Publication date: London 2005
The GuardianThe Guide, 7-13 January 2006
Steve Rose
‘If youÕve sometimes felt that looking at nice pictures in a book is verging on intellectual sloth (as opposed to looking at nice pictures in an art gallery, say) then hereÕs a book that lets you have your cake, but doesnÕt let you eat it until youÕve finished your greens. Before you get to the posters themselves, youÕve got 50-odd pages of printed text to get your teeth into. And itÕs pretty challenging stuff, too: a series of essays on Indian visual and graphic culture written by academics (sample title: Notes On the Epidemiology of Allure). A little difficult to digest maybe, but highly nutritious all the same, and appropriate ballast for the opulent dessert course: over 150 full-colour reproductions of posters from 1949 to the present day. And as with the films themselves, theyÕre all just a bit more extreme than their western equivalents. Many are beautifully hand-painted and coolly designed, some take outrageous liberties with colour, fashion or human anatomy (in 1978’s Don, Amitabh Bachchan appears to be fighting his own lapels), and others are spectacularly crude exploitation images (adult movie Stay With Me seems to be about a plump seductress who lurks in the toilets). In some cases, you get to compare the original studio poster with its crude local knock-off, and there are even a few for foreign movies, including a rare design for the original King Kong, in which the ape himself is dwarfed by the words “SUPER HIT”.’
Eye: The International Review of Graphic DesignSpring 2006
Alex Coles
‘The editorial method underpinning Living Pictures derives from the way its source material was originally gathered: through chance encounters on the streets of India and in a series of meetings with poster sellers and distributors in studios and workshops. The editors, David Blamey and Robert DÕSouza, allow the grit of Indian city life to pervade through the book by ensuring the gist of this raw experience is worked into the grain of its pages. So rather than being exacting and academic, the editorial method is intuitive and speculative.
The contemporary experience of these posters on the street is held in tension with their original design context through both the bookÕs editorial and design methods. Additional images snapped by the editors in pursuit of further posters lend further insight into their ethnographic method, since they track the very process of fieldwork. Some of these images echo a scene depicted in one of the posters, while others are more indirect and require closer scrutiny. Set in juxtaposition to the poster for Yashoda Krishna from 1976 - which heavily features the flute, the instrument associated with Krishna Ð is a photograph taken by one of the editors revealing a group of street vendors carrying bundles of flutes to market. Elements that have been taken from the streets and souped up into the language of fantasy in the posters are hereby firmly re-located on the experience of the street.
The way the editorsÕ adopt an ethnographic method towards design is enhanced through the graphic conceptualisation of the book. A form of what can be termed Ôethno-graphicsÕ is the result. Propelled by the editorsÕ approach, Graphic Thought Facility has derived their layouts from the unusually heavy captions the editors insisted must accompany the posters. Each of these carries details of the posterÕs production: its size, method of printing and so forth. In this way a marginal art form such as the poster, which so often loses its sense of identity through its distribution and mass circulation, is re-animated, as something of its primary design and production context is returned to it. These captions run down the left-side column of each page, forming a sort of extra column. Not only are they conceptually tactical they are also visually strategic, as they graphically organize the book in its entirety by being repeated and resized throughout Ð even on the cover in the titles.
A handful of essays form a good half of the book. They must be read closely to experience how each one carefully chips away at a further facet of our received knowledge of the Indian Film poster. The essays provide a further set of perspectives, this time textual ones. More than just an annexe to the way the posters are presented through the editing and design of the book, the essays actively counterpoint and work against them.
That they are penned by a variety of writers from different disciplines Ð Sara Dickey from anthropology, Patricia Uberoi from sociology, Emily King from design criticism, to name just a few Ð helps in this process. Each one assists in further conveying the bookÕs editorial method, deftly summed up by Blamey in the closing lines of his textual contribution: ÒThe assignment was simply to reflect on the meaning of this unique and forceful visual medium, back from the surface of its physicality, through its everyday use, and out into the world.’
Design WeekVolume 21/ Number 2
12 January 2006
Mike Dempsey (Sample Extract)
‘Living Pictures consists of connected essays on the art, history and social context of the Indian cinema poster with hundreds of illustrated examples. For me, it is 260 pages of the kind of crass commercial art that I have spent my life fighting against. Having said that, for someone Ð in this case two Ð to painstakingly record this sometimes hideous, and very occasionally charming genre is probably worthwhile, if only to have the book on the cultural study shelves of the reference library. I canÕt see much else in it.’
