The early film song booklet as visual art and the ‘intermedial scope’ of Indian cinema histories

Abstract

Film song booklets or, more generally, cinema booklets have gained traction in recent years as archival resources contributing to the uncharted histories of Indian (and South Asian) cinema. They add to the rich repositories of cinema ephemera that underline the importance of extra-filmic material in writing such histories while focusing on themes of printing, circulation, consumption and thus the afterlives of films themselves. Beyond the immediate remits of film history, the cinema booklet/film song booklet, I argue, offers an ‘intermedial scope’ of understanding the relationship between visual, oral and aural dimensions of filmmaking and film-viewing. In this article, I focus on two such digitised collections from the British Library and the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum in London. It considers the cinema booklet not as standalone ephemera, but a vital connection in the changing landscape of visual art in India as it affords insights into those aspects of the societal that remain eclipsed.