Sandalwood Cinema Street Posters
Indian cinema is internationally renowned. Bangalore’s Kannada-language Sandalwood cinema industry is among the most notorious, hosting three box-office hits in 2022. Since 1971, Ramachandraiah, a printer, has been running a small print shop in Bangalore with his son, Raju. Their shop, Sir Venkateshwara Litho & Printing, is in the heart and center of Bangalore’s neighborhood. Together, they create beautiful zinc lithographic movie posters that are put up all over the city. They copy directly from the official movie posters and create their own. These posters have bold colors with hand-drawn images that express the essence of Kannada cinema. These posters are passionate about putting India’s movie culture on an accessible stage. Vibrant hand-drawn typography gives these posters an extra pop and is well-appreciated by enthusiastic cinema fans. Broad strokes resemble the same power of German expressionism and communist propaganda.
Raju is the shop’s resident artist, creating all the wonderfully drawn celebrities and typography. He sits at a drafting table on the sidewalk with a thin, large piece of paper. He traces a blown-up movie still and eyeballs the design while also adding his elements. It took him only a few hours to draw each poster. It is then passed down to mass production and eventually processed into a lithographic machine. Dozens of movie posters are done each week, costing pennies to print them. Guerilla promoters plastered These posters at night, ignoring signs to “stick no bills here.” These posters are illegal and aren’t considered local art but urban graffiti. Information urges viewers to “watch today” at their local “talkie” (theaters that provide sound). 70-foot posters of admired actors and actresses are broadcasted all over building sites, highways, overpasses, and bus stops, begging for the public's attention. Street cinema posters are translated into Southern Indian languages such as Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Tegual, Hindi, and even sometimes English.
In 2019, the print shop shut down due to the mass closure of many single-screen cinemas across India. This marked the end of a long and proficient era. These posters captured the distinctive culture of Southern Indian cinema in a way that many movie posters worldwide could not. These movie posters will permanently preserve a small, affluent part of Bangalore's audiences’ love for Sandalwod’s film industry forever. Unprovoked and overwhelmingly energetic, these posters embodied the passion and immediacy of Indian cinema.
