The first physical copy of the Hrishikesh Mukherjee book reached me last week. My reaction in these situations is to not want to open the thing lest my eye should fall on an especially demented piece of writing, or a thought/idea that I am now not so sure about, or a typo or line-editing error. I won’t be rereading this book anytime this decade, but one thing I’m happy about is the image inset – 16 pages, of which 12 are made up of film stills (four per page) that illustrate some point made in the text, or note thematic or visual connections between scenes from different films.
I spent a lot of time on this inset, looking through DVDs for hours, taking all the screen grabs myself (and then having to take many of them again because there was an aspect-ratio problem), making longlists and shortlists of scenes I wanted to include, choosing scenes from lesser known films over the really popular ones, putting together the text for each page. And the final result (after initially being warned that resolutions may not work out) is very pleasing – this isn’t a make-up-the-numbers collection of images, it is very much part of the overall vision I had for the book. A big thank you to Udayan Mitra, and to Richa Burman, who did everything to ensure the process flowed smoothly.
The pictures below are not the absolute final versions of the inset pages, but just to give you an idea of what some of them look like...
[The book can be pre-ordered here and here]
I spent a lot of time on this inset, looking through DVDs for hours, taking all the screen grabs myself (and then having to take many of them again because there was an aspect-ratio problem), making longlists and shortlists of scenes I wanted to include, choosing scenes from lesser known films over the really popular ones, putting together the text for each page. And the final result (after initially being warned that resolutions may not work out) is very pleasing – this isn’t a make-up-the-numbers collection of images, it is very much part of the overall vision I had for the book. A big thank you to Udayan Mitra, and to Richa Burman, who did everything to ensure the process flowed smoothly.
The pictures below are not the absolute final versions of the inset pages, but just to give you an idea of what some of them look like...
[The book can be pre-ordered here and here]
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