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Material, history, arguments: unidentified publicity images and art-installations

In 2004, I located hundreds of glass-plate negatives (approximately 4 inches × 2.5 inches) in Calcutta, India. The small, fragile and shimmering glass pieces, appearing like miniature abstract paintings, evoked curiosity and excitement. The study of the negatives began in 2004, and was followed up in 2008. The initial process was to retrieve what looked like indistinct yet shiny blotches, produce by silver halide emulsions imprinted on glass. The procedure involved careful scanning of the plates; and afterwards, turning the digital images into positives. A comprehensive catalogue was prepared for the new-found material. The material came forth as a bulk of publicity images, comprising primarily lobby cards or a series of cards designed for theatrical exhibition. Customarily, the print size of lobby cards is about 10 inches × 18 inches, and includes shots of the relevant film. Moreover, there were blueprints of posters, photographs of stars, and so on, of films from (predominantly) the 1940s to 1960s. Furthermore, along with these came a huge pile of advertisements for consumer products, as well as of public shows, election propaganda, censor certificates, and so on, intended for theatrical projection. Notably, these images were not big posters for display on the streets; but were pictures for theatre lobbies. Briefly, there was a spatial significance of the material. Consequently, my exposure to the material set off certain critical queries, connected to issues of the film industry, technology, aesthetics and reception. The material necessitated an inter-disciplinary dialogue, and required an exploration into histories of glass-plate cameras as well as applications of glass-negatives up to the 1960s; furthermore, the art of the cards demanded a close reading of visual practices. Additionally, accounts of exhibition networks, sites of the theatres, and the meaning of cinema as a cultural form became crucial. Even so, beyond this there were a range of mysterious images, which could not be identified in terms of year, location, language, author, actor, production, etc. Therefore, almost onequarter of the material continues to exist uncatalogued and outside the structures of film archives and histories. Indeed, Paolo Cherchi Usai (1994, 2001) as well as Robert Allen and Douglas Gomery (1985, 29) demonstrate how “thousands of individual motion pictures made since the invention of cinemas” no longer exist. Therefore, can we consider Usai’s method of using (forgotten) images along with commentaries as an effective approach to narrate stories that cannot be otherwise written? And, how does one address existing historiography, when much of the data in the sub-continent is varied, incomplete, unofficial and sometimes somewhat spurious? In addition, the sight of the images marked by shafts of lights, dark zones, and faces of the enigmatic (female) stars in black and white, opened up debates on genre (especially melodrama), gender, intimacy, affect, and the romance of cinema. The outcome of such deliberations was a series of media-installations, which attempted to re-contextualize the indefinite material. Theatres of Spectacle (2011), Interiority (2011) and Fragments of Cinema (2012), principally used these excluded material to create art works, videos and video-essays; in addition, mirror-finish acrylic, vinyl prints, found artifacts, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 2014 Vol. 15, No. 1, 113–127, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2014.871774