Book fair celebrates 100 years of cinema
At the 20th edition of the Delhi World Book Fair, it’s not just books that is on display. Playing on themes like “100 Years of Delhi”, “Towards 100 years of Indian Cinema”, “150 Years of Rabindranath Tagore” and a pavillion with more than 30 publishers from foreign countries, the nine-day fair has much more to offer.
At the pavillion that celebrates 100 years of Delhi, one can find posters of Delhi emerging as the national capital, another one celebrates the life and times of Rabindranath Tagore. And it’s the pavillion celebrating “Towards 100 Years of Indian Cinema” which was the crowd-puller. It tries to bring out the association of literature and cinema over the years.
“Most of the time a movie buff is also an avid reader or vice-versa. This exhibition that displays more than 400 titles related to cinema, representing publication of almost 100 publishers, is an effort to bring out that unspoken bond between cinema and literature,” says Kumar Vikram, editor, National Book Trust that organises the biennial event.
To bring out the best from this exhibition, organisers have tried to give it a dramatic feel. So, just outside the hall, there’s a bioscope and a replica of a sculpture by Devaprata Chakraborty “depicting a typical queue outside cinema halls in India”.
And as one enters the hall, besides the 400 books on display, there are posters from films that advocate reading and posters of those films based on novels. Like, a poster of Sanjay Dutt from Lage Raho Munna Bhai, where he spends an entire night in the library reading books on Gandhi and comes out as a transformed man the next day, has been displayed large and wide.
There are more than 20 similar posters displayed in the entire hall that suggest reading/writing by other actors.
“Finding these pictures and selecting them for display was not a day’s job,” says Vikram and adds that the editorial and arts section of NBT with the help from National Film Archive of India has been working on this for almost a year.
Another fascinating aspect at the exhibition is a book — Points of View: Annotated Rights Catalogue of Indian Cinema — that gives one an overview of all the books and other details like who holds the copyright rights of a particular book, who should be approached to buy the rights, etc.
The organisers have also come up with the Brail edition of three books — The Cinema of Satyajit Ray, Dadasaheb Phalke and Balraj: My Brother by Bhishm Sahni. “We found that there are very few books on cinema in Brail and thus we thought of this special segment,” says Vikram
While the exhibition aims to help people looking to buy the rights of particular book, it also grips the common public. Suresh Vijarnia, a media student from Indian Institute of Mass Communication, says that it’s an interesting concept for movie buffs like him. “I want to study cinema. After visiting this exhibition, I have a fair idea of the books on cinema that have been published till date,” he says.
Post new comment