Jerry Pinto and Sheena Sippy’s next collaborative is yet another delicious ode to popular culture

The films that are churned out by this industry, decade after tireless decade, are varied in genre and employ millions in its main and ancillary functions. The films themselves, and the industry at large, have been at the very heart of academic discourses, and one should not be surprised today to find a research paper on ‘The Treatment of Time and Space in Karan Johar’s Films’, in the cavernous depths of the Stanford University Library.

An object generating fascination over years has been the Film Poster. Writer Jerry Pinto and lenswoman Sheena Sippy’s Bollywood Posters (India Book House) pays tribute to the dying art form that has played sutradhar to generations of film audiences.

Stylishly designed and shot by Sippy, the book juxtaposes de-saturated vibrant images of posters from the early hand-painting days of Do Bigha Zameen and Sahib, Biwi aur Ghulam with the digitally shot, mechanically reproduced monstrosities of Abbas Mustan’s Race or Yash Chopra’s Dhoom:2. Interspersed with the images are insightful essays by Jerry Pinto, who is also a pop-culture enthusiast. He claims that the industry, which relentlessly spins out around 800 films a year with a majority of flops, works without any economic logic. “It runs on glamour, on its own solipsistic appeal and on its self-generated aura,” Pinto writes. He also goes on to claim that Bollywood, though perceived as working outside of genres, has a built-in differentiating logic. And to demonstrate this, he divides the chapters and the posters in the book into six categories—drama, crime, history, mythology, romance and fantasy.

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