A Brief History of Designing Publicity in Indian Cinema
Hand-painted imagery had dominated film publicity in the early decades of the 20th century. The styles of South Asian film publicity were shaped diversely by the realism of 19th century European oil painting; the emulation of classical Indian sculpture, Mughal miniatures, and East Asian influences in the depiction of line and human form; and in the 1930s/1940s, the Industrial-Modern influence of Parisian Art Deco. Photographs were incorporated with hand-painted imagery in these decades of international references. Post-independence (1950s), internationalism took a back seat to the hand-painted portrait of the star's visage at a moment of heightened emotion, with extensive use of stock symbols (cobwebs = entanglement; wineglass = intoxicated love) drawn as much from Victorian gothic sources as from the imagery of Urdu poetry. Thus, film publicity emphasized the cinema's appeal as a repository of grand emotions and characters’ abhinaya or expression. In this collection, the songbook cover of Nagin (1954), pictured below, underscores the importance of hand painting, even as it is likely photographic stills served as the basis for the figures painted. Photography as such, is relegated to a montage on the back cover.
In the booklet for a 1960s black and white movie, Grahasti (Householder, Hindi, 1964), the photographs may have been overpainted by watercolors.
The painted photograph as a genre of embellishing photographic portraiture, dates to the 19th century in South Asia, and was widely popular through much of the 20th century, from commissioned portraits to retouched passport photos. Pop Art was also an influence in the 1960s when Hindi cinema transitioned to color (see cover of brochure of International Crook, 1974, Hindi, below).
In the 1970s, the dominant style in posters underwent dramatic changes. Poster artists used photographs as the basis for poster design. But these designs were then heavily “overpainted” by oil paints in bold and conspicuous brush strokes with a palette knife so that the poster looked both accurate in rendering star faces, but also emotionally charged and expressive. This “overpainted look” made famous by an artist named Diwakar Karkare most readily evokes vintage Indian cinema publicity today. The cover for one of the biggest Hindi hits of 1977, Amar Akbar Anthony, illustrates this style.
So does the marital melodrama Udhaar Ka Sindoor (Borrowed Vermillion, 1976, Hindi) also designed by Diwakar. The latter reveals variation in Diwakar’s style. Sindoor’s cover mutes his signature style. Accompanying it is line art as the frontal focus. Notice as well that the two faces are depicted in different hues and that the emotion-laden style utilizes canted angles and averted gazes.
Film publicity styles varied widely across regions, languages, genres, and budgets. The cover for a Punjabi movie, Daaj (Dowry, 1976) depicts a hand-drawn portrait of a weeping bride with a smaller image of a palanquin symbolizing her journey to her in-laws’ house after a wedding. While the cover emphasizes one theme (dowry and the sale of women in marriage), the English summary inside describes the movie as a romance across a rural-urban, poor-rich, and generational divide. In this way, commercial cinema addressed different audience demographics by emphasizing different elements of its plot.
Equally basic, but relying entirely on a photographic still, is the booklet cover of the commercial Hindi film Hira aur Pathhar/Diamond and Stone (Hindi, 1977). Since the romantic angle will be central to ridding the hero of his resolute atheism in this movie, the photograph frames hero and heroine in front of the steps to the hilltop temple from which emits a divine light. Iconic frontality, a compositional feature of Hindu devotional images, is utilized here in the depiction of romance.
The combination of figure and setting in a pithy manner is evident also in the brochure for Satyakam/Righteous Work (1969, Hindi), a story of the travails of a patriotic and honest public works engineer, that spans pre-and post-independence India. The cover photograph depicts his character traits (his resolute gaze across the plane of the image), and occupation through costume (a uniform) and setting (the construction of a bridge in newly independent India), just as the back cover depicts the courtesan and single mother against the feudal setting perhaps evoking Victorian interior design in India -- Grecian columns, chandeliers, statuary -- from which she will escape by marrying the protagonist.
Hrishikesh Mukherjee, the director of Satya Kam was an exemplary figure of “middle cinema” (the kind of filmmaking that rejected the more sensationalist elements of commercial melodrama but retained its song conventions and depicted middle-class life). Two other booklets of his films in this collection (Choti Si Baat/A Small Matter, 1971, Hindi) and Arjun Pandit, Hindi, 1976) reveal a similar simplicity and sparseness of cover design.