Subrata Mitra to a cameraman...Almost every shot of "Pather Panchali" posed a problem for me, innumerable problems, many sleepless nights spent on ruminating over the prospects of the next day's shooting..."Pather Panchali" had many excellent shots--both technically and artistically, but it had many bad shots too." From 1997 until his death, Mitra was an emeritus professor of cinematography at the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI) at Kolkata. Subrata Mitra Subrata Mitra (12 October 1930 – 7 December 2001) was an Indian cinematographer. Acclaimed for his work in "The Apu Trilogy" (1955–1959), Mitra is often considered one of the greatest of
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,