Brochures as Tactile Objects: The Consumer and Material Cultures of Indian Cinema

The historical significance of film publicity exceeds its seeming ephemerality. These publicity materials constitute the material culture of celluloid cinema from the age of pre-digital marketing and belong to decades before television became widespread in India in the 1980s. They participate in the wider patterns of consumer culture. For instance, the collection includes advertisements for light bulbs and tourist brochures that prominently feature the images of 1980s film stars Sridevi and Smita Patil (both pictured below).

Others mimic material objects such as the telephone, or the widescreen cinema experience replicated in page dimensions and format. Reproduced below are the cover and inside pages of Junglee (Savage, 1961, Hindi).

Also noteworthy are inventive folding techniques, asymmetrical cuts, and pages of varying sizes bound together, that “stage” the film as a reconstituted and novel material product. Among the most significant objects in this collection is the two-sided brochure for M.S. Sathyu’s feted chronicle of the impact of partition on a middle-class Muslim family in India, Garam Hawa (Scorching Winds, 1974). The brochure unfolds in a complex way into boxes of text of varying sizes whose boundaries are the creases along which the folds occur.

The text layout evokes tête-bêche bookbinding whereby text blocks are arranged head to toe so that turning the page or unfolding the brochure may reveal an upside-down layout, requiring constant reorientation of the object as it is read.

Shot in color on a shoe-string budget, the movie’s brochure’s employment of black and white photographs and tinted frames from the film underscores the seriousness of the movie’s purpose, and obstructs our hope that images captured by sight can convey the complexity of the movie’s themes. While the English and Urdu synopses occupy the entire vertical length of the unfolded brochure, the Hindi synopsis is contained in a shorter panel.

Bengali auteur Tapan Sinha’s movie Harmonium (1976) follows the life of the hand-pumped musical keyboard instrument, as it changes owners, with changing times, from the decrepit mansion of a rural landlord, to an urban brothel, to a middle-class household where the mansion owner’s aged and single daughter now works as a music teacher, and is reunited with her childhood harmonium. Folded up, the brochure horizontally mimics the shape of a harmonium in front and back (as the folded front indicates).

A full photo of the harmonium occupies the lower half of the reverse side of the brochure (pictured below).

But the bottom portion of this lower half also supplies the top fold for the front cover, and the black cast shadow of the harmonium provides a bold graphic dimension that ties the folds together into a single image on the folded front (see first image above). Unfolded, the verso of the brochure reveals synopses in three languages (English, French, and Spanish).