Raj Kapoor and the Golden Age of Indian Cinema

MoMA Program Guide
January 6-16, 2012

I was delighted when my friend Rajendra Roy, the then-relatively new Head Curator of Film at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, wanted to play key selections from the Raj Kapoor series. As Roy was someone who had grown up with an awareness of these films and who was now running the venue where the only decent retrospective of Kapoor’s work had taken place (under the curatorial watch of Elliot Stein in the 1980s), it was a true honor to see the show presented there. Here, I have included only the introduction—a more judicious edit of my TIFF one—and not the notes, which were largely similar to the originals. The new print we created of AWAARA was apparently much-discussed and admired!

Largely unknown in North America—except, of course, to millions of fans of South Asian descent—actor, director, and mogul Raj Kapoor (1924–1988) is revered not only in India but throughout the former Soviet world, the Middle East, and beyond for the films he made during the Golden Age of Indian cinema. This exhibition of eight legendary Kapoor films, presented in newly struck 35mm prints, offers an introduction to one of the most ravishing and influential periods of world cinema. Kapoor founded RK Films in 1948, and it became the most important Hindi-language studio of the post-Independence era—and the one most commonly associated with that nebulous and often misunderstood term, “Bollywood.”

Fire (1948), Kapoor’s first film as producer and director, reflects German Expressionist influences, and established the modern-day, hyper-romantic style that would become his trademark—combining contemporary Hollywood melodrama with the moral lessons and metaphors of the “mythologicals”: special-effects-laden versions of tales from the Indian epics the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. Kapoor took the latent romanticism of prewar Indian commercial cinema and made it frank, intense, and personal, creating a new idiom for the expression of emotion that had little place in traditional Indian literature and drama.

As Elliot Stein writes in Raj Kapoor: The Showman Auteur of Indian Cinema, “Kapoor’s singular and gargantuan talent subsumes a variety of influences and affinities—[Charles] Chaplin, Frank Capra, Orson Welles—with even a touch of Russ Meyer apparent in the later work. At times, his œuvre recalls the work of a 19th-century European literary giant whose sympathy for the underdog, protean activity, inexhaustible energy and penchant for excess earned him fame and a national reputation as early in life as Kapoor. Yes, Raj Kapoor is—to a degree—the Victor Hugo of Indian cinema.”
—Noah Cowan

Curated by Noah Cowan, Artistic Director, TIFF Bell Lightbox, and organized by TIFF, IIFA, and RK Films, with the support of the Government of Ontario. Organized for MoMA by Joshua Siegel, Associate Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art.