Bombay Talkies, India’s hugely innovative production house, was founded in 1934 by the pioneering actor-director Himansu Rai and his wife, actress Devika Rani, who took charge of the studio after Rai’s death in 1940.
Josef Wirsching (1903-1967) was a German cinematographer whose deep association with Indian cinema began when he worked with German filmmaker/ photographer Franz Osten (1876-1956) on Prem Sanyas ( The Light of Asia , 1925), an Indo-European film on the Buddha, which was shot on location in Jaipur and other cities. The refined vision and technical acumen of the Wirsching-Osten duo would become integral to the success of Bombay Talkies.
Wirsching settled in India and worked in over 10 films with Bombay Talkies, at a time when the studio maintained high artistic standards, with its sound and echo-proof stages, laboratories, editing rooms and preview theatre, setting production benchmarks of the time.
Lyrical aesthetic
This unique German collaboration with the rising Indian film industry is explored in an exhibition titled A Cinematic Imagination: Joseph Wirsching and the Bombay Talkies that’s on at Serendipity Arts Festival, in collaboration with the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts in Goa now. Featuring 130 prints being showcased for the first time, the exhibition is co-curated with author/scholar Debashree Mukherjee, with scenography by Sudeep Chaudhuri, and enabled by none other than the Josef Wirsching estate and family based in the city.
Devika Rani and Najam-ul-Hussain in Jawani ki Hawa, 1935, Bombay Talkies
An important and bold film made by Bombay Talkies was Achhut Kanya (1936) on the taboo relationship between an untouchable girl and a high-caste Brahmin. Wirsching’s passion for his craft is evident not just in the filma’s cinematography but also in the behind-the-scenes informal documentation of lead actors such as Ashok Kumar and Sashadhar Mukherjee, as well as in the large pool of workers — spot boys, continuity script readers, sound recordists, labourers and artisans.
After Independence, once Bombay Talkies began to dissolve, Wirsching became affiliated with Kamal Pictures, shooting the blockbuster films Mahal (1949), Dil Apna aur Preet Parai (1960) and the cult-classic romance Pakeezah for Kamal Amrohi. Over 10 years in the making, Pakeezah was released in 1972, but Wirsching passed away before then.
At the time Wirsching-Osten were shooting The Light of Asia , the 1925 Leipzig Fair launched a camera that permanently altered photography: a still photography camera that had been modified to take 35 mm movie film. The new camera, Leica (an acronym of Leitz Camera), was created in 1913 by Oskar Barnack (1879-1936), a German optical engineer/ industrial designer, who was Research Director at Ernst Leitz company. The Leica was the first to make 35 mm truly viable, the world’s most popular and enduring film format.
Devika Rani and Kamta Prasad in 'Izzat'
Most of Wirsching’s archived works testify to this technical revolution in still photography. The Leica also transformed modern photojournalism, captivating its major practitioners by enabling a new, stark yet lyrical aesthetic that is seen, for instance, in Henri Cartier-Bresson’s images of India, or Robert Capa’s images of war.
This exhibition spotlights long-established Indo-German collaborations in photography and printmaking, which examine the colonial encounter and its effects on different sub-continental communities and classes. For instance, in 1883 the Vajifdars of EOS Studio (later renamed Bombay Photographic Company) on Bombay’s Kalbadevi Road had a steady partnership with
German artist Karl Koening.
The German photographer/ studio owner Philip Adolphe Klier (1845-1911) spent decades in British Burma, creating unforgettable portraits of the region’s royalty and commoners, and its traditional architecture.
In the late 19th century, German printing technology was in use in presses at Ghatkopar, Kurla, Lonavla, etc., to revolutionise the replication and circulation of Ravi Varma’s oleographs and chromolithographs. The new medium would result in an audacious melding of Indian classical and folk content with Western naturalism — some of the printed oleographs had Indian gods superimposed upon famous European structures such as the medieval Rheinstein Castle. As noted by art historian Jyotindra Jain, the images use edifices around Lake Geneva as suitable palaces for Krishna: Alpine landscapes are transformed into Vrindavan.
Fresh perspective
Another cross-border connection, other than the pioneering German architect and designer in Indore, Eckart Muthesius (1904-1989), was the Moravian-born scholar-curator/ art historian Stella Kramrisch (1898-1993). At the University of Vienna she studied Sanskrit while earning her doctorate in Art History. In 1919 she was invited to lecture at Oxford University, where she met Rabindranath Tagore and accepted his invitation to teach at Kala Bhavan in Santiniketan.
Kramrisch reached India in 1920 and taught at Santiniketan till 1923, moving on to become the first Professor of Indian Art History at Calcutta University.
At the behest of Kramrisch and Swiss Expressionist painter Johannes Itten, in 1922 the Indian Society of Oriental Art organised a major exhibition in Calcutta to showcase Bauhaus works along with Modern Indian artists such as Nandalal Bose, Sunayani Devi and Abanindranath and Gaganendranath Tagore. The exhibition included 250 graphic works, drawings and woodcuts by Itten, Lionel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, among others.
The post-war years in Europe, and Germany in particular, were marked by the need for a new vision for the arts in an “age of mechanical reproduction”, to use Walter Benjamin’s famous term.
Himansu Rai, Devika Rani and Ashok Kumar in 'Izzat'
A pioneering large-scale display of motion picture and still photography that exemplified a fresh perspective was the 1929 ‘Film and Foto’ exposition in Stuttgart by the Deutsche Werkbund (Federation), featuring radical works by Eugène Atget, Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Höch, László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray and Alexander Rodchenko, among others. The show sparked a new modality for image-making, and catalysed intense debate about Indian modernism.
Candid image
This was already exemplified in Wirsching’s path-breaking oeuvre and entrenched German Expressionism, with its asymmetrical camera angles and atmospheric compositions, as well as his expert handling of the candid image, the close-up, the staged portrait and reportage, revealing his mastery of both the still and the moving image.
But we also have the output of other Indophiles: for instance, Swiss photographer Raymond Burnier (1912-1968) and his French partner, historian/ musicologist Alain Daniélou (1907–1994), who, like Wirsching, lived and worked here, and from a similarly ‘assimilated’ viewpoint offered a depth of imagistic/ sociological analysis that seems to transcend the typical ‘exoticism’ and ‘orientalism’ frequently alleged in the ‘India’ produced by Western imaginary.
Additionally, there are India-themed short films and documentaries by the German filmmaker Paul Zils, the Italian film directors Roberto Rossellini and Piers Paolo Pasolini, the French director Louis Malle, and the French filmmaker/ writer Marguerite Duras, all drawn to India for different reasons and finding creative inspiration here.
These modern European collaborations reinforced the deep German engagement with Indian philosophy, language and the arts that first manifested in the 18th and 19th centuries through the works of Goethe, Schopenhauer and Max Müller, and which continues and diversifies into the digital present.
ON SHOW: A Cinematic Imagination: Josef Wirsching and the
Bombay Talkies, Dec. 15-22,
Adil Shah Palace, Goa
The author is Curator, Alkazi Foundation for the Arts in New Delhi, and co-curator of this exhibition.
