In Paris for the holidays? This Bollywood exhibition is a must see

In , and Shammi Kapoor sing, dance and fall in love under the watchful eye of the Almost sixty years later, just a few short paces away under the shade of that same monument, the Musée Quai Branly has opened an entitled . With over 1,500 films produced every year, India is now the world’s leading of films.

Celebrating a century of the Indian film industry, the exhibition spans roots in the performing arts, travelling and the of the 1920s to the Bollywood blockbusters of the 21st century, complimented a cultural calendar of traditional dance performances, (choreographed by Mahina Khanum) culinary events and DJ nights.

More than 200 works including , shadow figures, costumes and photographs track the evolution of Bollywood. “The idea was to create a dialogue between cinema and art, to consider as a work of art,” explains Hélène Kessous, an anthropologist specialising in Indian culture and co curator of the Branly exhibition.

She first fell in love with Bollywood while travelling through in 2003 when she came across a screening of . Preparation for the exhibition began in April of 2020 and uses the collection as a starting point. To wit, the tour opens with a 19th Century temple painting from from the museum archives. Pieces were also loaned from a France based private collector, London’s Victoria & Albert Museum (Rajasthani jewellery), the Louvre Abu Dhabi (16th Century sandstone jalis) and some bought items that will join Branly’s permanent collection, including angarakhas and a 20th century wedding dress, the train of which required ten people to lift into place.

“It was very easy to [curate an exhibition and cultural program] linked with cinema because [in India] cinema is everywhere and everything is cinema: dance, music, cooking,” says Kessous. “We started with and history, which both combined in [Indian] cinema.” At the beginning of the 20th century, India was a British colony divided by , regional and religions and films needed to reach this vast market.

To meet this challenge, and in the context of nascent nation rebuilding, the first films went back to India’s roots, embodying historical gods and heroes. The exhibition is immersive, with ‘ ’ rooms where clips of Vijayakumari dancing as Cholama Devi in 1973’s and singing 1993’s play in loops.

The journey spans the narrative arts that preceded cinema with performances by storytellers, shadow theatres and a replica of the ‘magic lantern’, a metal and wood projector with glass slides that was travelled from village to village, breathing life into stories of Hindu mythology. There are original paintings by Raja Ravi Varma (1848 1906) and lithographs from Dadasaheb Phalke (1870 1944) whose lithography was used to create India’s first silent films.

We see clips from early aughts blockbuster films such as and , TV series such as 1988’s , garments, artefacts and larger than life cut outs of Amitabh Bachchan—minus one Mr Shah Rukh Khan. “The most challenging part of the exhibition was [procuring] the footage and getting the rights for all the films every second of footage or music otherwise we could have [included] more movies!” says Kessous, recounting a cut out of that had to be removed after opening because of a rights issue.

“It was so difficult and the rights were so expensive that we had to make drastic choices.” Kessous also laments on being unable to explore regional industries in greater depth, noting that in France, the diaspora is mainly from and Sri Lanka. “I would have loved to include Kollywood and Tollywood, but there simply was not enough space!” Personally speaking, one of the most eye opening revelations was that less than a year after the Lumière brothers first held film screenings in Paris in 1896, the arrived in Bombay.

“Paris is a very strong cinephile city and can have a negative idea of Bollywood,” says Kessous. “It’s exactly what is forbidden in [French] cinematic language: the super zooms, [a character] looking directly at the camera. But this is what I love, when Shak Rukh Khan is looking directly at me! So I think people have the wrong idea.

For me, it was very important to cite that in the exhibition and to show how beautiful [Bollywood] is, how qualitative it is and that we have to accept that it’s another cinematic language.” “In 1896 when cinema arrived in Paris, India was not behind. India, at the same time, was doing amazing things in cinema so it was important to show that.”.