Adding more attractions to its existing treasure trove, the National Film Archive of India, in a major acquisition, has included more than 450 glass slides of films to its collection.

The importance of the slides lies in the fact that these are an integral part of the early cinema viewing experience. The process of making these slides was interesting as they were made by pressing a film positive between two thin glass squares. They were mainly used to announce new movies to the audience inside a movie hall. They were shown either before the film started rolling on the screen or during the intermission.

The slides numbering more than 450 are all in black and white and cover 70 Telugu films from a period beginning 1939 to 1955.

The acquisition by NFAI includes glass slides from many important films like V.V. Rao’s trendsetting social drama about widow remarriage Malli Pelli (1939), B.N. Reddi’s Vande Mataram (1939), starring Chittor V. Nagaiah, popular swashbuckling hit Keelu Gurram (1949), featuring Akkineni Nageswara Rao and Anjali Devi, another hit N. T. Rama Rao starrer Daasi (1952), critically acclaimed adaptation of Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s classic “Devdas” Vedantam Raghavaiah’s Devadasu (1953), starring Akkineni Nageswara Rao, Savitri and Lalitha in the central roles and many more.

Speaking about this latest acquisition by NFAI, its Director, Prakash Magdum said: “Glass slides are exquisite records of Indian cinematic heritage, and we are happy to preserve these in our archival collection. In the wake of fast-changing technologies having these glass slides in such huge numbers is a rare and significant discovery. I appeal to all film lovers to come forward and deposit film footage, photographs, posters, lobby cards and other such material so that it can be preserved.”

The film positives used to prepare the glass slide were miniatures of the film poster or publicity material for newspapers and magazines. The glass slides acquired represent and depict the pictorial history of early Telugu cinema for a period starting from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s. Featuring lovely frames, these historical slides trace and show the importance of Telugu cinema during the early decades of Indian talkie.

The documentation in-charge at NFAI, Arti Karkhanis, commenting on the significance of this valuable collection, said: “These glass slides give a bird’s eye view of the publicity scenario in the Telugu industry in its formative years. It has a great reference value for film researchers, and we will soon digitize them.”

NFAI last year too had acquired nearly 400 glass slides. At the moment, NFAI has over 2000 such glass slides of Hindi, Gujarati and Telugu films in its collection.