‘A good poster artist is also a good sociologist’

 

It is post-modernism that seems to have persuaded Western scholars to take popular Indian cinema or Bollywood seriously. Over the last two decades, the scholarship in this area has largely come from the West.

 

Interest in Indian popular culture also led Western scholars to study keenly the art of film poster painting and printing. Though the film poster has been one of the industry’s most powerful publicity materials, no analytical study of it was done until recently, within the framework of visual culture or visual anthropology.

 

Except perhaps Ranjani Mazumdar’s seminal paper The Bombay Film Poster.

 

Over the last few years, exhibitions of Indian film posters have been held abroad and at home. Our billboard painters have been invited to museums abroad for ‘live shows and workshops’. A film poster exhibition was held in London in December 2004, and one of the welcome spin-offs is a book Living Pictures: Perspectives on the Film Poster in India, edited by David Blamey and Robert D’Souza, for the London based publishers, Open Editions. Both Blamey and D’Souza are artist-teachers in the UK.

 

Earlier Rachel Dwyer and Divia Patel had explored poster art and its artistic implications through their book Cinema India: The Visual Culture of Hindi Film (Reaktion Books Ltd., UK). This book was also preceded by a comprehensive exhibition of Hindi film posters in the UK.

 

The film posters, whether of A-, B-, or C -grade films, have long been part of our visual memory, our inner eye. The city walls, the skyline and the slum rooftops where the old and new cloth and canvas hoardings, and paper posters co-exist, form a huge exhibition site.

 

The good old kitsch of the film posters and hoardings has been replaced by the new, slick computerised designs and synthetic vinyl. The city roads and streets are now filled with more gloss and star-oriented glamour. And with the mall-and-multiplex culture, consumption patterns are also changing.

 

The posters of Hum Aapke Hain Koun? (1994) with Madhuri Dixit in a purple saree, highlight how it is a fashion design culture that is increasingly colonising prime poster space.

 

A good poster artist is also a good sociologist. It is interesting to know how the poster designers and painters interpret the film for its direct communication with its viewer.

 

In the absence of any big star cast in a film, they make the poster brighter in colour and glossier in texture. And if any film had the presence of a superstar like Amitabh Bachchan, the compositional emphasis of the poster changes—remember the posters of Coolie and the image of Amitabh Bachchan that was centralised and foregrounded with his badge number 786.

 

The poster designer also knows the importance of regional variations, depending on the star cast. The poster of a multistarrer with actors like Dharmendra earlier, and Sunny Deol now, would be designed to highlight the star’s macho presence in North India, where generally, the feminine figure would be marginalised.

 

And the gun would replace the guitar in the hands of the hero. So, don’t think the poster in your street is too naïve.