Bombay Talkies

josef wirsching archive | alkazi collection of photography

Bombay talkies

AN UNSEEN HISTORY OF INDIAN CINEMA

Bombay talkies

AN UNSEEN HISTORY OF INDIAN CINEMA

Ever since cinema became a popular medium of mass entertainment audiences have been intensely curious about life and work on a film set. How are films made, we have wondered, hoping that first-hand knowledge of a film set will explain and subdue the hold that cinema has on us. This book presents rare behind-the-scenes photographs from the personal archive of the cinematographer Josef Wirsching, a pioneer of Indian cinema. Most of these photographs were taken in the 1930s and ‘40s when Wirsching was employed at the legendary film studio, Bombay Talkies Ltd. Shot across film sets and outdoor locations they convey a world of meaning that was never intended to be projected on the silver screen.

Bombay Talkies was founded in 1934 by the husband and wife team of Himansu Rai and Devika Rani, who had previously worked in Germany. After the Nazis’ rise to power, the largest German film studios of the day were taken over for propaganda purposes, restricting the creative freedoms of filmmakers. At the same time, new sound technologies made it possible to make Indian films in Indian languages for Indian audiences. Himansu Rai and Devika Rani decided to start their own film studio in Bombay and invited their German colleagues to join them in this new artistic enterprise. Some of the biggest hits of Bombay Talkies were made by a multilingual and transnational collective including Franz Osten (director), Josef Wirsching (cinematographer), Devika Rani (actress), Niranjan Pal (writer), and Ashok Kumar (actor). The studio played a foundational role in defining India’s commercial film form, producing some of the most iconic musical films of the era.

The essays in this volume help us understand the historical and imaginative value of the photographs in the Wirsching archive. We are confronted with the fact that it is impossible to demand a superficial authenticity from the past. What is Indian about Indian cinema? How do we navigate the gap between the star image and off-screen lives of beloved actresses such as Madhubala and Meena Kumari? Can we fix a medium that moves between architecture, photography, and embodiment? As this book suggests, the past continues to surprise us as new sources emerge, showing us that history, and cinema itself, is a vital ongoing project. With 165 photographs

Bombay talkies

Archive

Bombay talkies

AN UNSEEN HISTORY OF INDIAN CINEMA

First published in India in 2023 by Mapin Publishing

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Text © Authors

Image captions © Debashree Mukherjee and Georg Wirsching Illustrations © Josef Wirsching Archive/Alkazi Collection of Photography unless otherwise noted.

All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

The moral rights of Sudhir Mahadevan, Priya Jaikumar, Debashree Mukherjee, Rachel Dwyer, Kaushik Bhaumik, Virchand Dharamsey, Eleanor Halsall and Georg Wirsching as authors of this work are asserted.

ISBN: 978-93-85360-78-7

Copyediting: Mithila Rangarajan/Mapin Editorial Editorial Assistance and Coordination: Jennifer Chowdhry Biswas and Hitanshi Chopra/ The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts

Proofreading: Marilyn Gore/Mapin Editorial Design: Gopal Limbad/Mapin Design Studio Production: Mapin Design Studio Printed in China

Captions:

Front Cover Jawani ki Hawa, 1935 (See, p. 22)

Front Endpapers

Song booklet covers

Jawani ki Hawa (1935), Achhut Kanya (1936), Mother and Always Tell Your Wife (1936), Bombay Talkies, d. Franz Osten

Courtesy: National Film Archive of India, Pune

Prem Kahani (1937), Vachan (1938), Bombay Talkies, d. Franz Osten Josef Wirsching Archive

Mahal (1949), Bombay Talkies, d. Kamal Amrohi Courtesy: National Film Archive of India, Pune

Page 2 Josef Wirsching 1958

Gelatin Silver Print, 165 x 127 mm JWA/ACP: 2020.01.0077

Pages 4–5

Jeevan Naiya, 1936 (See, p. 47)

Pages 6–7 Jawani ki Hawa, 1935 (See, pp. 110–111)

Pages 10–11

Jawani ki Hawa, 1935 (See, p. 166)

Back Endpapers

Song booklet covers

Jeevan Prabhat (1937), Nirmala (1938), Nav Jeevan (1939), Jeevan Naiya (1936), Bombay Talkies, d. Franz Osten Josef Wirsching Archive

Pakeezah (1972), Mahal Films/Kamal Pictures, d. Kamal Amrohi

Courtesy: Debashree Mukherjee

Back Cover

Izzat, 1937 (See, p. 60)

Josef Wirsching and Charlotte Wirsching on a holiday to Arthur Lake in Maharashtra in 1965.

Josef Wirsching Archive

Foreword

In May 1967, Wolfgang Peter Wirsching received a distressing and fateful telegram from his father, Josef Wirsching, informing him that his dear mother, Charlotte, was on her deathbed, and if he wanted to see her again he’d have to come to India immediately. Peter was in Hamburg, Germany.

This one poignant moment has brought us to where we are today and it helps define the circumstances of how the Wirsching Archive has become what it is now.

Josef Wirsching was a cinematographer who learned and perfected his craft in Germany in the mid-1920s and eventually became a paragon of technical innovation and cinematic brilliance through a career spanning forty years. Most importantly, his love for India is evident in his decision to live in this country and in the stories he captured with his camera’s lens.

