In the 1920s, Florence Burgess Meehan, scouring shooting locations in South Asia, wrote in American Cinematographer that, “the Orient receives the cameraman gladly and warmly . . . it loves the moving pictures and that ‘gifted child of the gods’ who carries a Bell and Howell is all but revered in most places.” In their print advertisements over the next decades, Western camera companies put this talismanic conception of film technology to good use. At the same time, India in particular served as a limit to Western technological capacity, so that any cameras that could survive the climate became imbued with a kind of ineluctable mobility. Cameramen were seen as attendants to this wondrous technology, intrepid explorers braving the unknown dangers of the “mystic East.” This paper locates Technicolor cinematography’s postwar introduction into the Indian Subcontinent within this longer tradition as well as burgeoning Indo-American relations at the outset of the geopolitical conflicts that would define the world of the 1950s and beyond. Relying on extensive archival research, this paper excavates the filming of these early color films and offers a comparative account of the distribution of foreign expertise and technology in Bombay film production. Even as Hollywood-Bombay relations in the early 1950s exceeded conventional Cold War mentalities, concerns about the wellbeing of foreign film personnel and problematic assumptions about the aptitude of “native” technical talent belied the easy translations assumed by the promoters of cinema trade.

Nitin Govil is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. His books include Orienting Hollywood: A Century of Film Culture between Los Angeles and Bombay (2015) and the coauthored Global Hollywood (2001), Global Hollywood 2 (2005), and the forthcoming Indian Film Industry. His writing has been translated into Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish. He is currently working on two books: a co-authored textbook on global media and a project on Indian cinema and postwar transnational film called Out of Alignment: Bombay Film Culture and the Cold War.

Cosponsored by the Departments of Communication Studies and Screen Arts and Cultures.