As a result of this foresight, the film’s print is today well archived at the National Film Archive of India (NFAI), Pune. He shot this film in Pathe colour, with the film processed at the Pathe Lab Inc.
The cinematographer of Guide, Fali Mistry, was one of the few who made the transition from black and white to colour effectively.
It was also the first Hindi film to be digitally coloured, released in 2004 to criticism for swapping the depth of black and white with the photogenic clashes of retro colour. Cinematographer RD Mathur would spend up to 8 hours to light a single shot, using headlights of trucks and reflectors. Syed included Belgian glass, gold statues, and formidable domes. The production design that was led by art director M. Opulence is synonymous with this film, almost ten years in the making - the budget of a song would exceed that of entire films. With Belgian chandeliers, expensive carpets, hundreds of extras, and an ailing Meena Kumari holding it together, this film produced the seeds that bore fruit in the modern Indian visual vocabulary.
He had died while the film was being shot over two decades - from its muhurat in 1956 to its release in 1972. Pakeezah was shot in part by the German cinematographer and regular collaborator with director Kamal Amrohi, Josef Wirsching. When Shammi Kapoor walked out of the interval during the premiere in Maratha Mandir, he had screamed, “Movie ka hero kidhar hai?” When people pointed out that Guru Dutt was in the lobby, he screamed back, “Arey woh nahin re, Murthy kidhar hai?”įew films have had such a lasting image-based legacy - the turrets of the brothel, with dancers twirling on them in the background, that we can see reflected in Devdas’ ‘Kaahe Ched Mohe’, the fountain of water to drench the hair that was also used in Devdas and Bobby Jasoos, the pistachio green walls that has become emblematic of the kotha, seen most recently in A Suitable Boy. While the Murthy-Dutt collaboration has provided some lasting images in Aar Paar (1954) and Pyaasa (1957), their final collaboration, the commercial failure Kaagaz Ke Phool - India’s first cinemascope film - ushered in a new era of filming. Guru Dutt’s collaboration with his cinematographer VK Murthy - who shot all of Dutt’s films since his sophomore attempt Jaal (1952) - set in the disillusioning world of movies, gives them every possible excuse to use beams of light, stark silhouettes, harsh backlights, soft facelights, and deep shadows for maximum drama. Dilip Gupta, the cinematographer, studied in the United States of America in the early 1930s, attending the New York institute of photography, and later working at Paramount Studios with legends like Greta Garbo and Clark Gable. Madhumati, one of the earliest films to deal with reincarnation, uses shadows effectively in scenes - hiding half of the face in darkness, intermittently blazing light on the other half with lightning strikes. The reason so many actresses wore print-saris in the black-and-white era is precisely to create a sense of visual tension in a world with no colour. It is true that black and white accentuates drama, by hardening shadows and silhouettes. Kapoor plays the homeless tramp who falls in love, and through light showers that look like ribbons floating in the air, the city of then-Bombay looks like the dream that every person dreams to be in - hardened by labour, softened by glory. Radhu Karmakar who has shot all of Raj Kapoor’s movies from Awara (1951) to Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985) lights both the artificial sets and on-set locations with equal control. The black umbrella and thick rain was immortalized as love in the song ‘Pyaar Hua Ikraar Hua’ from this film. What we consider beautiful is a question of instinct and nostalgia. At Film Companion we are celebrating the beauty in the movies by selecting 30 of the most beautiful Hindi movies of all time.