Josef Wirsching was born on March 22, 1903, into a reasonably well-to-do family in Munich, where his father, Josef Wirsching Sr, ran a successful business as a set designer and theatrical costumer. His father wanted him to become an architect, but when young Josef was gifted a film camera on his sixteenth birthday he found a different calling. After much fighting with his father, Josef started his career as an apprentice photographer and cinematographer at the Weiss-Blau-Film studios in Munich. He also studied photography theory at the state-run trade school in Munich. In 1923, Josef joined Emelka Studios (now Bavaria Films) as an assistant cameraman and laboratory assistant and was soon working as a film cinematographer on the studio’s epic film productions.

In 1924, Himansu Rai, an Indian lawyer living in London, convinced Emelka to collaborate on an international co-production for the film The Light of Asia, changing Josef’s life and the future of Indian filmmaking.

The concept of The Light of Asia was based on a script about the life of Lord Buddha, written by Niranjan Pal, an Indian playwright in England who was a good friend of Himansu Rai’s. The script was itself based on a poem by the English poet Edwin Arnold. The script was initially envisioned to be a theatrical play, but it was way too expensive to be portrayed on stage and so Himansu Rai decided to make it into a silent film.

After meetings with numerous film studios in England, who were all reluctant to risk making a film of this magnitude, Rai finally approached Emelka Studios. Upon hearing his story, the studio bosses at Emelka were willing to take on the challenge of their first international co-production in India. As part of the collaboration, Emelka provided the main technical crew, consisting of Franz Osten as director, Josef Wirsching as the main cameraman, Willi Kiermeier as the assistant cameraman, and Bertl Schultes for production and translation. Emelka also provided all the equipment and material and handled processing and editing of the final movie. Himansu Rai was to provide an Indian cast and organize finances for expenses, which amounted to Rs 1,00,000; the film would be billed as one of the most expensive to be made that year. The Light of Asia was shot completely on location in India with the assistance of the Maharaja of Jaipur at his palace in 1925. The film was completed in 1926 and premiered to large audiences in Europe.

Through this project, Josef Wirsching encountered India for the first time. His second encounter was in 1927–28 when Emelka deputed him to film a travelogue documentary. Along with an assistant cameraman and two drivers, Josef travelled overland from Munich to Calcutta (now Kolkata) in two specially modified Mercedes-Benz automobiles. The team set off across the Mediterranean Sea on August 4, 1927, via a steamer ship to Egypt, from where they continued by land into Lebanon, the Syrian Desert, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and then into India through Lahore. From here they continued on to Bombay (now Mumbai), then to Delhi and Benares (now Varanasi), finally reaching Calcutta in early 1928. When the Emelka bosses reviewed the footage shipped to Germany, they were so impressed that they directed Josef and his assistant to continue filming the travelogue from Calcutta to Rangoon. Due to the rough terrain, the team was unable to use the Mercedes-Benz vehicles and hence this second leg of the journey was done mostly on foot and by any other means available. They left Calcutta on March 7, 1928, and finally left Rangoon by steamer on May 26, 1929. This was an extremely harsh and rugged journey, although an eventful experience for the twenty-five-year-old Josef Wirsching. After returning to Germany, Josef continued filming numerous iconic films for Emelka. In January 1929, Josef married his childhood sweetheart, Charlotte Mühlberger.

In the late 1920s, Himansu Rai and Franz Osten co-directed a few films at the UFA studios in Berlin. The actor Devika Rani had also moved to Germany and together they witnessed the overwhelming fascist political atmosphere that was brewing. Rai now started to plan his own state-of-the-art film studio in Bombay. After successfully procuring the necessary financial assistance from various Indian businesspersons and bankers, Rai was able to institute the Himansurai Indo International Talkies Ltd (HRIIT), which later became Bombay Talkies.

With the advent of the Great Depression, Emelka faced financial problems, even as the Nazi movement took root in Germany. This was when Rai again approached Emelka for technical support. At his request, Emelka Studios offered to help him procure all the equipment that he would need to set up the studio and also offered him the services

The Light of Asia

1925, Emelka Films & Great Eastern Film Corporation, d. Franz Osten 80 x 140 mm Negative Josef Wirsching Archive

Josef Wirsching with his Askania camera on a tripod under an umbrella outside the City Palace, Jaipur.

ABOVE Charlotte, Peter and Josef Wirsching with their pet dachshund Pooky on the steps outside the entrance to one of the studio buildings of Bombay Talkies in the early 1950s.

BELOW Peter and Rosamma Wirsching with their sons Georg and Josef in one of the last family pictures at their home in Goa in late 2015 before Peter took seriously ill and passed away in August 2016.

of some of their best film experts, including Franz Osten as director, Josef Wirsching as director of cinematography, Karl Graf von Spreti as film architect (set designer), Wilhelm Zolle as the laboratory-in-charge and Benjamin Hartley as the chief sound technician.

Based on conversations with my father, it appears certain that Josef, my grandfather, wanted to distance himself from Nazi ideology and what he viewed as a madness that had gripped his homeland in the early 1930s. Bombay Talkies provided Josef a wonderful opportunity to take himself and his wife away to India to start a new life in a place to which he felt a strong connection. A series of curious encounters confirmed this feeling of connection. In 1925, when Josef first came to India to film The Light of Asia, a court astrologer at the Jaipur Palace told him, “Welcome back to India.” Josef, a bit taken aback by this odd statement, explained to the astrologer that he had never been to India before but the astrologer simply told him that Josef had very much been an Indian in a previous lifetime, which was why he instinctively knew so much about the country, why he loved the food and why the oppressive heat did not affect him as much as it did the rest of the German crew. Later on, in 1927, when Josef reached the banks of the Indus (or Sindhu) River, as he was entering India on his overland trip, he encountered a travelling fortuneteller who told him that he would marry the love of his life and do great things in India. Finally, in 1928, when Josef reached Benares, he encountered an Aghori ascetic on the banks of the Ganges, who read his palm and predicted that Josef would go on to do great things, leaving behind a great legacy that would manifest itself through his family that would stay on in India after him. These three separate encounters solidified Josef’s conviction that coming to India to help start Bombay Talkies would be the next best stage in his life.

