[Reader-list] 2nd posting

[Sarai Independet Fellowship]

Early Cinema and Rise of a New Form of Advertising 

Posting dated 25th March 2004 

by 

Indrani Majumder 

I have started collecting and studying the handbills preserved from the period 1900 - 1905 which were definitely the first and most primitive form of film advertisement to appear in those days. The handbills, though visually unattractive, provide a lot of information about early films and the spectators. A handbill is an extension of newspaper advertisement of the same programme often providing a little more information to its reader. The handbills indicate that cinema was predictably presented to the audience as a new form of ‘attraction’ – a visual ‘gimmick’ not to be missed at all. It was almost mandatory for some established commercial theatre to feature ‘bioscope’ along with the main play in the commercial theatres of Calcutta regularly in the first decade of 20th century. Different packages of shorts, mainly documentaries or ‘actualities’ as they were known in those days, were considered as crowd-pullers. Occasional comic films and travelogues were also started appearing soon. After all cinema was a ‘modern scientific marvel’ and many believed that the magic of cinema was a logical extension of stage illusions or ‘special effect’s that was so special to commercial theatre in those days. The first newspaper advertisements and handbill were careful in listing these ‘attractions’ offered by a  film programme for the benefit of its potential spectators. In Bengal Hiralal Sen started recording specific scenes from the threatre productions and showed those to the theatre audiences. The rare handbills featuring Hiralal Sen’s ‘Royal Bioscope’ shows begged the audience not to miss these ‘attractions’ and were sometimes quite blatant in praising the quality or standard of the films. One handbill, for example, indicated that the images are not ‘dark’ which was most common ‘fault’ in the early films where exposure control had yet to be perfected. The handbills carried no photographs but used different front sizes to highlight specific ‘attractions’ such as a memorable moment from a theatre or a nationalist meeting which had its obvious theatrical  / performative characteristics. 

As a new commodity cinema had to appeal to popular sensibilities, to address the public directly and convincingly.  It was rather natural for the cinema industry to use all means of communication to intimate the public to come and see a film. Handbills, slides, newspaper advertisements, lobby cards, song books, hoardings, banners, and ‘trailers’, which were so unique to cinema, had created not only a subsidiary industry of its own but also new ways of intimating and addressing the people. The language of the cinema advertisement uses words and images, graphics and designing unlike any other medium. The film advertisement among other things, I believe, is a form of graphical construction of pleasure in and through which both words and images talk to its ‘reader’. Ideology of graphical representation of cinematic pleasure in the form of advertisement in which power of addressing becomes supreme needs to be deconstructed to show how the codes of representation were created and functioned. The handbills from the first decade of 20th Century indicate the beginning of this.


I welcome suggestion / advice.