Preface

This online exhibition showcases items from a collection of film ephemera donated by American cinephile and writer Lyle Pearson to the University of Washington libraries, in 2024. The exhibition's focus is mainly on the decade of the 1970s. However, the ephemera in Pearson's collection were accumulated over nearly five decades of film festival attendance in locations ranging from Paris to Tunis to Istanbul to New Delhi. The collection comprises songbooks of commercial films, brochures for serious art films, publicity posters, production stills and photographs documenting India's film festivals, and Pearson's correspondence with important figures in the world of cinema.

The physical exhibition in October-November 2024 was accompanied by a conversation with Lyle Pearson, a symposium of talks by three scholars coming together from Germany, India, and the United States: Usha Iyer (Stanford University), Navaneetha Mokkil (Jawaharlal Nehru University), and Salma Siddique (Humboldt University), and a “microseminar” leading up to the symposium.

The funding was awarded from the Simpson Center for the Humanities on the basis of a “collaborative project” grant application by Sudhir Mahadevan (Comparative History of Ideas, and Cinema and Media Studies) and Radhika Govindrajan (Director, Center for South Asian Studies in the Jackson School of International Studies and Associate Professor of Anthropology).

The Structure of the Online Exhibition

This online version introduces audiences to the text and images that were featured at the exhibition. As with the physical exhibition, which comprised 22 posters, some of which have been consolidated and extended here to showcase additional materials, there were three broad themes covered.

An introductory section outlined the scope and range of the collection, introduced viewers to the major forms of Indian cinema, and to the decade of the 1970s that served as the focus of the exhibition.

A middle section – the most extensive – on the design aesthetic of the publicity materials in the collection, analyzed the visual elements of the artifacts in the collection.

A final section described the relevance, significance, and value of the film festival-related records in the collection.

Navigating this resource

There are two ways to navigate this exhibition. You may either jump to a topic using the Table of Contents sidebar, or you may peruse the exhibition – utilizing the walk-through section below -- in the order in which the posters of the physical exhibition were arranged.

(pictured below: cover and page from publicity booklet for Udayer Pathey/Towards the Light, 1944, Bengali).