Bombay Talkies was incorporated in 1934 and they were ready with their first production, Jawani ki Hawa, in 1935. In the years that followed, the studio made several socially relevant movies that questioned the patriarchal norms and social misogyny of the times. Influenced by the Indian freedom struggle, this was a decade of the Indian “social film” and Bombay Talkies made several reformist films and soon came to stand out as a beacon for changing social values. The German crew also trained many young men and women in film craft, and many apprentices of the studio found themselves becoming award-winning actors, directors, editors and producers over the years to come.

Unfortunately, when World War II broke out in September 1939, as a German national living in British India, Josef was immediately interned in the prisoner-of-war camps set up for “enemy aliens.” He was first placed in the Dehradun and Deolali camps and then moved to the main camp at Ahmednagar before he was allowed to be reunited with his family in 1944 in the Satara camp, which held the women and children. Josef and his family were finally released from internment shortly before India gained independence. All detainees had to be either sent back to their countries of origin or had to return to their previous jobs in the countries where they were detained; Josef chose to stay in India and return to Bombay

Introduction

What Photography Can Tell Us About Cinema’s Past

FIG. 1 Jawani ki Hawa

1935, Bombay Talkies, d. Franz Osten

Lobby Card (Gelatin Silver Print), 294 x 246 mm Josef Wirsching Archive

Kamala (Devika Rani) and Ratanlal (Najmul Hussain) share an anxious moment on board a speeding train in Bombay Talkies’ debut feature film.

Ever since films became a popular medium of mass entertainment, audiences have been intensely curious about life and work on a film set. How are films made? we have wondered, hoping that first-hand knowledge of a film set will explain and subdue the hold that cinema has on us. If we could only peer behind the scenes, we might be free of the seduction of the screen. But, fortunately or unfortunately, that has rarely happened. The experience of the film set has historically confounded any straightforward process of demystification. Even the most casual witnesses of a film shoot frequently depart more starry-eyed than before. Consider this testimony from the legendary film journalist B. K. Karanjia:

My interest in cinema was first aroused in 1934 when a group of us students from Wilson College were taken on a study tour of the Bombay Talkies studio at Malad. The picture being filmed and directed by the German director Franz Osten had the rather intriguing title Always Tell Your Wife. The scene being shot showed Najmul Hussain holding Devika Rani in a close embrace, whispering sweet nothings into her ear. Oh, I’d have given anything to be in Najmul Hussain’s shoes! In my adolescence, Devika Rani appeared to me the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, the goddess of my dreams!

The young Karanjia was so moved by the spectacle of a live romantic scene unfolding before his eyes that he longed to trade places with the film’s hero. And Devika Rani’s starry charms, rather than appear diminished in real life, were heightened on set.

In this book, we present a selection of photographs from the personal archive of Josef Wirsching, one of the pioneering film artistes of Indian cinema. These photographs, most

FIG. 2 Josef Wirsching

c. 1924 Gelatin Silver Print, 119 x 154 mm Josef Wirsching Archive

A dramatic portrait of a young Josef Wirsching, with pipe in hand and the shadow of a film camera in the background. This image was taken in Germany when he was working for Emelka film company.

of them taken on film sets and outdoor locations, show us a world of meaning that was never intended to be projected on the silver screen. These behind-the-scenes photographs add new layers to how we understand cinema and the past.

When first confronted by these images, one feels something in the body. A range of sensations courses through your veins before you can articulate what these sensations signify. If you’re a film historian like I am, you might feel surprise and excitement because you were never expecting to see anything like this. The archive of Indian cinema is notoriously fragmented and many of the primary sources that scholars working on Hollywood take for granted, we have accepted as lost. Not only are more than 90 per cent of preIndependence Indian films considered lost forever, we currently have very limited access to paratextual materials like studio papers, contracts, and screenplays. Production stills of the kind preserved by the Wirsching family are absolutely unprecedented for the 1930s.

Seeing images of film practitioners immersed in the work of making movies, attempting to build a new local industry and shape an emerging art form, unsettles our assumptions about the past in fundamental ways. For one thing, these images show us that early filmmaking in India was often organizationally and technically robust despite the wellknown challenges of finance and infrastructure. We are also confronted with the fact that the pioneers of Indian cinema belonged to many different classes, religions, castes, genders, even nationalities, and it would be false to demand a superficial authenticity from the past. Instead, as the essays in this book suggest, the past continues to surprise us as new sources emerge, showing us that history itself is a vital ongoing project.

