Introduction

This exhibition introduces viewers to Indian film memorabilia donated in 2024 to the University of Washington Libraries by American cinephile and writer Lyle Pearson (pictured below in a photograph from around 1976).

While not voluminous in cubic feet, the Pearson Collection is wide-ranging. The oldest document dates to 1944 (a brochure for the 1944 Bengali film Udayer Pathey), while recent film festivals underway in India on an annual basis are also represented.

The collection contains several categories of materials. Film songbooks, brochures, posters, and photographic stills constitute one category of materials pertaining to film publicity. Much of this material is from the 1970s, the decade when Pearson started attending global film festivals, in Paris, then in North Africa where his interest in Indian cinema was piqued, and then India. Documents acquired from attending film festivals in South Asia and around the world therefore constitute the second major category of materials in this collection.

Pearson assiduously clipped news articles on the cinema as he encountered them daily, and these constitute another form of ephemera in the collection. Some of his writings on cinema are also present in the collection. Finally, the collection includes fascinating “snail-mail” correspondence with luminaries in the world of cinema (Moroccan pioneer of ‘New Arab Cinema’ Moumen Smihi; Afghan director Toryalai Shafaq; a letter written to Bengali art film director Satyajit Ray, to name a few), and two reel-to-reel tapes of a radio show he hosted at Western Washington University, called The Gitanjali Express.

As should be clear, Pearson’s donated materials exceed India, although Indian cinema is vastly over-represented. The collection includes artifacts pertaining to Afghani, Pakistani, Nepali, and Bangladeshi cinema in South Asia. Also present are photographs, assorted documents, and brochures from Turkish and North African cinema, and a few Hollywood scrapbooks he prepared in his high school years.

Rarely does one find a life so extensively documented in artifacts for so many decades: pictured below is a snippet of a 1963 response to a letter he wrote to the British Film Institute as a master’s student researching his M.A thesis on Shakespeare on Film.

Currently based in India, Lyle Pearson is an active writer, researcher, and scholar of Indian cinema to this day. He has published articles in major Indian film and non-film magazines such as Filmfare, Youth Times, and Sequence (Bangladesh), as well as South Asian diasporic newspapers such as The Overseas Times (Vancouver, B.C). His writing includes articles in French written for the film magazine Afrique-Asie (on the Turkish director Yilmaz Guney for instance, shown below), and an article on the Bangladeshi filmmaker Alamgir Kabir for Sequence (Bangladesh) when he was a “roving correspondent” for Film Quarterly.

He served as facilitator in the early 1990s for the National Film Archive of India in its efforts to acquire prints of foreign films from U.S. based distributors and advised the International Festival of Third World Films (Festival International du Cinema du Tiers Monde) in 1981 on their selection of Indian films. P.K. Nair, the central film-archivist figure in the long history of the National Film Archive of India, was a personal friend of Pearson's.

The current exhibition selects South Asian cinema related materials in two categories: film publicity, and film festivals. It isolates the 1970s for a closer examination, since this is the decade best represented in the collection and looks at that decade’s forms of film publicity and the public events (film festivals and screenings) that shaped film culture and perceptions of Indian cinema.