Classic Bollywood posters a click away

Bollywood art, such as the scene in which Balraj Sahani pulls a cart in Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zamin, might soon adorn your home.

Bollywood art, such as the scene in which Balraj Sahani pulls a cart in Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zamin, might soon adorn your home.

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Posters of path-breaking movies by Satayajit Ray, Bimal Roy and Raj Kapoor have been collected from the film industry and digitised by the National Film Archives of India.

The NFAI has digitised over 16,000 of these posters of Hindi and regional cinema spanning several decades to preserve them and make them available for research.

Each poster has been scientifically conserved to increase its longevity to 200 years.

“Any poster on our list would be available at the click of a mouse. We have developed special software to enable a scholar to source a poster of a particular film at a click of a button,” said V.H. Jadhav, the institute’s director.

The NFAI also plans to open a digital posters library.

Posters, till the advent of television marketing of films, was the most import medium to attract audiences to cinema halls.

“Designing posters was an important element of film production as it was an attempt to capture the flavour of the movie in single painting,” said Mahesh Bhatt, Bollywood producer and director.