Josef Wirsching and Indian Cinema

The story of Josef Wirsching is intimately tied in with the story of Bombay Talkies, a film studio that has an undisputed place in the history of Indian cinema. While films like Achhut Kanya (1936) and Kismet (1943) are considered important milestones in the career of sound cinema from Bombay (now Mumbai), many of the studio’s stars and technicians actively shaped commercial filmmaking in twentieth-century India. From Ashok Kumar, who started as a rookie laboratory assistant at the studio, to Dev Anand, who made his acting debut with Ziddi (1948), several of India’s best-loved stars began their film careers at Bombay Talkies. Interestingly, a review of Ziddi in The Times of India noted that the film was “distinguished by some of the finest photography we have seen in years on the Indian

FIG. 3 Izzat

1937, Bombay Talkies, d. Franz Osten 35 mm Negative

JWA/ACP: 2020.01.0011

Josef Wirsching, Devika Rani, R. D. Pareenja and Franz Osten cool off during a location shoot.

screen—the camera in fact steals the picture,” and therefore, according to the reviewer, the real star of the film was not the debutant Dev Anand but Josef Wirsching’s cinematography. The work of reinstituting Josef Wirsching within the known history of Indian cinema offers us an expansive perspective on the contours of so-called national cinemas. How can a German cinematographer be considered a pioneer of Indian cinema? And what was he doing in the Bombay film industry in the first place? Tracking these questions leads us to a fascinating network of people, places, and practices that converged on Bombay city in the 1930s. From London to Lahore, Calcutta (now Kolkata) to Berlin, the Bombay film industry was built by people and resources from across the world. When one enquires after the ethnicities, linguistic identities and nationalities of the pioneers of Bombay Talkies, it becomes clear that the category “Indian cinema” is a tenuous construct and includes a wide array of trans-regional and transnational influences, borrowing from Hollywood and Parsi theatre even as its practitioners crossed the borders of old and new nation states.

Born in Munich, Germany, in 1903, Josef Wirsching experienced all the cultural ferment of the interwar years. Cinema was still a fledgling art form at the time, and was radically influenced by Munich’s robust theatre and photography scene. For instance, the Ostermayr brothers (Franz, Peter and Ottmarr) ran a photography studio, studied acting and worked at Max Reinhardt’s Kammertheater before they turned wholeheartedly to filmmaking.

Josef Wirsching himself was slated to take over his father’s costume and set design studios, but had a career epiphany when he was gifted a still camera on his sixteenth birthday. Against initial family resistance, Josef enrolled in an industrial arts school to study

How Photography Gives an Account of Itself

The Wirsching Collection as a Nation of Photography

FIG. 1 Nirmala 1938, Bombay Talkies, d. Franz Osten 35 mm Negative (detail)

JWA/ACP: 2019.01.0082

Devika Rani and Maya Devi rehearse a tracking shot with dialogue.

A riveting photograph in the Wirsching collection is a behind-the-scenes picture of the shooting of Savitri (1937). The image could be read as a document of a production process; the caption used in the 2017 exhibition of these photographs asked us to notice the clapboard, microphone, lighting assistant and reflector.1 But a gaze drawn to particularities would notice a different and dizzying configuration of elements: chalk and watercolour, board and canvas, metal and leaf, rope and cloth, light and shade—a dense profusion that disables our attempt to turn sense into significance (figure 2). The canvas, with its watercolour and its radiating support, evokes the dedicated space for the representation of a distinct reality from which everyone is alienated: the actor in make-up, the crew around him, as well as the viewers of this photograph: an allegory of the cinematic itself, perhaps, provided we recognize that this allegory is only one element of a more confounding phantasmagoria of compacted elements in which humans and images, media and matter, occupy the same space. 2

Yet, formal patterns, abstractions, concepts and symbols gradually reassert themselves. The paired elements are noticeable: actor Ashok Kumar, in flesh and blood, and the figure on horseback that he is painting on canvas, both in profile, both partially obscured; the two kinds of hats on the heads of the production crew members that mirror each other, the graphical matches of the canvas and the reflector. Numbers and words (in varying fonts and sizes), painting and photography, language and image: all are brought together in this “spatial inventory,” this “warehousing of nature” (Kracauer 1993, 435). In director Franz Osten and cinematographer Josef Wirsching’s native Germany a decade earlier, in 1927, Siegfried Kracauer would use precisely those phrases in his coruscating critique of the flood of photographs that were being published in Germany’s illustrated newspapers, of which one of the most famous, the Berliner illustrierte Nachtausgabe, also makes a

FIG. 2 Savitri

1937, Bombay Talkies, d. Franz Osten

35 mm Negative

JWA/ACP: 2019.01.0085

cameo appearance in this very collection of images. The flood of images disabled contextual understanding. Kracauer argued that if photography’s warehousing of “disintegrated elements” indicated a total alienation from nature, if spatial inventories and temporal inventories (in the form of historicism) conspire against an adequate understanding of our shared reality, it was incumbent on us to establish “the provisional status of all configurations,” even perhaps to find the right order of elements out of the profusion of images produced by photography (435–36).

It is the aim of this essay to extrapolate this notion of configurations and apply it to this collection, but without the aim of establishing the “right order” of elements (the individual photographs) in the collection. The latter is a curatorial task. Instead, I want to suggest that this collection amounts to something like an expression by photography of itself, “giving an account of itself,” in Edward Steichen’s words (Stimson 2006, 24). There are good reasons to think along these lines. The collection belonged to Josef Wirsching, a German cinematographer who moved to India in the 1930s and helped establish, along with fellow German Franz Osten and the UFA-trained couple Himansu Rai and Devika Rani, one of the iconic studios of pre-Independence Indian cinema, Bombay Talkies. However, it is difficult to find a singular vision stamped across this collection. After all, Wirsching himself is the subject of many of these photographs, alongside Osten, Rai, Rani and others. Further, the collection contains a remarkable diversity of genres of photography: event photography, candid pictures, publicity and production stills, images taken during location scouting that could easily be imagined in the photo-illustrated newspapers of the time in India, as well as documentary images of the production of films at Bombay Talkies. So, it would be a mistake to attribute all the photographs in this collection to a single vision.

