BOLLYWOOD TECH KILLED THE POSTER ART 2

Down an alley in Mumbai, past a Hindu shrine and potholes from the monsoon, you get to one of the last studios where artists paint billboards for Indian movie blockbusters. Their work is stacked against each other, huge displays in bright epic colours, the faces of heroes and heroines, dwarfing the men on ladders touching up their lips and eyelashes. "I don't think I'll be doing this for much longer," says Raza Abbas who has been painting since he was 14. "No one wants our hand-painted work anymore. Everything is becoming computerised and the cinemas are being made into these multi-plexes" says Guruji Vinod himself a prominent practitioner of this art. Talking about these poster-artists, as they went about doing their thick-brushed paint strokes on canvas with what seemed like deceptive ease. “Deepak could paint as many as three posters in a day,” he said, pointing to one veteran who worked and trained under him. Guruji Vinod joked that the posters, after use, would go into propping up shanti-town houses and roadside homes, and thus played a role in serving the commonman too. “We painted the town not just red, but blue and pink and violet and all the shades and colours in between,” he said, half jokingly, while noting how the art was fading away. Besides the huge billboards that graced the skyline of Bombay, one would find that every inch of public wall space was taken up with gaudy pictures of Bollywood stars and starlets, making for very colorful city streets. People like him and their art are a victim of India's technology and economic explosion.

The old cinema hall is dying out and the shopping mall with coffee shops, fountains, designer boutiques and multi-plex cinemas are coming in. "It is much cheaper and when the film closes here we can roll it up and ship it off to the next cinema." But while the art might be dying, the products are becoming more valuable. In a cubby hole of a shop, a young couple, Purva and Rahul Singh, are surrounded by a clutter of old Indian movie posters. The rarest from 1950s films such as Mother India, India's first entry for the Oscars, sell for up to Rs. 8000. "The old posters are more beautiful," says Purva. "You can see the lines and texture. The new ones are just copies of the films made by someone sitting at a computer."

Nostalgia

Purva unrolls a poster for one of the latest hit films Singh is King. "See this," says Rahul "There is no feeling from the artist. Its technical design might be good, but this..." he says pointing to the wall. "I would die to be able to get more of these. But I think we've seen the last." Purva chips in. "That's not to say the modern posters aren't valuable. We have a difficult time getting hold of these as well." In the window of the tiny Movie Max shop, a Hindi poster for Spiderman hangs alongside one for the 1975 film Sholay, still considered to be the great Indian classic. For Purva and Rahul, there might be a tinge of nostalgia, but - whether hand-painted or digital - business is still good.