns to obsession”, with debates such as “Amitabh vs Rajesh Khanna” or “Lata vs Asha” routinely playing out online.

That vintage films of the subcontinent are in need of restoration is certain. They faced damage at various levels: in the handling of the reels when they were first made and showed, and in the course of being converted for home viewing using inferior digital technology. The Hawaii resident’s practice of healing films is interesting in a scenario where Indian DVD companies have not felt motivated to invest in restoring films once they pass into the public domain. 

Daniel decided to create a channel because expertly-restored versions of the films he so loves were just not available. It points to how fixed-up home releases and online archives will be important for fans, researchers, and even the uninitiated to enjoy such works. “The NFAI [National Film Archive of India] has restored dozens of films but where are the DVDs and Blu-Rays?” Harking back to the director whose film was the first he had sampled, Daniel notes, “What I wouldn’t give for restored versions of Guru Dutt films!”