Category — Visual Anthropology

I recently came across an article on The Atlantic, written by Steven Heller who discusses how DVD covers use original poster designs but add add stills from the film that make it more appealing and more marketable a package. In particular, he discusses the ‘butchering’ of the work of Saul Bass who did art work, titles and posters for Alfred Hitchcock among many others.

Click here to access the article.

Rosie Thomas’s essay on Indian B-movies of the 1950s that appeared on the Tasveer Ghar site. Click here to read it.

(Note: It is a five-page long essay, click on ‘Select page’ or ‘Next’ which will appear at the bottom right corner of the page.)

I’m sharing an essay I read on the Bachchan film posters. It has been written by Ranjani Mazumdar, Associate Professor of cinema studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Ranjani has previously written on the Bombay film poster, but this paper works specifically on Amitabh Bachchan, and it creates a visual map of how cinema responded to societal changes in the 1970s, and also traces Bachchan’s rise to stardom through the film poster.

The essay is four-pages long, and you have to go to the bottom right corner of the page and click on ‘next’, a link that isn’t very visible on the page.

Click here to access the essay.

As expected, Frank Heidemann’s lecture on the “Photographic Processes and Artefacts,” hosted by the Dept.of Mass Media and Communication Studies, University of Madras, on 18 09 2009, evoked a very good response. A good number of senior professors (from disparate disciplines such as philosophy, history, statistics and public affairs) along with students in Journalism and Communication, Electronic media and other courses attended the first session of the Media and Society Seminar Series and enjoyed the lucid presentation of Prof.Frank Heidemann. Prof.Steve Hughes, SOAS, University of London, whose work on early Tamil cinema audience is well known, was also in the audience. Here is more on what I wrote today on the topic.