'Bollywood in Posters' is the debut book by film historian S M M Ausaja that is being launched by Amitabh Bachchan in the forthcoming IIFA weekend in Macau on the 11th of June. Published by Om Books International, it is all about celebrating Poster art in Hindi cinema – an art that could never win an art historian's attention, at least till the mid nineties. Kitsch is what it would be generally referred to. The brush-stroke art that appeared in the publicity material of films till early eighties was belatedly celebrated. There were artistes – poster designers – who specialized in publicity art and they were often very popular within the producers' community, though somewhat anonymous to the rest of the world. Hindi films arrived in 1931 with Ardeshir Irani's Alam Ara. In the thirties, forties and fifties, there were lithographic posters. The lithographic press gave way to the offset press and posters of seventies and eighties were mostly offset prints. The nineties popularized the digital press. Consequently, by the end of eighties, the era of hand painted posters ended, replaced by the printed collage of images appearing on the posters. With the end of the hand-painted posters, came the realization of treating the originals as pieces of art, thereby making the hand-painted poster of any film from thirties to eighties as an object of art. This book is in honor of all the unsung poster designers who made the poster art of the country immortal with their valuable contribution.
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