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Journalism of Courage
Old-timers in the movie business get nostalgic at the drop of a billboard. Om Prakash Katyal a.k.a. Chachaji,whos been around in showbiz for more than five decades,talks wistfully of a time when the size of posters and hoardings would be a matter of fierce competition: Bhala unka poster mere poster se bada kaise? At a time when movies were getting
bigger with every release,size mattered.
What Devraj,filmmaker and screenwriter also formerly of Channel V where he created Quick Gun Murugan,has done along with Bouman,an Amsterdam-based collector of Indian film posters,is create a uniquely wrought,painstakingly researched,well written history of Hindi cinema,from its beginnings to the mid-1990s. Back in the day,shows of movies would be accompanied by what the trade called booklets. These would be prized possessions because they would have photographs from the movies and some would even have the lyrics of all the songs. Cinema halls would display large hoardings with imaginative cutouts of the stars. Posters would bring the movie out of darkened halls. They would be plastered on the walls,on the sides of buses,everywhere. They were pop art. They were kitsch. They were street shows.
The posters started appearing in the silent era and proliferated in the 1930s when the newly formed studios began to warm up to the art and craft of cinema and employed artists to paint posters and banners. Even when studios went into terminal decline,the tradition continued to flourish through the artists who by then had created signature styles. The book,which is a collation of rare posters and pictures,has also done a signal service to these unsung artists: B. Vishwanath,D.R. Bhonsle,Gopal Kamble,Diwakar Karkare,Baburao Painter,S. Pandit,V.G. Parchure,Ramkumar Sharma. These men,with their varying,intensely individual styles,shaped poster art in Hindi cinema.
You can see the decades and the genres flash past as you turn the pages. The pre-sound,pre-Independence years it was in the mid 1930s that the banner trade was established,according to painters interviewed in the book; M.F. Husain started out by painting banners around that time,the studio-dominated 40s,the golden age of 50s,the 60s when the films turned colour,and started acquiring a new look and language the posters nodded to glossy Hollywood dramas while holding fast to Bharatiya sanskriti; the 70s when movies went masala; the 80s when movies succumbed to the excesses of violence and vulgarity,and all the way up till the mid-1990s when finally,mass digitisation put an end to handmade,handcrafted posters.
The lavishly produced book took five years from conception to publication. It was surprisingly easy for the authors to discover the material,because its all out there,says Devraj. And its all in here posters and pictures and banners featuring every conceivable character from the classic and the respectable to the C-grade,from singing stars to superheroes,from demure Sati-Savitris to sexy sirens. The book gives us the first glimpse of one of Bollywoods iconic images: The Wet Sari,in the 57 Baarish,in which Nutan appears in a wet sari which clings without revealing a thing though seldom as brazen as American pin ups,these images at least acknowledge the long suppressed secret that women have breasts Leading ladies were painted modestly,reserving luridness for vamps,who were given pointy chests and pouty lips.
One of the most fun sections in the book deals with B-movies in a chapter called Tarzan,Ali Baba and Mr X,with posters from such movies as Flying Man,Rocket Girl,Mr John a superb poster highlighting Johnny Walkers grinning face,Superman yes,there is such a film,starring Nirupa and Jairaj. Theres also a Dara Singh poster from Hercules,which Devraj prefaces,tongue firmly in cheek,thus: Mothers are very important in Indian moves; even Hercules in the eponymous 64 film had an Indian mom who affectionately calls him Harku.
Bollywood poster art started dwindling by the early 90s,when vinyl started replacing cloth-and-canvas. Digitisation sounded the death knell of handmade posters. These can still be found in some small towns and forgotten single screens,but we have come to accept instant reproductions of instant reproductions.
In an age where everything is downloadable,a richly detailed,celebratory-of-times-past volume like this one needs to be treasured.
