Alam Ara
[1] history of the hindi film song
ALAM ARA
March 14, 1931 was a historic day for Indian cinema. Ardeshir Irani of Imperial Movietone released Alam Ara, the first full-length Indian talkie film at the Majestic cinema in Bombay. This film very effectively broke the golden silent era and laid a milestone that marked the steeping into the new talkie era as well as rang the death knell to silent films. However, it was the Warner Bros who had only a few years earlier launched the sound era with Don Juan (1926) starring Mary Astor with synchronised musical score and sound effects and followed by Jazz Singer. But it was Lights of New York (1928) that was the first talkies film followed closely by Hitchcock’s Blackmail (Britain) and Rene Clair’s Sous Les Toits Paris (France). Meanwhile, India’s first synchronised film Melody of Love was by Madan Theatres in 1929. Alam Ara: 124 minutes; black & white; Hindi-Urdu Director: Ardeshir Irani Production company: Imperial Movietone Scriptwriter: Joseph David Cinematography: Adi M. Irani, Wilford Deming Music: Ferozshah M. Mistri, B. Irani Lead players: Master Vithal, Miss Zubeida, Jilloo, Sushila, Prithviraj Kapoor, Elizer, Wazir Mohammad Khan,Jagdish Sethi, LV Prasad
The Story: Written by Joseph David, a playwright from the Parsi Imperial Theatrical company, the play Alam Ara had already proved to be a popular success. The story is about the king of Kumarapur’s two queens, both of whom are childless. A fakir’s prediction that the good queen Navbahar will bear a son comes true, eliciting the intense jealousy of the wicked queen Dilbahar. Dilbahar fancies Adil, chief of the army but the latter spurns hers. In retaliation she has him imprisoned. Adil’s wife dies giving birth to Alam Ara (Zubeida) who grows up in a gypsy camp. One night she goes tot he palace in search of her father, when a charm aroud her neck reveals her true identity. There she meets the young prince (Vithal) and they fall in love. In the end, Adil is released, Dilbahar punished and the lovers married.
The making of Alam Ara Inspired by Universal’s Showboat, Ardeshir Irani went about to produce Alam Ara. The film took months to make following the hazardous recording conditions, the distressing laboratory processing methods of that time and the secrecy surrounding the project. Says Irani , "There were no sound-proof stages , we preferred to to shoot indoors and at night. Since our studio is located near a railway track most of our shooting was done between the hours that the trains ceased operation. We worked with a single system Tamar recording equipment. There were also no booms. Microphones had to be hidden in incredible places to keep out of camera range." Irani and his assistant Rustom Bharucha picked up the rudiments of recording from Wilford Deming, an American engineer, who had come to India to assemble the equipment for them. Deming, the methods of film production had come as quite a shock. "Film was successfully exposed in light that would result in blank film at home, stages consisted of flimsy uprights supporting a glas or cloth roof or covering. The French DeBrie camera, with a few Bell & Howell and German makes, completed the list of photographic equipment." As a film, Alam Ara had few technical and artistic qualities but it was pioneering effort. In a letter to the Times of India (March 23, 1931), a viewer who signed as Filmster wrote about the quality of sound, "Principal interest naturally attaches to the voice production and synchronisation. The latter is syllable perfect; the former is somewhat patchy, due to inexperience of the players in facing the microphone and a consequent tendency to talk too loudly."
The outcome of Alam Ara: Alam Ara's rather predicatable story line managed to string together the numerous song and dance numbers. And much to the filmmaker's surprise, the Majestic cinema in Bombay where the film was released was mopbbed by surging crowds. Recalls Irani's partner Abdulally Esoofally in the Indian Talkie Silver Jubilee Souvenir, " In those days, the queue system was not known to filmgoers and the booking office was literally stormed by jostling, riotous mobs, hankering to secure somehow, anyhow a ticket to see a talking picture in the language they understood. All traffic was jammed and police aid had to be sought to control the crowds. For weeks together tickets were sold out and blackmarket vendors had a field day." Meanwhile, the success of Alam Ara led to a rush of other films into production. Producers enticed actors from the stage as voice was the chief criterion and not all actors of the silent era could adapt to sound. Three weeks after Alam Ara, Madan Theatres' released Jamai Sashti (Bengali), followed by Alam Ara; Shirin Farhad (Urdu) which was a spectacular success, featured the most popular singing pair, Jahan Ara Kajjan and Master Nissar, was recorded on RCA photophone sound system and contained three times as many songs as Alam Ara; Kalidas (Tamil, 1931), Bhakta Prahlad (Telugu, 1931), Ayodhyecha Raja (Marathi, 1932), Narasimha Mehta (Gujarati, 1932), Dhruva Kumar (Kannada, 1934). However, the arrival of sound in spite of being welcome in several quarters had serious implications for the whole industry and its appendages. The talkies era silenced a whole generation of artists, film-makers and technicians. Many studios unable to switch over to sound closed down; Anglo-Indians who did not speak fluent Hindi or Urdu were the worst hit. Those who could not sing were also hit as there was no playback and direct recording meant artistes had to sing their own songs.
The making of the talkie film Apparantly the very early attempts to make motion pictures audible was the device used by Edison in 1913 which employed the phonograph record for the source of sound. Though this method worked satisfactorily, the only hitch was the sound reproduction was not enough to fill a theatre. Also the reproduced tone did not sound natural enough to give the proper illusion. (However, it was the vacuum tube which came later and amplified even the most inaudible whisper.) In Cinema Vision, Ram Mohan quotes veteran film technician Krishna Gopal, "Problems? Of course we had problems--thousands of them--no one knew how to handle the sound equipment. We did not know how to deal with echoes inside the studios. The cameras had no blimps ad their noise drowned out the dialogues. We tried all we could to muffle the camera noise. We wrapped the camera in blankets, put insulating shields around it. Nothing seemed to work. We couldn't hear a word the actors spoke inside the studio." When the shoot was moved outdoors, the quality of sound improved "but one cannot shoot an entire film outdoors. Even in a historical, the characters have to go home sometimes." Long takes from a single point became a necessity because of the many unsolved problems of combining photography with sound. Actors had to huddle around a hidden, low-fidelity microphone, often resulting in self-conscious performances. Picturisation of songs too were done in a single shot. Trial and error resulted in mush wastage of raw stock and many films had to be abandoned. However, there was the other side to it too. The box-office returns were so fabulous that they came to be known as mortgage-lifters, enabling those cinema houses that had shut down during the Depression to reopen. Also, it gave a temporary respite from pressing foreign competition. Foreign films now suffered a reversal . English dialogue limited the audience to European and a small number of English-speaking Indians.
Trivia
- Whenever, they (the Talkie people) camped, they were given a princely ovation and a hero's send-off. The Railways gave them travel concessions; the guard at Trichy junction delayed a train by four minutes for the latecomers; a theatre propreitor in Salem slept by the loudspeaker on the stage to guard it during their stay there; every coffeehouse they visited in Tumkur district town in Mysore refused payment for food and drink; in Burhampur the cinema propreitor took the party around the vegetable market, where the best of vegetables were presented to them.
--T S Mahadeo, Indian Talkie
- Although Mehboob was scheduled to play the lead in Alam Ara, Master Vithal; from Sharda Studios got the part. When Sharda sued Vithal for breach of contract, he was defended by M A Jinnah.
- The film was remade in 1956 & 1973 by Nanubhai Vakil
