SUCHITRA SEN AND A POSTER EXHIBITION

Few who have seen Bimal Roy’s Devdasstarring Dilip Kumar, Suchitra Sen and Vyjayantimala will be able to forget the beautiful Parvati. Who can ever forget the ambitious politician hungry for love but regal in her bearing in Gulzar’sAandhi? The romantic role in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Musafir would also have been memorable but for the fact that the film flopped. Suchitra Sen’s charisma in Hindi films may not have caught on. But it did not make a single dent in her audience pull and her mesmerizing star-power in Bengali cinema.

She is the only actor in the history of Indian cinema to have declined the top DadasahebPhalke Award for her rich contribution to Indian cinema because that would need her to come out in public out of the completely private world she had encased herself into. She chose to live in complete social isolation soon after the failure of her last film Pronoy Pasha (1978) opposite Soumitra Chatterjee.

But her scores of fans refuse to forget her. Every year, on her birth anniversary, programmes are organized in her memory across the city of Kolkata and beyond. Among these, this year, was a wonderful exhibition of 46 film posters featuring Suchitra Sen organized by SudiptaChanda, head of The Dreamers’ Music PR, an organization that presents music programmes and poster exhibitions round the year.

When asked what inspired him to organize his collection of film posters on Suchitra Sen, says Chanda, “It is like looking back into one of the most important and impactful mediums of publicity. Besides, they bring back the nostalgia of hand-painted posters which are an art form unto itself, unlike the digitally created posters we have today. Hand-crafted  posters are an integral part of our cultural heritage and it is necessary to archive them for generations born into the digital age. Film posters are not valued by art collectors like paintings, sculpture and other art forms. So, I decided to collect and preserve  them.”

In addition to 46 film posters framed and hung at the Abanindranath Gallery at the ICCR, Kolkata, there were other archival collections on the star actress such as booklets, song books, film stills, magazine covers, commercial Advertisements and one gramophone disc of her own songs.

Sudipta points out that among the 46 Suchitra Sen Posters he has collected so far, his favourites are the posters of the films -Amar Bou, Agni Pariksha, Chandranath, SabarUpore, Uttar Phalguni and Harano Sur. Harano Sur, incidentally, starring Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen was one of the biggest hits of the pair and ran for ten houseful Sunday morning shows at Bombay’s Chitra Talkies in Dadar.

According to Sudipta who has been collecting film posters from the time he was a fan of Shakti Samanta moving on to Bachchan and then R D Burman. He would directly collect old posters from the new extinct Purna Cinema in Kolkata or buy them directly from poster sellers and film distributors. He fell in love with hand drawn film posters.

Posters for cinema did not exist till around 1924. When India’s first film, Raja Harishchandra was released in Mumbai’s Coronation Cinema 100 years ago, the announcements appeared in the Times of India. For the release of India’s first sound film AlamAra (1931), posters were unknown. The screening was advertised through text-based handbills and advertisements in newspapers and this was the norm. However, the earliest surviving poster of an Indian film is believed to have been before AlamAra. It was a 1924 film called KalyanKhajina directed by Baburao Painter.

However, Chanda is more attracted by hand-painted posters than the digitally produced ones. He says, “It is true that digitally produced posters are more modern in looks and more mathematically precise, and smart. But they all look identical as they are machine-made and not hand-crafted. In the days of hand-drawn posters, and even in litho-print posters, each artist would draw the inlay manually and the fonts for the film titles were also hand-crafted by them. They would work out their own colour combinations so each film poster did not become identical with another featuring the same stars. The graphics on the posters were hand-drawn by the artists themselves. So, each poster artist came to be known in poster circles by their own individual styles which they evolved over a period of time. Digitally created posters are mechanical and lack the human touch whereas hand-painted posters are enriched by the human touch and have an old-world charm of their own. What more do you want? And it is only through such individual collections like mine can this kind of poster art survive historical decay.”