FIG. 3 Nicky, the Wirschings’ pet dog

35 mm Negative

JWA/ACP: 2019.01.0047

Nevertheless, the search for an idea that might encapsulate the collection is tempting, and we could also imagine this collection as expressive of the nation of photography 3 Taken together, the photographs embody and envision new forms of post-nationalist belonging under the aegis of a film studio, at a time when India was moving inexorably towards independence from the British Empire. A remarkably “cosmopolitan crew” at Bombay Talkies drew together, to paraphrase Debashree Mukherjee, German Expressionism, Art Deco, Bauhaus, Bengali reformist novels, Hindustani classical music, Orientalist adaptations of Sanskrit plays and more in their productions of social reformist films imbued with the spirit of nationalism (Mukherjee 2018, 57). As we shift our gaze from one photograph to the next in this collection, we realize that we are gazing at images pertaining to the workings of a film studio that brought together Indians and Europeans in a contingent and provisional community, even as the images themselves are inescapably informed by the forces that shaped photography in the context of empire (on which more below).

Jacques Rancière reminds us that photography has to “be grasped within a wider form of visibility and a wider plot of intelligibility” (Rancière 2009, 36). What is that wider form of visibility? What makes this collection intelligible? It goes without saying that cinema is indispensable to such questions. These images were produced at a time when cinema’s “sensuous incitements” and provocations were of thematic concern within the movies, as well as central to the contexts around them.4 Films such as Achhut Kanya (1936), Jawani ki Hawa (1935), or Nirmala (1938) tracked private desire’s spillover into the public realm as a matter of social negotiation between modernizing conceptions of romance and traditional worldviews of fate, social order and hierarchy. The reformist “social film” in which Bombay Talkies specialized, a genre defined by its topical concerns and present-day time period, visualized and narrativized contemporary preoccupations. At the level of industry and institution, studios like Bombay Talkies, with their highly visible workforce, continuity scripts and divisions of labour, emblematized the aspiration towards a viable national film industry (Mukherjee 2015; Mukherjee 2020). More generally, politics in South Asia was itself a theatrics of appearances—of mass processions and rallies that were in turn recorded

How Photography Gives an Account of Itself

The Knot

A Scholar and an Angel Unravel Izzat (1937)

FIG. 1 Izzat

1937, Bombay Talkies, d. Franz Osten

35 mm Negative

JWA/ACP: 2019.01.0008

This piece is in the form of an indirect exchange between two voices. The first voice is that of a film scholar who speculates on a few images, using visual and written evidence to make her case. The second voice appears to belong to an angel of history, as inscribed in a bound volume found in the office of a now-deceased Senior Clerk at the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority, along with a collection of other objects recovered from the 2005 Mumbai floods.

All-seeing possessors of perfect memory, angels exist outside human scales of meaning, comprehension and compassion. In contrast to a scholar’s loquacity, angels speak infrequently, so what follows is a rare document. The past, present and future often collapse in an angel’s eternal vision, which makes their speech challenging to decipher. Nor is it always easy to discern who the angels are speaking about when they speak, as they mention proper names only when it pleases them. After considerable research and debate, historians now largely agree that the angel here is referring to the same images as those discussed by the scholar. Both are talking about the husband and wife team of Himansu Rai and Devika Rani, who established the Bombay Talkies studio in colonial India in 1934. Like the scholar, the angel appears to be preoccupied with the company’s production of Izzat, directed by Franz Osten in 1937.

Some historians continue to contest this claim.

FACING PAGE

ABOVE

FIG. 2a Izzat

1937, Bombay Talkies, d. Franz Osten 35 mm Negative

JWA/ACP: 2019.01.0079

A photographic series in which Devika Rani and Ashok Kumar prepare for a scene under the direction of Franz Osten. The scene shows Devika Rani being bound to a tree by Ashok Kumar.

BELOW

FIG. 2b Izzat

1937, Bombay Talkies, d. Franz Osten 35 mm Negative

JWA/ACP: 2019.01.0031

Scholar: In this essay, I discuss the function of gesture and desire in Himansu Rai’s Izzat (Osten, 1937), by thinking about the bodies of the film’s characters in relation to the bodies of the film’s actors. My analysis is inspired by a few photographic stills from the Josef Wirsching collection of Izzat ’s shoot in and around Bombay. Wirsching’s locational photographs accompanying this essay document scenes that preceded, succeeded and, on occasion, potentially overlapped with shots that appear in Izzat (for which Wirsching was the cinematographer), allowing us glimpses into the gestures and postures that were rehearsed and eventually adopted by the actors in the film. In most of the images, actors are taking their positions in the profilmic space. I follow Tom Gunning’s definition of the profilmic as “everything placed in front of the camera to be filmed” (1994, 19) because it opens up the process-oriented nature of something that is to be filmed. It makes visible the connections and subtle distinctions between the gesture and placement of actors in a film’s setting, as opposed to the image that appears projected on-screen and bound by a film frame. It brings into relief the connections and gaps between a film’s profilmic and onscreen spaces by giving the former its own density and significance. In other words, Wirsching’s cinematography in the film Izzat and his production stills from the shoot convey overlapping but non-identical scenarios.

