Calcutta


The Rev David Down was a missionary to India in the early 1950s. He was also a keen amateur film maker, using a clockwork camera and 16mm film. We are grateful to him for allowing us to copy his film, which is a most valuable archive of what Calcutta was like immediately after the Raj ended.

If the quality of the film is not up to our usual standards, that is partly due to the difficulty of converting 16 frames per second silent film to 25 frames per second video of our cameras and then compressed into mp4 format

The commentary is by the Rev Down himself, who also kindly supplied the music and sound effects, which are from recordings he made in India, though not necessarily at the same time as he filmed the scene.