Famous Romantic Movie Lines

Unique art installation pays homage to Bollywood great Raj Kapoor

The backlit Indian idol has tilted her head, her lips gently parted. Her lover holds her cheek, a prelude to a kiss.

Yet in this romantic movie moment, the lover’s face changes. He’s no longer the late revered director Raj Kapoor, acting in one of his films from the golden age of 1950s Indian cinema. His face is digitally altered to become contemporary Toronto filmmaker Srinivas Krishna. At other times, the face morphs into everyday people.

It has a novelty quality: Come up, come up and have your picture put in a famous Indian movie! It’s the Photoshop equivalent of having your photo taken with your face through a hole in a painted placard.

However, Krishna’s installation piece and elaborate photo booth – set in a corner of Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox and accompanying a major retrospective, starting July 1, of Raj Kapoor’s most important early contributions to Bollywood – deftly demonstrate how Kapoor’s movies tapped into the viewers’ aspirations and conscience, particularly among audiences in a newly independent India. The retrospective is being held in association with the star-studded International Indian Film Academy Awards in Toronto this weekend.

As Krishna explains, the idea goes back to the photo studio. Even as late as the 1950s, Indians would get dressed in their finest to have their portrait taken, posed against a pillar or some other formal motif. The images were about what people aspired to, lives like the characters in the newly emerging Indian cinema.

“The idea is that if photo studios are where people explored another possibility of being, they went to the [cinema] to explore multiple possibilities of being. And that’s what those filmmakers provided for their audiences,” he says.

“That’s what Raj Kapoor did. That’s what happened in the cinema of those days. That’s the kind of theory or understanding that I’m trying to reconstitute for you here.”

When you walk into Krishna’s installation and homage to Kapoor, entitled My Name Is Raj , there is a wall on the left with hanging photo-studio portraits, lovingly framed, from early last century. Most show dapper individuals formally posed, looking the way they aspired to look. Even a photo of an impoverished water carrier has a formal classicism, with his hand on a pillar.