No budget film post-production. Satyajit Ray's debut film, "Pather Panchali" (1955), which was produced on a budget of Along with the other films in Ray's "The Apu Trilogy" the film is frequently listed among the greatest films of all time. In 1960, Ron Rice released "The Flower Thief", starring Taylor Mead, to a positive reception. The film was produced for less than $1000 using black-and-white 16mm 50' film cartridges left over from aerial gunnery equipment used during World War II. In the early 1960s, filmmaker Jack Smith used discarded color-reversal film stock to film "Flaming Creatures". John Waters' 1964 black-and-white film "Hag in
Pather Panchali the films were indeed destroyed by fire or the effects of age, other parts were salvageable. The materials were shipped to a restoration laboratory in Bologna, Italy: L’Immagine Ritrovata. Over a thousand hours of labor by hand were expended in restoring and scanning the negatives and, in the end, about 40 percent of the "Pather Panchali" negative was restored. (For those parts of the negative that were missing or unusable, duplicate negatives and fine-grain masters from various commercial or archival sources were used.) The Criterion Collection’s own lab then spent six months creating the digital version of all three films,