Posters in the Collection
Titas Ekti Nadir Naam (1973) - 33 5/8 x 22 3/4 inches
The Pearson Collection contains posters from nine South Asian films. Bengali art film director Ritwik Ghatak's 1973 film Titas Ekti Nadir Naam (A River Called Titas) is an epic melodrama, a 159-minute, unceasingly emotional and searing exploration of the life of a fishing community, and the erosion of relationships, communities, and the river Titas itself, told through mythic archetypes drawn from South Asian epics and folklore. These archetypes are embodied by the movie's female characters who are central to Ghatak's exploration, not just in this movie, but across all his films, of the trauma of Bengal's partition, a trauma from which Ghatak (1925-1976) himself never recovered. Titas was Ghatak's return to his lost homeland of East Bengal (born anew as Bangladesh in 1971) where this movie was produced and made, with a Bangladeshi cast. Ghatak's film was only recently (2019) restored by Martin Scorcese's World Cinema Foundation. The undated and fragile poster -- expertly conserved and scanned by UW libraries' conservation department -- is striking for its emphasis on the depths of the river, on partition, and the centrality of its women characters (one of whom, true to the movie's allusions to myth, dies and is resurrected twice in or by the river). The Bengali text on the top line emphasizes the words "timeless" and "adaptation" in red in noting that the Ritwik Ghatak movie is based on Bengali writer Adwaita Mallabarman's 1956 novel of the same name, while the text in the blue block begins by crediting the film’s score composer Bahadur Hossein Khan, before listing cast, and ending with the production company's name.
Two other posters from Ghatak’s last film, Jukti Takko Aar Gappo /Reason, Debate, and a Story (1974) underscore in text that this was Ghatak’s last film, and therefore may be dated after Ghatak’s demise. Ghatak himself plays the disillusioned, drunk intellectual on a road journey with a motley crew: a traumatized refugee woman from Bangladesh, an unemployed young engineer, and a teacher of Sanskrit whose school has been shuttered. All arrive in the countryside home of a poor folk theater (chhau) performer, and then are caught in the maelstrom of the era’s armed uprisings in the countryside. Both posters for this film emphasize Ghatak’s face. In one poster, he is in disheveled three-quarter view so that fictional character and tragic film auteur merge into one figure. In the other, his face caught in wide-eyed thought epitomizes the figure of the intellectual director. Both posters also feature the wordless aged man who opens and ends the film, gazing in exhaustion from within Ghatak’s traumatized universe of partition-induced displacement. (The first Ghatak poster below measures 38 ½ x 27 ½ inches; the second Ghatak poster measures 29 ¾ x 19 ¾ inches).
Mere Apne (1971) - 29 7/8 x 20 inches
On the commercial side is a poster of Mere Apne (My Dear Ones, 1971, Hindi), the directorial debut of lyricist, screenwriter, and director, Gulzar. Mere Apne was a close remake of a popular 1968 Bengali film, Apanjan, by director Tapan Sinha. Pairing Hindi cinema’s major star Meena Kumari with up-and-coming stars Vinod Khanna and Shatrughan Sinha, the movie tells the story of an elderly homeless woman displaced from village to city, who befriends two warring gangs of urban youth, but dies when she is caught in the crossfire of their conflict, thereby bringing peace between them. References abound to the alienation of blood relations in modern urban life, and equally the exhaustion of socialism as a viable ideology. The movie holds up emotional ties as the solution to social fractiousness. The poster for this movie, painted in a bold brushstroke technique, is a portrait of its idealized character, lost in thought, quite unlike Ghatak’s emplacement of woman as mythic archetype in relation to landscape and historical trauma.
Meena Kumari was known as the “tragedy queen” for the sheer number of roles she played saturated with melancholia, death, and disease. Within weeks of the release of her next and perhaps most iconic film Pakeeza (1971), whose brochure is also in this collection, she died of liver cirrhosis at the age of 36. Pakeeza, 15 years in the making, is shot in gloriously expressionist style by German émigré cameraman Josef Wirsching (the last instance of his illustrious Indian career as well, the movie completed posthumously). Kumari plays a courtesan in double-role (both as mother who dies in the movie’s first scenes, and as daughter) whose profession poses an almost insurmountable obstacle to true love, her dancing quarters the equivalent of a tomb that entraps her in a life of melancholic performance.
Pakeezah belongs to the “Islamicate” mode in Hindi cinema, movies attending to aspects of Muslim and more broadly Indo-Persian life and history in the subcontinent. Taj Mahal (1963, Urdu, 38 ½ x 29 ½ inches) was another commercial hit film on the monument that resulted from the legendary love of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan for his wife, empress Mumtaz Mahal. The director of this film M. Sadiq migrated late in his life to Pakistan, pointing to the interconnected histories of the two countries’ cinemas.
In Pakistan, the writer-director Riaz Shahid, known for his commitment to leftist themes in the 1960s, made Gharnata (Grenada, 1971, Urdu/Bengali), a historical epic on the 1492 fall of Muslim Grenada. The poster for this movie is the largest in the Pearson collection (nearly 5 ft x 6.5 ft).
Finally, the last poster worth mentioning in this discussion of historical epics is Yahudi (1958, Bimal Roy, Urdu, 30 x 20 inches), also starring Meena Kumari (with Dilip Kumar), a commercially successful movie on the historical persecution suffered by Jews in the ancient Roman empire, based on the Urdu play by playwright Agha Hashar Kashmiri (1879-1935).
Two other movie posters are of masala films. One released in the height of the Emergency, was Maha Chor (Great Thief, 1976, 28 x 21 inches). The movie reveals its establishment-orientation during a time when civil liberties were being widely curtailed (see introductory posters on the 1970s). The movie's hero is played by film star Rajesh Khanna in a double-role as a Robin Hood-thief and a princely nitwit who must be rescued and restored to his feudal lineage. In a telling scene, Raju the thief lectures to a little kid about spectacular and honest days ahead for the nation.
The other poster is for The Great Gambler (1979, Hindi, 28 7/8 x 20 inches), starring the era’s biggest male star Amitabh Bachchan in a double role as long lost twins: an international crook, and an honest police officer on his hot pursuit to protect the nation’s top military secrets. Shot in several international locations from Cairo to Lisbon to Venice, enormously stylish, and boasting some of the decade’s most well-known melodies (including a romantic song that begins on a gondola in lyrics that are in Italian), The Great Gambler’s poster reveals the all-encompassing stardom of Bachchan, absorbing the era’s accomplished actresses Neetu Singh and Zeenat Aman in the hero’s figure.