Colour, Scope, and the Long Romance with Place: How Indian Cinema Learned to Dazzle
Colour, Scope, and the Long Romance with Place: How Indian Cinema Learned to Dazzle Cinema in India did not turn technicolor overnight. It took experiments, failures, experiments again, economic gambits, changing audience appetites, a star system that adapted, the diffusion of processing labs and prints, improvements in theatres — and an irresistible hunger for images of place. From the grainy experiments of the 1930s to the widescreen epics and foreign-location musicals of the 1960s and 1970s, Indian filmmakers gradually learned how to use colour, scope and place to create cinematic spectacle that could stand as a mass event. This essay recounts the technical, economic and cultural story in full: the first colour experiments, the slow diffusion of different colour stocks, the arrival and trials of CinemaScope and 70 mm, the strategic use of Kashmir and foreign cities, the star stories (Raj Kapoor, Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand, Shammi Kapoor), regional adoption, preservation headaches, a...