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Though cinema is more than 100 years old in India it is receiving some scholarly attention only recently. There was this issue with high art and low art. Film can be seen by all and so was considered a plebeian preoccupation.

When the DMK began using it for political purposes and actors like MGR and S. S. Rajendran rode into politics on their popularity as actors, Tamil cinema began to be noticed by academics particularly from the West. Later with subaltern and culture studies gaining popularity, there was a rush into this discipline. The arrival of video tape and DVD facilitated film studies. However, no attention was paid to the other dimensions of cinema, such as film posters.

The book under review sets out to examine this colourful area. Posters and hoardings are an important adjunct of our film culture. Poster art is as old as cinema in India. The oleographs of Ravi Varma set the pattern for early film posters. Babu Rao Painter, the filmmaker, is pointed out as a pioneer poster artist. M.F.Hussain rose from this school of painting. In South Indian cinema, it was K. Madhavan who set the pattern for film posters. Each cinema house had an in-house artist who used the posters to create a large mural at the entrance to the cinema house. Often it was a collage. There were also lettering artists.

In Tamil filmdom some art directors and even cinematographers have come from this school. Hoarding art was alive in towns like Coimbatore and Tiruchi till two years back. Today Vinyl hoardings have taken over marking the end of an art form. It was from this group that an alumnus of the college of arts M.P.Dhakshna, whose paintings form the major portion of this book, worked as a hoarding artist. His paintings capture the spirit of the art and that of Tamil cinema.

The book tries to take a look at the art of film hoardings and the culture that surrounds it. An art form that has disappeared is documented here. The authors have classified the subject of hoardings under nine categories, according to the nine emotions. The Tamil treatise Tholkapiyam talks about these nine emotions in its “Meypattiyal” section.

Poster art began developing its own iconography: who figured in the poster, in what order, and the size of each figure in the poster, whose names appeared in the poster, and so on. The whole art of hoarding was born out of the poster and the art work of the poster was used for advertisement in magazines. Though there is no photograph of any poster in the book, there is an interesting section comparing posters and hoardings. Here is a sample “Posters and hoardings both negotiate a complex zone of interaction between the filmmakers and their audience.” The prejudice against cinema was extended to poster art also. In fact there was even an act to keep a check on film posters, from the point of view of obscenity.

In Hollywood the works of poster artists have been documented. For instance, you can find out who created the poster for “Gone with the Wind”. Popular art forms have always suffered due to neglect. They did not get documented and often disappeared without a trace, more so if they were non-religious. This is what makes this book significant.

In discussing the hoarding art, the authors touch upon major trends in Tamil cinema. They examine, though briefly, stardom in Tamil cinema and the symbiosis between the star and politics in Tamil Nadu. The translations of the songs have been done effectively, retaining the flavour of the original. The book is sure to extend the frontiers of film studies.

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