Output details

Still Magic: An Aladdin’s Cave of 1950s B-Movie Fantasy

http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/essay/103/index.html

Assessors, please note that this 7,000-word essay comprises five webpages, accessed via the link in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.

This commissioned and peer-reviewed visual essay emerged from – and is structured as a response to – a collection of Indian popular visual ephemera (the Priya Paul collection). Thomas’s research process began with an exhaustive search through the archive’s 4,500 images to select a shortlist of 50, out of which the structure of the essay and its argument were developed. These 50 images (subsequently reduced to 42) uncovered a range of connections between Bombay’s B-movie fantasy films of the 1950s and imagery as diverse as 19th-century textile labels, early 20th-century European travellers’ postcards, matchbox covers, wrestling posters and calendar art. The archive’s half-dozen cinema-lobby cards from the 1952 Bombay fantasy film 'Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp' were used as the core around which the essay’s argument was structured and evolved. Each of its five sections explores a different thematic set of relationships between film stills (from this and other 1950s B movies) and other elements of Indian popular visual culture. This was the first published academic work on 1950s Indian fantasy films. In contextualising these visual fragments, the essay drew on Thomas’s own original interviews with Aladdin’s director, the late Homi Wadia, and on textual analysis of this film. It also built on her substantial original research on other fantasy and stunt films of Indian cinema from the 1920s-1950s period (see Output 3), and her research on Indian popular visual and performance culture traditions. Tasveer Ghar is a digital archive of South Asian popular visual culture, hosted by University of Heidelberg and Duke University, Durham, USA. Contributors invited to write on the Tasveer Ghar peer-reviewed website include distinguished international scholars; see http://www.tasveerghar.net/ Thomas’s essay will be republished by Sumathi Ramaswamy, Christiane Brosius, Yousuf Saeed (eds.), in Houseful: Image Essays on South Asian Popular Culture from Tasveer Ghar, New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2014.