Output details

Distant Voices, Magic Knives: Lal-e-Yaman and the Transition to Sound in Bombay Cinema

This peer-reviewed essay is the first, and so far only, detailed account and analysis of the earliest and one of the most successful Indian sound films of the 1930s to have survived (Lal-e-Yaman, dir. J.B.H. Wadia, 1933). Thomas argues that the film is, at its core, structured around an opposition between the visual and the aural, in which the power of the voice prevails over the illusory qualities of the visual – an allegory of the arrival of the Talkies. The film is compared with Wadia's penultimate silent film, Vantolio, to suggest two different modes of modernity. The argument draws on Michel Chion’s notion of the acousmatic (disembodied) voice to demonstrate the sophistication of Wadia’s ways of presenting divine voices (in comparison with his better known rivals at Prabhat Studios). Despite this, its Islamicate setting meant the film was critically disparaged at the time of its release. This 10,000-word chapter draws on Thomas’s AHRC-funded research over more than two years at the Wadia Movietone archive. This includes analysis of first-hand accounts of Wadia 's working methods via unpublished memoirs; newspaper accounts of the film’s success and publicity; information on box-office takings via documents found in Wadia Movietone offices; close textual analysis of these two Wadia films (at that time only available within the archive), and comparison of these with others of the period. Early versions of the essay were presented as invited conference papers at New York University Abu Dhabi, the University of Sunderland, and as peer-reviewed papers at conferences of Screen, UK, and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, USA.