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Journalism of Courage
Jerry Pinto and Sheena Sippy8217;s next collaborative is yet another delicious ode to popular culture
The films that are churned out by this industry, decade after tireless decade, are varied in genre and employ millions in its main and ancillary functions. The films themselves, and the industry at large, have been at the very heart of academic discourses, and one should not be surprised today to find a research paper on 8216;The Treatment of Time and Space in Karan Johar8217;s Films8217;, in the cavernous depths of the Stanford University Library.
An object generating fascination over years has been the Film Poster. Writer Jerry Pinto and lenswoman Sheena Sippy8217;s Bollywood Posters India Book House pays tribute to the dying art form that has played sutradhar to generations of film audiences.
Stylishly designed and shot by Sippy, the book juxtaposes de-saturated vibrant images of posters from the early hand-painting days of Do Bigha Zameen and Sahib, Biwi aur Ghulam with the digitally shot, mechanically reproduced monstrosities of Abbas Mustan8217;s Race or Yash Chopra8217;s Dhoom:2. Interspersed with the images are insightful essays by Jerry Pinto, who is also a pop-culture enthusiast. He claims that the industry, which relentlessly spins out around 800 films a year with a majority of flops, works without any economic logic. 8220;It runs on glamour, on its own solipsistic appeal and on its self-generated aura,8221; Pinto writes. He also goes on to claim that Bollywood, though perceived as working outside of genres, has a built-in differentiating logic. And to demonstrate this, he divides the chapters and the posters in the book into six categories8212;drama, crime, history, mythology, romance and fantasy.
In this, the book stands out in stark contrast to another, very unforgettable, book to have come out this year in the South8212;The 9 Emotions of Indian Cinema Hoardings by V Geetha, Sirish Rao and famous film poster painter MP Dakshna Tara Publishers. 9 Emotions categorises the legendary poster art of popular Tamil cinema within the framework of the Navarasas as proposed by the Natyashastra, the second-century text on performance and aesthetics.
All the paintings used in the book were painted exclusively for the book and do not show any film titles. But they do allude to some of the most iconic images from Tamil cinema classics. The book also playfully blends in popular film song lyrics with the images thereby lending meaning and context. 9 Emotions holds a certain academic value in interpreting the grammar of cinematic images that have been integral to political propaganda and posturing in the south. Tamil film plots in the 60s reflected the DMK8217;s steady rise to power-changing stances. This was obviously reflected in the iconographic posters that grew to gigantic proportions, literally giving cinematic images that larger-than-life image.
The emergence of two such books in the Indian publishing arena also reflects the changing views towards popular-culture paraphernalia and their preservation. When Neville Tulli of Osian displayed a poster of Guide beside VS Gaitonde8217;s work a few years ago, he laid the foundation for an interest for investment in film posters as art. And though, the art is nearly dead, recognition of this kind may salvage the dust-gathering relics of yesteryears.
