BOLLYWOOD ...The First Sound Films: In India, the earliest demonstration of what was known as 'Phonofilm' a process invented by Dr.Lee DeForest, in which sound was synchronised with the picture, was given at the Royal Opera House in Mumbai, in May 1927. The programme comprised of scenes from Julius Caesar with Basil Gill, the famous London actor, in the cast. Lillian Hall Davies and Miles Mander appeared in a comedy skit entitled As We Lie.9 The earliest attempts at synchronised sound film production in India were made by Madan Theatres. Early in 1929, Madan Theatres exhibited the first talking picture in India, Universal's Melody of Love at the Elphinstone Picture Palace in Calcutta. This was the first theatre in the East to be equipped with permanent sound apparatus. Soon after, on February 2 1, the same film was presented at the Excelsior Theatre in Mumbai By the end of 1930, more than 30 out of a total of 370 theatres in the country were technical ready for sound projections of film. 10 J.J.Madan had seen The Jazz Singer in New York. The tremendous public response to the film had convinced him about the unavoidable impact of sound in cinema. Alam Ara is India's first fulllength sound film. It was released on l4th March, 1931 at Majestic Theatre, Mumbai (then, Bombay.) It narrowly beat Shirin Farhad (1931) to make cinema history. It established the use of music, song and dance as the mainstay of Indian cinema The film was a period fantasy based on Joseph David's popular Parsee theatre play and narrated a fairy tale. Alam Ara was made on the Tanar single system camera, recording image and sound simultaneously, which was difficult especially for the songs which were the film's highlights. Wazir Mobanurted Khan's rendering of a wandering minstrel's song number de de khuda ke namme par pyaare was particularly popular. It pioneered the use of a commentating chorus, a device adopted in several later films. In an interview with the Indian documentarist B.D.Garga, Irani said, "since there were no soundproof stages, we preferred to shoot indoors at night. Since our studio is located near a railway track... most of our shooting was done between hours that the trains ceased operation. We worked with a single system Tanar recording equipment...There were also no booms. Microphones had to be hidden in incredible places to keep out of camera range."" Along with his assistant Rustom Bharucha, he learnt the elementaries of sound recording from Wilford Denning, an American engineer, who had come to India to assemble the equipment for them. "Alam Ara shows the range and variety of sound reproduction involved in the production of a complete story ... it has shown that with due restraint and thouthfull direction, players like Vithal and Prithviraj and Miss Zubeida could by their significant acting and speech, evolve dramatic values to which the silent screw cannot possibly aspire. ,12 Within three weeks of Alani Ara, Madan Theatres released its first Bengali takie, Jamai Shashthi. This was followed with the release of Shinn Farhad in Hindi, also from the Madan's production house. This film beat Alam Ara's record at the box office. Three reasons given for its thumping success are : (a) the dialogue by Aga Hashar Kashmiri, (b) the songs sung by Kajan and Nissar and (c) the crystal clear recording done on the RCA Photophone. The recording for this film. was done on Double System Sound by foreign technicians. Madan Theatres turned out eight sound films in 1931 and 16 in 1932. Almost simultaneously with Hindi, films in different languages began to be made in the country. Among the first regional language films were Jamai Sashti in Bengali (193 1), Kalidas in Tamil (1931), Bhakta Prahlad in Telugu (1931), Ayodhyecha Raja in Marathi (1932), Narsimha Mehta in Gujarati (1932) and Dhruva Kumar in Kannada (1934.) But in terms of form and content, they were copies of the Hindi formula, full of songs, dances and music. The scenario has remained more or less the same today.
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