"Ephemera"

"Ephemera":

I ve always been a big movie fan, and watching them in theaters has also attracted me. So how do you come to know that a particular theater is getting the movie of your favourite star released? Silly question!?! Of course those huge ubiquitous posters advertise them, raising your excitement every time you pass by the cinema hall, and catch a glimpse of your favorite hero posing in a blood stained shirt, with the heroine in one hand and a gun in the other, and the villain slogging somewhere down the poster. Reminding you of a typical bollywood movie? However, these huge posters portraying cinema on inexpensive canvas have always appealed 2 me. So this led me to do a little research into the history of movie poster artwork and its evolution over the years.

Film posters have always been designed with the commercial intent of getting movie goers to buy a ticket. It is generally thought that the first movie poster was created in 1890 by French painter and lithographer Jules Cheret for a short film called “Projections Artistiques”.Most of the early film posters prior to 1910 were simple signs with block text announcing the title, producer, and director.

The period from the 1920s to the 1990s was a time when Hindi cinema developed its own distinctive visual language and produced its most magnificent images. It was during these years, that Coca-Cola and other brands like them got billboard painters hired. Hollywood posters switched from illustration to photography at an early stage and they also tended to use a lot more textual information. In India, by contrast, the focus remained on painted images for most of the 20th century, and that's what made Bollywood so special. Additionally, if you look a

t the way banners, billboards and cinema displays were created here -- that was such a unique system as well. In Hollywood, the studios commissioned designs which were reproduced everywhere in exactly the same way. But here, you had dozens

of painters across the country, using publicity stills to create their own handmade versions. I don't know if there were many other countries that had a similar wealth and diversity of images.

From the mid 1920’s through the 1940’s, movie studios in Hollywood developed their own artwork styles for their movie posters and hired well-known artists and illustrators such as Al Hirschfeld, John Held Jr., Hap Hadley, Ted I

reland. MGM was known for it’s highly polished posters that used pastel colour schemes on white backgrounds. 20th Century Fox, on the other hand, used rich and vibrant colours in their posters to promote their movies (typically musicals).As well, the increasing public preference for colour photographic quality prompted Columbia Pictures to pioneer the “fake colour” process which colorized black and white still photos.

One of the remarkable painters in the Hindi cinema was D.R.Bhosle. He could create the most stunning posters simply by placing a single expressive image against a stark black background. The overcrowded "masala poster" oft

en identified as typical of Bollywood, was merely a phenomenon of the 1970s, reflecting the nature of the movies during this period. The product of the 1950s, Hindi cinema's Golden Age, is a lot more restrained in comparison. The artists would use devices like colored faces sparingly, while in the 1970s, a single image could employ every imaginable trick. The poster-art, which changed over generations, also had regional differences. Delhi artists created their own lurid style in the 1970s and 1980s -- oodles of blood and AK-47s in both hands, even when the movies were relatively harmless.

In the 1980s, many commercial movie producers moved to photographic images, though sex and horror movies continued to use painted images with gruesome monsters and nubile nymphets. The result may have been some very pulpy and entertaining images, but unfortunately Bollywood's long tradition of hand-painted images seemed to have ended sordidly. When trends changed in this decade, veteran poster artists retired and the younger generation took to mass-produced photo-collages, and later, digital images. Then there were also those whose workshops churned out large banners and cinema displays which were, in turn, threatened by the introduction of vinyl in the 1990s. Today only a handful have survived across all of India.