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Photo: K. V. Srinivasan

Documenting an artwork At the book launch

“It was like we woke up one morning and they were all gone,” said V. Geetha, one of the authors of “The 9 Emotions of Indian Cinema Hoardings,” which was recently launched.

Published by Tara Publishing, the book is a tribute to this vanishing art form and the artists who lost their livelihood with the advent of digitised hoardings.

“We didn’t want to do just a documentary of the artwork,” said Geetha, writer, translator and ardent fan of Tamil movies. Instead she and co-author Sirish Rao set out on a more ambitious task: to capture the navrasa, the nine emotions of these hoardings, ranging from the righteous fury of the angry young hero to the terror of the hapless heroine confronted by the villain.

But it was far from easy, given that none of the old artists kept any record of their work, and that few archives or collections of the artwork exist.

“In Hollywood, old cinema posters have been documented — you can look up the original poster of ‘Gone with the Wind’, for example,” said film historian Theodore Bhaskaran, speaking at the launch. “Unfortunately, cinema hoarding art in India has been neglected, in spite of producing artists of the calibre of M.F. Hussain.”

And so Geetha and Sirish spent eight months going through old Tamil magazines, downloading stills and combing through the Roja Muthiah Research Library for images they could use for the 22 paintings in the book.

“We’ve used some stills exactly as they were, while others are combinations of stills from different films,” said Sirish, who did the preliminary sketches for all the stills.

But the actual painting was done by M. P. Dhakshina, a well-known hoarding artist. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Dhakshina has been able to learn the computer skills needed to survive in the business, and has a studio in Chennai where the artwork for the book was done.

The book also contributes to film studies literature with four essays on hoarding artists, the history of the art, and the culture of spectacle in Tamil films.

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