ABSTRACT
For the past five decades, the visually arresting medium of banners and
cutouts transported the melodrama of Tamil cinema from the darkened
confines of the theatre to the public sphere of the streets of Chennai. This
medium consisted of images derived from film stills that were painted by
hand on cloth and on plywood board. The gigantic proportions of banners
and cutouts (33 by 6.5 metres for the largest banners and over 13 metres
high for the cutouts), their vibrant colours, as well as the convincing illu-
sionism of their imagery ensured the dominance of this medium in the urban landscape. But with the turn of the twenty-first century, solvent
printed images on vinyl sheets have displaced the hand-painted banners and
cutouts. What precipitated this transition in advertising media? Does this
shift in media from hand-painted canvas to print on vinyl parallel a shift in
Tamil cinema from a provincial to an international idiom?
