Saturday, March 1, 2008

MSI-The Icon of malayalam film database


Want to know about the music director of a film or you want to know about the singer of a particular song or you want to know about the movie from which a particular song is, there is a website for that, and that is Malayala sangeetham info or MSI.Started as a personal site, MSI has grown in stature and has become the icon of malayalam film related database. Its not only for films and films songs, but you will get infos regarding alubm songs, drama songs, books and sites related to this field.

MSI in this status today is due to the combined and dedicated efforts of people from round the globe who love to have a website with these sorts of informations. Day by day lots of entries are being made into the database. The site is taking utmost care in providing error free and authentic infos to the public. At the beginning there was only film database, then they started songs database. Now they are in the stage of providing raga infos and lyrics of the songs. Along with this you can find a very nice collection of paattupusthakams which has got an antique value. They are also in the process of building database for album songs and drama songs in Malayalam. They are having databese for unreleased films. Obviously you cannot find these sort of infos in any other sites.

MSI also got a blog and yahoo mailing group. You can find entries of about 4000 films including UR films and of 15000 songs.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

A treasure trove of filmi infos-National Film Archives, Pune

A film historian or any person interested in knowing the film history would love to hear about a place where he can ogle through old film magazines or photographs. The National film archives at Pune is the perfect place for this venture.

It was started in 1964 and is one of the largest in Asia. The building for the archive was given by the great Prabhat Films. They are having more that 10000 films in their collection from different languages, large number of scripts, photographs, posters. The 1931 issue of "The Cinema" magazine is the oldest in the lot. They are having a huge collection of rare film magazines from different languages. Same is the case with gramophone records. All these treasures were preserved in the film archive.

Even though we are having this archive, still lots of film prints were lost for ever. the prints of early malayalam films like Vigathakumaran, Balan, Njanambika are not available now
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