FIG. 2c Izzat

1937, Bombay Talkies, d. Franz Osten 35 mm Negative JWA/ACP: 2019.01.0080

Wirsching’s photographs of Izzat ’s shoot capture the environmental space reproduced in the film, but are temporally adjacent rather than simultaneous to the filmed shots. With a critical reading that oscillates between Wirsching’s photographic images of the film’s profilmic spaces and the film’s narrative, I elaborate on the “filmed spaces” (Jaikumar 2019) of Izzat to provide an account of the casual as well as curated relational dynamics of the production company’s creative team. Further, I argue that while these photographs

A German Eye on Indian Beauty

Josef Wirsching’s Portrayal of the Female Star in Hindi Film

FIG. 1 Jeevan Naiya 1936, Bombay Talkies, d. Franz Osten

Gelatin Silver Print, 294 x 243 mm

JWA/ACP: 2019.01.0035

Devika Rani wears a stylish tasselled sari in this portrait photo, lit to emphasize mood.

Josef Wirsching (1903–1967) spent over half his life in India, becoming a key figure in the history of Indian cinema. Trained in Germany, he helped to shape the aesthetics of Indian cinema, particularly in his use of exotic and dreamlike images, revealing a romantic side to his understanding of his craft.

Wirsching clearly loved India, capturing the everyday alongside the staged images of films presented in this collection. His photos show him and his fellow Germans, including Franz Osten, as well as the stars and scenes from the films they worked on. These reveal what Wirsching saw as the essence of the image captured on film, presenting us with stills of the greatest stars in Hindi cinema, both on screen and off. Cast and crew members of the studio are seen on the sets, indicating their working relations, whether engaged in technical matters or relaxing. Many of the photographs are staged but they still reveal what was going on behind the scenes.

In this essay, I connect the stills with the films and explore how Wirsching created the defining images of three of the greatest stars of Indian cinema and ideals of Indian beauty and femininity: Devika Rani (Devika Rani Chaudhuri, 1908–94), Madhubala (born Mumtaz Jahan Begum Dehlavi, 1933–69) and Meena Kumari (born Mahjabeen Bano, 1933–72). Wirsching’s dramatic style of shooting the stars, with his Expressionist use of light and shadow, made their faces iconic, capturing their idealized beauty, which helped smooth their on-screen roles as disruptive women, and their off-screen, sometimes scandalous, star images. Their films are mostly romances featuring strong, often remote, women alongside powerless men.

FIG. 12 Dil Apna aur Preet Parai 1960, Mahal Pictures, d. Kishore Sahu 35 mm Negative

JWA/ACP: 2020.01.0001

Josef and Charlotte Wirsching play walkon parts in the cabaret song “Itni badi mehfil aur ik dil” (I have just one heart on offer in this large gathering).

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FIG. 13 Madhubala

Unknown Photographer; Ram Siddhartha’s Collection (stamp on verso)

Gelatin Silver Print, 1950, 118 x 86 mm

Courtesy: Rahaab Allana Collection

In Kangan (1939), Wirsching shot Leela Chitnis, famed as a great beauty and the first Indian star to advertise Lux soap. Shortly afterwards, Wirsching was interned in a camp for German nationals. R. D. Pareenja took over as cameraman in Wirsching’s absence, working on films such as Kismet (1943), which has the iconic nationalist song “Dur hato ae duniyawalon, Hindustan hamara hai.” There followed many upheavals in the studio: Himansu Rai died in 1940 and soon a breakaway group, including Sashadhar Mukherjee and Ashok Kumar, left Bombay Talkies to form Filmistan in 1943. In 1945, Devika Rani married the Russian artist Svetoslav Roerich and quit the studio, after which Ashok Kumar and Savak Vacha returned to Bombay Talkies as producers in 1947.

Madhubala

After the dust settled, Bombay Talkies produced Mahal (1949), where Wirsching created a strong Expressionist Gothic style. The film’s melodrama and Expressionism link to the Gothic in literature which explores emotion, the anti-rational and non-scientific to oppose or haunt the rational and the modern as part of an eighteenth-century reaction to the Enlightenment (Eisner 1969; Carroll 1990; Dwyer 2011).

The film has a striking absence of religion and any moral code, showing Gothic features including disguise, mistaken identities, feudal authority and the haunted house. The romance contests feudalism as the daughter of the gardener seeks to be the mistress of the house, enchants the hero by suggesting they were a couple in an earlier birth and makes ghostly connections, leading him to ignore his wife. The camera focuses on the house itself, its clock, its staircases and swinging chandeliers, while the ghostly heroine moves through its underground passages.

The mise-en-scène, particularly the lighting of the film, disrupts any attempt at realism. Darkness and moonlit shots create a dream world, its ghostliness intensified by the deep field of vision. Even at the film’s end, when a trial reveals the hoax, many features are left unexplained, such as why in the song “Aayega aanewale” the chandelier is swinging, or whence the portrait of the earlier owner who looks like the

Between the Studio and the World Built Sets and Outdoor Locations in the Films of Bombay Talkies

FIG. 1 Vachan 1938, Bombay Talkies, d. Franz Osten

35 mm Negative

JWA/ACP: 2019.01.0084

R. D. Pareenja under a black camera blind during a daytime shoot in the lawns of the Bombay Talkies studio.

Cinema is a form that forces us to question distinctions between the natural world and a world made by humans. Film studios manufacture natural environments with as much finesse as they fabricate built environments. Even when shooting outdoors, film crews alter and choreograph their surroundings in order to produce artful visions of nature. This historical proclivity has led theorists such as Jennifer Fay to name cinema as the “aesthetic practice of the Anthropocene,” that is, an art form that intervenes in and interferes with the natural world, mirroring humankind’s calamitous impact on the planet since the Industrial Revolution (2018, 4). In what follows, my concern is with thinking about how the indoor and the outdoor, the world of the studio and the many worlds outside, are co-constituted through the act of filming. I am interested in how we can think of a mutual exertion of spatial influence and the co-production of place and space by multiple actors.

