Bollywood : Poster-ed In Time
The history of Indian cinema goes back 105 years to 1913, when Dadasaheb Phalke birthed the industry with a silent, 40 minute feature film, Raja Harishchandra . “A performance with 57000 photographs. A picture two miles long. All for only three annas” was Phalke's promotional line for Indian cinema's first film. However, when one takes a glance at its poster released in the prestigious “Times of India”, it is a disappointing far cry from the general layout of a film poster – it had no glossy pictures and thick fancy writing. Phalke would continue making films - all of them silent, after the elite audience he'd invited and the thousands who gathered to watch Raja Harishchandra at the Coronation Cinematograph said good things about his 57,000 pictures. However, the posters that accompanied would be as bland and full of writing as the first, at least until ten more years had passed. In the 1920s, Bollywood cinema (a portmanteau of Bombay and Hollywood, dubbed by the m...