CINEMA
Explosive eye candy
PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
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A Bollywood spectacle in a book.
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Lights, Camera, Masala; Naman Ramachandran, photographs by Sheena Sippy, India Book House, Rs.1995.
INSIDE find: a fold-out poster of "Deewar", a fan letter to Abishek Bachan in an orange envelope, pages from a film script, a pinwheel that spins to reveal Bollywood icons, a film strip negative, Sabu Cyril's sketch of a temple and one large masala popcorn box wrapped in an eye-devouring pink-orange-red avant garde design.
There hasn't been a coffee table book on Bollywood like this. If you spot it in a bookstore, you'll feel compelled to pick it up. And not put it down for a good half hour. You may want to buy it but the price, like all coffee table books, is going to give you pause. Wishing you could buy it, you'll settle in more comfortably to browse through the book for another half hour before you put it down and leave the store.
It's the explosive book design that's irresistible at first. It gouges the eyes, approximating the kind of eye candy Bollywood movies have meant to us. On a closer look, you realize the photographs and the text are just as cutting edge. Lights, Camera, Masala: Making movies in Mumbai written by Naman Ramachandran with photographs by Sheena Sippy and design by Divya Thakur, is the first book on Bollywood that gets the interplay between text, photographs and design right.
Look and read
The text, which is usually a fringe affair in coffee table cinema books, is sumptuous here. The pleasure of a picture book like this is that you can look AND read. Shrewdly, it skirts past cinema history, biography and period detail to plunge you into contemporary Bollywood.
Naman Ramachandran, a screenwriter, filmmaker, film festival programmer and film critic who writes for "Sight and Sound", uses this playful, neat idea of following two characters called Vijay and Ravi — the oft-used screen names of Shashi Kapoor and Amitabh Bachchan from their 70s hits — as they frantically run from one film set to the other, hoping to learn how a Hindi movie gets made from script to post production.
Ace cinematographer Ravi K.Chandran says he hates repeating the same style of lighting a film and Ashok Mehta tells you how he began his career on the streets of Mumbai. Karan Johar reveals to them that he never word processes his script but scripts it in his head; Faran Aktar tells them that he learnt from his father that "the script is the star of the film." In contrast to Aktar's full bound script, Anurag Kashyap admits, "I don't know what my second page is going to be while writing the first page. I just follow my character."
Sheena Sippy, a Bollywood insider, specialises in film photography. Her work has been featured in "Vogue" and "Time".
Through the lens
To give you an idea of the range of guises character actor Boman Irani can don, Sippy catches him in a spontaneous burst of snapshots that's really lovely and insightful. Through her lens you can also look and listen to choreographer Farah Khan, make-up artist Mickey Contractor, Ashokbai, now fifty years a light boy, and action/stunt director Alan Amin.
Young turks such as Rajkumar Hirani, Nikil Advani, Kunal Kohli, Rohan Sippy, Sujoy Ghosh and Ashutosh Gowariker interestingly talk about themselves more as screenwriters than directors.
As for those we've heard too much from — the stars — you can delight in Sheena Sippy's photographs which are not just gorgeous but have edge, atmosphere and character.
Among many fabulous pictures, my personal favourite is a wonderful black and white photograph of Aishwarya Rai in a make-up room. I wish the book had more photographs, especially more photographs of actresses.
And because the book is so full of the `now' (2005-2006) it risks looking and sounding dated soon. The design overwhelms the photographs and the text.
But these are minor quibbles. Divya Thakur pulls out all the stops in book design to transform Lights, Camera, Masala into a dancing-singing Bollywood spectacle.
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