GrafikIssue 138/ March 2006
Book Reviews
‘In LIVING PICTURES Text required ext required Text required Text required Text requiredText required Text requiredText required Text requiredText required Text requiredText required Text requiredText required
(Review Reference no.00/00, p000-000)Obviously a labour of love, this is a very thorough, if somewhat minority-interest little publication. These artefacts are about as far from the high-production-values-coupled-with-pseudo-Swiss-typography school of graphic design as you can possibly get and so, while thereÕs no doubting their socio-cultural significance and undeniably camp nature, they will simply not be to everyoneÕs taste. As Emily King points out in her contribution, film posters take on an emotional significance in the same way that music packaging does, but itÕs unlikely that the people at whom this book is aimed will have actually seen most of the movies. That aside, itÕs a well researched book and a positive visual treat Ð a riot of saturated colour, dodgy printing, high-impact typography and more eyeliner than the entire make-up counter at Boots.’
The HinduFriday Review
‘The Charisma Continues’
Malathi Rangarajan
’Living Pictures,’ a pictorial book on the film posters of our country, launched at the Indian High Commission in London in December last, has MGR and Jayalalithaa on the cover. “This is the first time that I have been approached for info on cinema posters,” says filmographer `Film News' Anandan, flashing a gentle smile. David Blamey, an artist, and director of The Buryport Critical Forum, at the Royal College of Art, London, and Robert D' Souza, who teaches in the School of Media, Art & Design, at the University of Luton, had sought Anandan's help for the book `Living Pictures Ñ Perspectives on the Film Poster in India,' published by Open Editions.
What strikes you most the moment you set eyes on a copy of ’Living Pictures' is the cover Ñ of M.G. Ramachandran and Jayalalithaa from the Tamil hit `Raman Thaediya Seethai.' From Dharmendra, Dev Anand and Amitabh Bachchan to Sunny Deol, Salman Khan and Sanjay Dutt, the book contains posters of many Hindi actors. But adorning the cover are the icons of the South! The choice is intriguing and so you catch up with David Blamey, one of the editors, via email. Blamey had gone to `Film News' Anandan for stills from MGR's movies because he was particularly interested in the actor-turned-politician's work. "There I recognised this particular picture as a potential cover image. It was colourful, nostalgic, romantic, escapist Ñ all characteristics of South Indian popular cinema Ñ and above all it wasn't Bollywood,” clarifies Blamey.
Blamey is familiar with Indian cinema to a certain extent. “But it was when I got to spend some time with actor Saeed Jaffrey in Mumbai and suddenly parachuted into the heart of Bollywood that my curiosity about Indian cinema got ignited," he says and adds, "The English do not know that Indian cinema exists beyond Mumbai. It is a lazy and patronising generalisation that has to be redressed. So we travelled South to collect material on regional cinema." Probably the fact that both MGR and Jayalalithaa began as actors and went on to become Chief Ministers of the State, made Blamey choose them for the cover. "No. Though there's a connection. Think of Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger in the U. S. Most politicians are actors these days. At least when they speak in front of the camera you assume that someone else has written the script,” is Blamey's cryptic response.
`Living Pictures' also has about 60 pages of written material (which includes rather tough essays by academics). Among them is a whole chapter devoted to MGR, entitled `Still One Man in a Thousand,' a take-off from the actor's super hit film, `Aayirathil Oruvan.' Honestly, an entire section on an actor like say the Big B is what you would expect.
“Surely we were in contact with Amitabh Bachchan. In the end, however, we were more excited by the idea of bringing in the relatively unknown MGR to a new audience in the U.K. rather than repeating what is already known about Bachchan. But Bachchan is adequately represented in the book ... his iconographic presence is matched only by MGR,” Blamey contends.
Three years of hard work has gone into the making of `Living Pictures.' So never mind if some of the posters appear crude. Or if some of the old representations are dubbed versions of films that did not make for good cinema. Or if prominent faces like those of Rajinikanth, Kamal Hassan (in a vague film called `Pagadai Pannirendu') or Shah Rukh Khan and other present day heroes find very little coverage in this collection of film posters that includes the past 50 years of Indian cinema. What matters is that in a book on films of the entire country, two charismatic faces from South India occupy a pivotal position.
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DNAFriday 24 March, 2006
‘A Good Poster Artist Is Also A Good Sociologist’
Amrit Gangar
‘The book, ‘Living Pictures: Perspectives On The Film Poster in India’, explores how the city itself is a huge exhibition site.
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.
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 changesÑremember 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.
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