Bengali Cinema’s Minimal and Modern Designs
The booklets for Bengali films in the Pearson collection are among the most interesting in design terms, spanning commercial films featuring Bengali cinema’s biggest stars (and in the 1950s and 1960s, its reigning romantic duo), Suchitra Sen and Uttam Kumar, as well as the films of India’s most prominent art film director of this era, the Calcutta-based Bengali director Satyajit Ray. Ray was an accomplished calligrapher, typographer, and graphic designer. His grandfather had been a pioneer of halftone printing technology, and his father, a renowned illustrator and author of children’s comic books. Ray began his professional career in an advertising firm before making his celebrated first film Pather Panchali (Bengali, 1955). His advertising training in London taught him nothing about design and illustration, Ray claimed. Instead, in Calcutta, he and his colleagues developed a distinctive “Calcutta style” in advertising that drew on Bengali folk and decorative art for visual elements such as borders, calligraphy in the lettering, and pen-and-ink drawings for the main illustration. The emphasis was on graphic design; style was paramount; and in the years Ray worked in advertising in the late 1940s, photography was almost non-existent in advertising imagery.
The emphasis on calligraphy, and a sparse aesthetic characterized by the near absence of photography, are features of the four Ray covers in this collection. All feature abstracted characters against stark, almost monochromatic backgrounds. But most eye-catching are the “logotypes” or the calligraphic lettering that defined the film. Each cover’s logotype or lettering and imagery encapsulates the movie’s themes through stark “reduction”. Seemabadha’s cover abstracts the posture of the protagonist in the movie’s final moments when, newly promoted at work, he realizes that his wise sister-in-law (with whom he has some romantic chemistry) has intuited the ethical compromises he has made to achieve his workplace promotion. The cover captures the desolation that emerges from this realization. A literal translation of the title would be “bounded”, and the logotype’s first letter’s lines, accentuated by a “depth effect”, exceed the boundaries of the frame in ironic counterpoint to the story.
The inside pages of these booklets evoke a different aesthetic. Compare below, for instance, the evenly spaced columns with text and images from the pages of the Seemabaddha booklet (bottom), with pages from Hungarian constructivist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946)’s book Painting, Photography, Film (1925, 1927) (top).
If the Ray booklets are sparse, “reduced”, and modernist in their style, the commercial Bengali film booklets from the same period are less so. Both sets, however, foreground graphic design and style (rather than movie stars, or storylines, or themes) as the medium of communication. It is in these commercial film booklets that we see flashes of the “Calcutta style” that incorporated folk and traditional decorative elements in graphic design. We can see this in the decorative patterns in the covers and inside pages of films like Sanyasiraja (The Monk King, 1975) and Phuleshwari (1974), the former pictured below, from the Pearson collection. The motifs come from patterns, called Alpana, drawn on the floor and on walls on religious occasions.
Unlike most of the Ray covers, these use photographs extensively, but some of these photographs are conspicuously halftone images (evident in the grain of the image) revealing a mass-production aesthetic. See for instance, the page from the Bengali film Agnishwar, 1975, and detail from the same page.
Conversely, we also see an artisanal touch in the over-wash of the black and white halftone image in a monochrome hue on the cover of Dhanyee Meye (Fortunate Girl, 1971, Bengali). Pictured below are the cover of the publicity booklet, and a detail from the cover.
A similar artisanal touch is evident in the lettering arranged as a crown over the photographic cutout in the page from Sanyasiraja (1975).
A third strategy is the use of collages and cutouts. In the 1970s, Bengali cinema’s biggest stars, Suchitra Sen and Uttam Kumar, were seen in central character roles as opposed to roles that demanded youthful romancing. In Fariyad (Lamentation, 1971), Suchitra Sen plays a single mother abandoned by husband, and sold by her indebted father to a life of sexual servitude and bonded labor as a bar dancer and singer to a rapacious bar owner. The cover metaphorizes this harrowing and bleak story, portraying her oversized and color-tinted face behind a precarious deck of cards. The second page underscores the film’s recurring motif of a bobbing dancing figurine, hanging in the car of the bar owner. The third and fourth pages feature a collage of other key motifs presented as photographic cutouts: alcohol and cash, and the powerlessness of the protagonist’s elderly mother, father, and son in freeing her from her life as a cabaret performer.