BOLLYWOOD FITS THE FRAME
BY V. RADHIKA (Contributor)

8 January 2006

How does an Armenian, growing up in Baghdad watching occasional Bollywood flicks on Sunday afternoons, end up curating an exhibition of rare yesteryears posters of Bollywood films in Toronto? The answer is: Serendipity.

Last year, as Rafi Ghanaghounian was casually flipping through a French magazine, an image caught his eye. It was the picture of a man painting a large billboard.

Curious, he got the accompanying article translated. It was a story about how the extending arm of technology was suffocating a traditional art form. "The article was about billboard painters in Bollywood, about how things were changing, everything was going digital. And these artists, their grandfathers were painters, and now they are unemployed. Because of programs like Photoshop and Illustrator we are witnessing the demise of a trade."

Inspired by this article, Ghanaghounian decided to curate Bollywood Tamasha!, an exhibition showcasing Bollywood art. A retrospective of lithographs taken from vintage Bollywood billboards, this exhibition organised in Toronto recently, was the first of its kind in North America. Coming as it did at a time when Bollywood is becoming a part of North American lexicon and Hindi films with all their kitsch evoke more than a passing curiosity, the exhibition drew visitors inhabiting various spaces of Toronto's multicultural landscape. And the bright-coloured posters from a bygone era sent the audience on a flashback journey.

"I have had people from China, Baghdad, Africa walking up and saying they remember watching some of the films whose posters are put up here," says Ghanaghounian who used to watch many a Bollywood film with his family and friends while growing up in Baghdad. "It was a good way to spend a Sunday afternoon," quips the Armenian who has an avid interest in cultural trends across the globe. His previous two exhibitions have showcased Japanese dolls and street fashion.

He then set off on a journey to acquire the posters from an era where all it took to lure movie-goers was paint and brush. However, he hastens to point out, these brightly-painted billboards with large lettering and brightly-painted faces were a result of hard labour. Traditionally, the posters were painted and then photographed. Thereafter, lithographs were made. The original paintings were either painted over or destroyed.

"Technology wasn't involved at all in making these billboards. They're pretty incredible. But it's an old trade and it's gone now," he rues.

The process of making these billboards unfolded roughly along these lines: the studios would provide artists with headshots of the movie's hero and heroine along with a short blurb of the film. Dozens of artists would work on each 3-metre by 6-metre billboard, completing the canvas in 24 to 48 hours.

The billboards were then photographed to develop posters, which were then printed on low-quality paper so they could be plastered everywhere to generate an inexpensive buzz around the movie.

The billboards, he says, have been used since 1918 to promote Bollywood films and the art was passed from generations-father to son and provided employment to thousands, but was forced to recede in the face of technology's advancing strides.

"It costs a fortune. No one will do it now. Today you have vinyl printing and digital printing. You don't need painters any more," says Ghanaghounian expressing regret over the fact that "many of these painters are considered labourers. Despite their talent in graphics, they are not considered artists."

With modern technology driving these artists out of work, it comes as no surprise that even with a seasoned veteran of the Bombay studio scene guiding him on his research trips to Mumbai earlier this year, Ghanaghounian says it wasn't easy finding originals of the posters that fitted his requirements.

"I was looking for the oldest posters I could find, ones where painted images had been transferred to plates and posters printed by hand. I wasn't searching for a particular theme but wanted a collection which appealed to outsiders interested in eye candy and older Indians who saw these movies when they were young," says the bespectacled curator of Anoush gallery under whose auspices the exhibition was organised.

To get back to Ghanaghounian's billboard quest, after several futile attempts to find posters that matched his need, he finally found his treasure in a Mumbai alleyway. "We went to Falkland Road, where you have older cinemas," says Ghanaghounian. "A theatre manager gave us an address in some alleyway. We climbed up a rusty staircase. And there was this man with thousands of posters just piled up. He showed me new posters and I told him that I was interested in the very old ones."

Though finding actual billboards was almost impossible since they had been painted over or destroyed, Ghanoughian commissioned two 2.5-metre by 4.5-metre billboards, one for the 1957 classic Mother India and another for the 2004 Aishwarya-Rai starrer Bride and Prejudice.

"So, we've got Mother India and Miss India," he quips attributing the latter to Aishwarya Rai. Both billboards were done by artists Alam Choudhary and Vijay Kumar Singh of Shaikh Arts Studios in Mumbai.

The melange of billboards at Toronto's exhibit ranged from romantic to thrillers and socials to the devotional. There was the classic Barsaat poster with its leads Raj Kapoor-Nargis locked in a passionate embrace, an image that became a defining statement of romance.

And sharing wall-space with Raj Kapoor was his contemporary Guru Dutt in the 1954 Bollywood thriller Aar Paar. Many of them also had the lyrics from the film's popular songs painted on them. Ghanaghounian's favourite are the romantic posters.

To make the exhibition a total Bollywood experience, Tamasha! also had a few programmes including a screening of Bollywood-inspired short films from SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Collective) and a mixed-media installation. Gaily-painted cycle rickshaws parked in the exhibition hall completed the ambience.

There was also a panel of experts discussiong the rising popularity of Bollywood genre internationally particularly in Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe and Middle East.

The exhibition isn't just for Bollywood aficionados, emphaises Ghanaghounian. "There are so many cultures growing up with Bollywood today," he says. "When I was bringing some posters from the framers, the cabbie, who was from Africa, recognised they were Bollywood."