Film Publicity: Song Booklets, Posters, and Film Stills

The earliest records of visual publicity for films can be dated to the 1920s (the movies arrived in India in July 1896, and newspapers announced showings in print-textual insets from the earliest years). Street publicity for movies was far more prevalent in India than in the West, and derived from urban commercial theater, which employed bullock carts for publicity. This frame from the 1948 film Aag/Fire, depicts a theatrical company advertising a devotional play called Bilwamangal (incidentally, also the subject of a 1919 silent film version).

In the 1930s sound era, song and dance became indispensable elements of commercial cinema. Song booklets containing lyrics of songs served as forms of pre-publicity for film distributors and exhibitors. They were also sold to audiences in movie theaters. Their eye-catching designs translate a big-screen experience into a tactile one of leisurely perusal, to be treasured later as souvenirs or discarded. Published song lyrics also underscore the extent to which popular verse has been an essential component of cinema's experience, building bridges between cinema, music, and literature. The Pearson collection contains several song booklets. It also contains an interesting variant: brochures for art cinema containing synopses of plots in various European languages for overseas distributors (see page from the brochure for Ankur/The Seedling, 1974), an under-researched aspect of Indian art cinema’s circulation (indicated in the news report sourced from the 1970s: also below).

A typical songbook included a cover that encapsulated the dominant emotional tenor of the movie, a page listing the movie’s credits, a synopsis of the plot, and song lyrics. Frequently, portions such as synopses would be printed in English and the movie’s language. A comparison of the English and non-English synopsis versions may offer interesting insights into attempts to translate the movie’s South Asian worldviews steeped in community, kinship, belief systems, and ethical frameworks, into a very different framework of ratiocination seemingly reflexively called for by the English language, which is then applied as well to attenuated effect in the vernacular synopsis. Thus, a movie whose melodramatic plot may have no semblance of suspense or defining enigma in the Hollywood sense of the terms, may nevertheless be synopsized as if it contained these elements. See for instance the English and Devanagari script versions of the period film set in the Mughal empire, Jahan Ara (1964, Hindi/Urdu).

As for song lyrics, these would be carried in two scripts, the Devanagari script in which Hindi is written, and the Nastaliq script for Urdu, as seen in these pages from Maa Baap/Mother and Father (1977, Hindi and Gujarati):

In the pre-digital era, film posters plastered on walls and billboards extended the visual culture of cinema (the settings, costumes, and the emotionally expressive faces of stars) beyond the confines of the movie theater. The movies themselves provide ample evidence (both witting and unwitting) of the pervasive presence of movie publicity. In these frames from Kala Bazar/Black Market (1960, Hindi), a movie about a tout who sells movie tickets at inflated prices, we see lobby cards framed for display outside a movie theater, and movie posters on billboards and marquees visible in street scenes.

While some poster artists in the early decades were art school trained, most poster artists were self-taught. The production of publicity drew together printing, hand-painting, photography, and calligraphy. Multiple designs for the same movie were common, as were significant regional variations and de-centralized production. Printed posters were frequently copied and retouched by hand, undermining notions of originality and singularity of medium. Posters were also re-designed upon a movie’s re-release. On the other hand, poster artists signed their works. Almost all booklets in this collection list publicity designers alongside cast and crew. See for instance a prominent film publicity artist Diwakar Karkare listed by his first name on the right-hand column under publicity in the page from the songbook for Amar Akbar Anthony (1977). Scholarly research since the 1990s has identified the distinctive styles of these artists (see the Works Cited section at the end of this exhibition).

In the third category of memorabilia, film stills may document movie production for circulation as pre-release publicity ("the production still") or may be expressly staged for publicity purposes. The film still was also generated by printing a frame from the film's reel. The Pearson collection mostly contains film stills of the latter category (frames from films), but it also includes a few production stills, including one of actress Hema Malini being directed for a stunt scene from director Ramesh Sippy’s hit film Seeta aur Geeta/Seeta and Geeta, Hindi, 1972.