FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
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India gets its own film museum

India gets its own film museum

Now there's a hi-tech archive to back up the Bollywood walk of fame

SEVEN YEARS in the making and costing the equivalent of Bt970 million, the first Indian film museum is set to open in the home of Bollywood more than 100 years after the country’s celebrated movie industry was born.
The government-funded National Museum of Indian Cinema, set in an elegant 19th-century heritage bungalow in south Mumbai, traces Indian cinema’s history from the black-and-white silent era to its modern musical blockbusters.
“It’s about time India had its own film museum,” says curator Amrit Gangar. “We have archives but not a museum, and today a museum can become vibrant because of technology and interactivity.”
Spread across two floors of the 6,000-square-foot building, the museum showcases original artefacts, memorabilia, recordings and filmmaking tools. Visitors can see an original painted poster for the 1957 epic “Mother India” and listen to songs by KL Saigal, considered the first superstar of Hindi film.
The idea is to celebrate not just Hindi-language Bollywood but also the films made in the various regions and languages across India, a country that produces nearly 1,500 movies a year. “All the filmmaking centres of India have been represented,” says Anil Kumar, head of marketing at the government’s Films Division. He says the museum is ready and will open within the next few weeks.
The curators were faced with big gaps in the country’s rich cinema heritage – many of the early films were not preserved, for example. The last remaining print of India’s first “talkie”, 1931’s “Alam Ara” (“The Light of the World”), was destroyed in a fire in 2003.
“Many things have been lost,” says Gangar. “We have only 1 per cent of early silent films left. So this isn’t a museum of collections but a museum of information, interaction and education through a sensory experience.”
Procuring original memorabilia was also a challenge for the museum, say its creators. “We didn’t get much, but we got a few things through donations and purchases. Many things have previously been amassed by private collectors,” says Kumar. “This museum will be more educational.”
Via a touch-screen panel, visitors can watch clips from the few remaining silent films, such as “Prem Sanyas” (“The Light of Asia”, 1925) and “Prapancha Pash” (“Throw of Dice”, 1929).
Among the moving pictures featured is “Raja Harishchandra”, the first all-Indian feature film brought to the silver screen in Mumbai on May 3, 1913. A tale from the Hindu epic book Mahabharata, the film quickly became a hit despite its female characters being played by men at a time when women acting was widely frowned upon.
Kumar says the museum will take visitors “through the journey of Indian cinema, from pre-cinema to the silent era to talkies to songs, the studio system, new wave and digital”.
Unlike Hollywood, a physical place in Los Angeles, the term Bollywood is a nickname for the Hindi-language film industry that is largely centred on Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay.
Much of the studio action now happens in a “Film City” complex in the city’s north – or in picturesque foreign locations – while old heritage gems, such as the once-famed Bombay Talkies studio, have been left to deteriorate in recent decades.
But a few projects have sprung up celebrating the city’s movie history in recent years. In 2012 a “Walk of the Stars” was set up on a seaside promenade in the style of Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, with handprints and signatures of various leading actors.
Ahead of the industry’s centenary last year, a Mumbai artist also began painting giant murals of classic film posters on the walls of the street.
It seems authorities may now also be recognising the potential for Bollywood to bring in tourism revenue – not only through the museum, but also through movie tours of the city.
Tourism officials of Maharashtra state, of which Mumbai is the capital, have recently begun offering “Bollywood Tours”, including drives past the homes of the stars and visits to Film City’s studios and costume galleries. The higher-end tours, costing 3,250 rupees (Bt1,700), offer a chance to glimpse the liveliness and chaos of a shooting set with lights, reflectors, cranes and heavily made-up actors hastily taking position.
While tourists are more likely to spot a TV actor, with some luck visitors might even catch a glimpse of a recognisable Bollywood star.
“The idea of the tours is to give a peek into Film City and its various locations and also how Bollywood functions,” says Manoj Gursahani, chairman of TravelMartIndia operating the tours.

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