The most ambitious film studios and filmmakers of pre-Independence India were intent on crafting a new kind of cinema for an emergent nation. What was this collectivity that comprised the nation? Who were its people? And what did it look like? Bombay Talkies studio, set up by a group of Bengalis who had spent formative years of their adulthood in Europe, took up this project of imagining an ideal nation space through a series of filmic experiments with built architecture and actually-existing geographies. Framed by the camera, nature becomes a set of values (purity, regeneration, unpredictability), as does the city (freedom, anonymity, danger). The Wirsching collection allows us to examine these values and their construction by keeping in view both the filmed narrative as well as parafilmic images of production. By examining the physical and imaginative worlds that were manufactured in the early films of Bombay Talkies—built sets, painted backdrops, carefully calibrated outdoor locations—I pursue some meanings of “place” that unfold outwards from the film frame.

of communal riots, the ambiguous nature of the built urban sets served to open up the meaning of an unspecified violent “disturbance” (gadbad, maar-kaat) to render riots as a generic feature of the modern Indian city. Architecture, off-screen sound, and verbal cues combine to make Hanuman Lane a cinematic metonym of urban experience, one that was increasingly marked by violent mass agitations.

Bombay Talkies had three sound stages, or soundproofed studio floors. Figure 6 provides an insider’s glimpse of the use of indoor sets to create a filmic milieu of lived life. This densely crowded image gives us a synoptic view of the elaborate assemblage of the mechanical and the manual, the technological and the human that constitutes the world of film production. Occupying the bulk of the frame is a built set of a terrace, with a gazebo structure wherein Kishore and Renu enjoy their final reunion. The film ends with the song “Hum qaidi” (We are prisoners) as the couple garland each other with flowers and reiterate that love is a consensual bond of commitment that arrests lovers in a mutual form of capture.4 The terrace set is built on a raised platform decorated with potted plants and hanging creepers. Lights illuminate the painted background and the protagonists and a system of water sprinklers overhead produces artificial rain. A thick water hose and sturdy metal chains vertically cut through the image, highlighting the tenuous and temporary nature of this environment held aloft by pulleys and links. This photograph shows the filming of a make-believe world, but as Siegfried Kracauer remarked about his own visit to UFA studios, “there is nothing false about the materials: wood, metal, glass, clay. One could also make real things out of them…” (1995, 286)

One of the reasons why images like this strike us as remarkable is that they starkly confront us with the many spaces of cinema that were never intended to be filmed. Two catwalks cut horizontally across the very top of the photo, designed for nimble human bodies to adjust lights, water faucets and pulleys, lowering and raising, turning on or off the machinery behind the illusion. These are spaces thought of as the space of production, not the space of representation. The objects, equipment and humans that inhabit these spaces are similarly outside the purview of a filmic canon of images, a history of the visible. Production stills in the Wirsching collection pull these unintended spaces and bodies into a history of cinema.

The film crew is concentrated on the lower right of the image, huddled behind the camera, which is facing the characters and the painted backdrop on the wall behind them. This painted backdrop, visible on the left edge of the photo, depicts an aerial view of multistoreyed residential buildings arranged in a grid-like pattern. It features prominently in several scenes in Bhabhi, noticeable through windows and on terraces. Based on a photograph taken by Josef Wirsching as a location reference (according to the Wirsching family), the meticulously painted backdrop creates a sense of spatial depth and grounds the film in a recognizable architectural milieu that signifies modern urban India. It is both particular and general, as the urban vista does not carry any specific architectural landmark

Between the Studio and the World

Re-Visioning Bombay Talkies: Restoring Parallaxes to an Image

A Conversation with Virchand Dharamsey

FIG. 1 Achhut Kanya 1936, Bombay Talkies, d. Franz Osten

Lobby Card (Gelatin Silver Print), 241 x 305 mm JWA/ACP: 2020.01.0043

This publicity still showcases Wirsching’s artistry with lighting design. In the shot are Devika Rani (left) and Kamta Prasad (right).

Kaushik Bhaumik talks with Virchand Dharamsey, a renowned historian of Indian cinema, about Bombay Talkies and its fortunes. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Prologue

Kaushik Bhaumik: Josef Wirsching is always talked about in terms of his connection with Bombay Talkies (henceforth BT) and then, over time, with Pakeezah (Kamal Amrohi, 1972). But I would say that there is another strand of history in which we can place Josef Wirsching, which is a very long history of people coming from outside India, especially from Europe, who have had a very direct connection with Indian filmmaking, production, acting and things like that. So, maybe the first thing will just be to place Wirsching in that context of Europeans and Americans who worked in South Asia in the silent period.

Virchand Dharamsey: The first Indian filmmaker who came [here] from America was Suchet Singh.1 He came to India and decided to just see what was going on and get some funding to form a company. He arrived with a cameraperson, Baron von Rayvon, and the latter’s wife, Dorothy Kingdon. 2 She was quite a well-known actor at that point of time. So, these were the first people with an American background to enter Indian cinema. We can also gain an insight into this period through Madan Theatres’s film Bilwamangal (Rustomji Dotiwala, 1919), which is now available. 3 We do not actually know who was involved in the making of this film, maybe [the Italian director] Eugenio de Liguoro 4 or someone else, but that’s the film that is available and was surely shot by Europeans.

FIG. 2 Aga Khan III and Bombay Talkies Shareholders

1936 35 mm Negative JWA/ACP: 2019.01.0051

Sir Sultan Mohammed Shah, the third Aga Khan, with Bombay Talkies shareholders at the premiere of the double bill Mother and Always Tell Your Wife. Prominently featured in a black suit is Rai Bahadur Chuni Lall, chief representative of Bombay Talkies’ managing agents and father of the famous music composer Madan Mohan.

