CHENNAI: The Serendipity Arts Foundation in association with the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts and the Josef Wirsching Archives present their 2017 festival exhibit ‘A Cinematic Imagination: Josef Wirsching and the Bombay Talkies’ at the Lalit Kala Akademi till August 4.
Being co-hosted by the Goethe Institute/Max Muller Bhavan, Chennai, this exhibition, first showcased at the Serendipity Arts Festival 2017, has a sampling of rare, original photos and digital reprints of early Indian cinema from the Wirsching Archive.
The selection comprises behind-the-scenes photos of cast and crew, production stills and publicity images. These photos, shot primarily on 35 mm with a Leica camera between the 1920s-60s, gives unprecedented access to the aesthetic decisions, creative communities and cross-cultural exchanges that were vital to filmmaking in late colonial India.
Acclaimed production studio, Bombay Talkies, established by Himanshu Rai in 1934, played a major role in defining the form of mainstream film in India. This exhibition foregrounds the critical role of German technicians and interwar image-making practices in Indian cinema, presenting some of the best-known actors and technicians from Devika Rani, Ashok Kumar and Leela Chitnis, to Jairaj, Hansa Wadkar, and Dilip Kumar. The exhibition is a tribute to cinematographer Josef Wirsching.
The curators for this exhibition are Rahaab Allana, Devashree Mukherjee and Goerg Wirsching. “The exhibition is about a certain artistic and imaginative globalism before the introduction of globalisation. The collaborative impulse of the coming of Bombay Talkies speaks to a time of modernism when traditional concepts about art and aesthetics were being challenged with a new vision.The latter was a school of thought that drew attention to new ways of seeing and reception in the interwar years, which was also the time of arrival of new media and cameras, such as the Leica on which most of the images have been shot by Josef Wirsching,” said Rahaab.
Grandson of Josef Wirsching, Georg, is now managing the archive and has been instrumental in preserving the work of his grandfather. About bringing the photographs to the fore Georg said, “I’ve been personally involved with scanning, archiving and preserving this material in our collection, consisting a few thousand negatives and prints, for the past 10 years. After interacting with numerous filmmakers, historians and archivists who were conversant with the genre, I was informed that ours is one of the largest, most meticulously preserved, photographic archives that document the changing times in Indian cinema right from the early silent years until the birth of colour epitomised in Josef’s final film Pakeezah.”
He was also the co-curator of this project at the festival in Goa. Speaking about the archival value of the photographs to be showcased at the exhibition Debashree said, “As a film historian, and from a historical point of view, these materials are unprecedented. Most people don’t realise this, but 95 per cent of the films that were made in India during the early talkie period are considered lost forever! Given that we only have five per cent of our film heritage available to view, still photographs such as these become very critical to help us understand the emergence of the global phenomenon that we call ‘Bollywood’ today.” Many film historians and archivists who have had the opportunity to see the archive have confirmed that the material contained in Josef’s personal photographic collection does not exist anywhere else and it is by far “The most extensive and well-maintained private photographic collection depicting the birth of Indian Cinema.”
The exhibition will be on from 10 am to 6 pm at the Lalit Kala Akademi.