Drona's First Look & Hope for Poster Art

Drona's 'first look' hearkens back to a golden age of Bombay film poster art which reached its peak around the 70s with the 'masala' dynamic of the period. Many 'posters' from that decade are now considered legendary and often fetch remarkable prices in online auctions or sales. This art form continued through the 80s and then more or less lost currency as the 'photographic' poster totally usurped this space. A more extensive sociology of this transformation would make for an interesting study. In essence however, a more imaginative and vital mode of film 'advertising' was lost in the process.

It would be an interesting idea for the Drona team to privilege 'pop art' and even if not exclusively to use this sort of 'animated imagery' in a supplementary way. Or even fuse 'pop art' with the 'photographic' as the current 'first look' does. This would make for a worthwhile exercise not only for the relative novelty of this attempt in the present age, not only because older art archives would be re-activated but also for the simple reason that a fantasy oriented theme would seem to lend itself perfectly to such representation.

Much of the economy of a commercial industry is geared around the advertising of a film, generating 'buzz' or creating 'hype' for the 'product'. The present media-intensive age however produces a level of stagnation beyond a point. There is an excess of images always preceding a film whether by way of the plainly photographic or the actual cinematic. The potential viewer's interest is aroused and satiated at the very same moment. By the time the film eventually releases the viewer already knows too much. The viewer enters the movie theater knowing in advance what the film will 'look' like in every conceivable way. What only remains at this point is to check off these 'new' images against those accumulated in memory. There is enough stock at both ends of this equation.

Film poster art offers a way out of this deadlock. Images seen in 'animated' fashion on such hoardings 'relate' to the photographic 'reality' of the cinema without ever becoming this. Excess here excites curiosity without necessarily satiating it. The viewer in this scenario sees very little of the actual film at any point. There might be one preview or more but the rest is only accessible indirectly by way of such 'art' that in turns stimulates imaginative possibilities. The viewer consequently enters the theater much more 'open' to the film, less 'dogmatic' in terms of expectation, because he or she has less control over the cinematic images associated with the work.

This last might be another crucial reason for the Drona producers not to make this present image the film's 'first and last look' in terms of the animation employed. In fact there ought to be as suggested earlier a proliferation of such 'looks' that together form a kind of 'virtual' comic strip. This was exactly the effect produced once upon a time in Bombay