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FIG. 3 Nirmala

1938, Bombay Talkies, d. Franz Osten 35 mm Negative JWA/ACP: 2019.01.0016

Himansu Rai and others on the balcony of the Bombay Talkies studio office in Malad, overlooking a nighttime outdoor shoot.

KB: It could have been Eugenio de Liguoro.

VD: [The French director] Camille Le Grand was active between 1921 and 1922, as a cameraperson and director. 5 Charles Creed, too, started with the Madans as a cameraperson (with J. J. Madan’s Nurjehan in 1923). He mastered sound technology with the advent of the talkies, going on to become chief technician with Shree Bharat Lakshmi Pictures in the talkie period.6 So, we have the Europeans and Americans in the beginning.

KB: Let’s speak of [the Italian cameraperson] T. Marconi.

VD: [The Italian writer] Count Angelo de Gubernatis had written a play called Savitri, which was subsequently performed in Bombay in 1883 by a Parsi theatre company.7 A film based on it, Savitri (Giorgio Mannini, 1923), was made in 1922–23.8 According to local publicity, it was a co-production between the Madans9 and an Italian company, but the Italians have never said anything about the Madans. It’s doubtful whether the Madans were really involved in the production of the film. Anyway, Marconi was around to observe the filming of Savitri in Rome and he became really interested in India. He came to India subsequently but we have no records of which films he was involved with—the first film for which we have a record of his name is Kapal Kundala, in as late as 1929—because the Madans never gave out any publicity, hardly any publicity. 10

There is an interesting similarity between Wirsching and Marconi. Marconi also stayed in India through the Second World War and, because Italy was at war with Britain, he was in a POW camp, like Wirsching. After the war, Marconi continued to work for a

long, long period in India. So it is interesting that both Wirsching and Marconi were from Axis countries during World War II and then lived for a long period in India.

I. The Founding of Bombay Talkies and Careers of Certain Key Personnel

KB: And so it was with Karma (John Hunt, 1933) that Himansu Rai came to Bombay and Rai Bahadur Chuni Lall was the person really managing the show.

VD: There are two very important persons in the early history of Bombay Talkies. One is Chuni Lall and the second is Richard Temple. I think these two people played a very important role. And then there was Framroze E. Dinshaw, who gave them some land he owned to set up a studio. Before that, in 1934–35, was the period when Maneklal Patel of Krishna Film Company had a very big studio in Andheri. 11 Himansu Rai wanted to buy it but Maneklal said no, i.e. he was not interested in selling the studio. And that’s why they started looking for another place. Finally, they found Dinshaw’s property, including its bungalow. I think the bungalow that we see [in the photographs], the Bombay Talkies office quarters, used to be Dinshaw’s.

KB: So that is then how Bombay Talkies came in. VD: And then they had to place a big advertisement in newspapers inviting applications for the post of the actor. They had a heroine [Devika Rani] but what about the hero? So a big ad was placed. And there were quite a large number of entries, I don’t remember exactly how many. Najmul Hussain was selected from this pool. That was the first film he applied for and he was selected.

KB: So now what we can do is have a look at the photographs and talk about some key personalities.

VD: And another thing before that: among the photographs that are available here, you can see they feature a lot of Devika Rani. So one can understand the importance of Devika Rani for BT and Wirsching. But to begin with, there are two people I can talk about, Sashadhar Mukherjee and Savak Vacha. Now, both Sashadhar and Vacha joined as assistants to soundman Len Hartley. Vacha, I think, had a background in technology, too. So these are the first people

Re-Visioning Bombay Talkies: Restoring Parallaxes to an Image

Sudhir Mahadevan is Associate Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Priya Jaikumar is Professor of Cinematic Arts in the Division of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California.

Rachel Dwyer is Professor Emerita of Indian Cultures and Cinema at SOAS, University of London, and Professorial Research Associate at the SOAS South Asia Institute (SSAI).

Debashree Mukherjee is Associate Professor of film and media in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University in New York.

Kaushik Bhaumik is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.

Virchand Dharamsey is an eminent researcher and scholar of early Indian cinema and author of the filmography of Indian silent cinema published in Suresh Chabria (ed.) Light of Asia: Indian Silent Cinema, 1912-1934.

Eleanor Halsall is a film historian whose current research focuses on German film studios as part of the STUDIOTEC project.

About the Josef Wirsching Archive

The Josef Wirsching Archive is managed by his family in Goa, meticulously preserved by his late son Wolfgang Peter Wirsching, and maintained by his grandson Georg Wirsching. This book is in conversation with the travelling exhibition ‘A Cinematic Imagination: Josef Wirsching and the Bombay Talkies,’ co-curated by Debashree Mukherjee and Rahaab Allana with creative collaborator Georg Wirsching, and shown at the Adil Shah Palace (Goa, 2017) and the Lalit Kala Akademi (Chennai, 2019). The photographs in this book are from the Josef Wirsching Archive/ Alkazi Collection of Photography.

other titles of interest

The Uprising of 1857

Edited by Rosie Llewellyn-Jones

Artist-Photographer in 19th-century India

Deepali Dewan and Deborah Hutton

Allegory and Illusion

Early Portrait

Photography

from South Asia

Christopher Pinney, Beth Citron and Rahaab Allana

The Alkazi Collection of Photography Printed in China www.mapinpub.com www.alkazifoundation.org