The Osianama.com >> program
theosianama.com program
At first, theosianama.com will focus primarily on Hindi and Bombay Cinema and the History of Indian Modern & Contemporary Fine Arts with an initial focus on the international public auction markets for the Indian arts over the past twenty-five years. This will be integrated with popular art forms, such as photography, printmaking, crafts, calendar art, select aspects of Indian and Asian antiquity, plus the most comprehensive library, which will include thousands of research materials from catalogues to letters to newspaper articles.
theosianama.com represents a vast cinematic imagery covering all forms of film publicity material and memorabilia. It includes more than 250,000 original artworks, such as lithographic and offset posters, lobby cards, show-cards, song-synopsis booklets, photographic stills, handbills, hoardings, glass slides, scripts, costumes and the like, dating back to the Silent Era.
Close to 95% of all Hindi films produced have been covered in some form or the other and efforts are ongoing to represent those remaining. Indian Regional Cinema – Bengali, Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and films from other regions of India – is represented as well and the documentation is growing on a daily basis.
To facilitate a more meaningful and in-depth global comparison with Indian cinemas one of the largest collections on Hollywood has been assembled and archived. This collection spans from the great lobby cards of the early decades of Hollywood (Leonard Schrader Collection) to hundreds of iconic props and documents and to an equally expansive collection on World cinema with focus on classic Polish and Japanese poster designs.
Memorabilia representing iconic personalities such as Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Marx Brothers, Laurel & Hardy, Clark Gable, Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, Alfred Hitchcock, Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean, Clint Eastwood, ‘James Bond’, Robert De Niro, ‘Tarzan’, Elvis Presley, Beatles, Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Fellini, Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, are also part of theosianama.com database.
The History of Indian Modern & Contemporary Fine Arts, as seen from various perspectives will also be revealed on a new scale. The focus will be on sharing public transactions of Indian Art from every auction conducted globally since 1987. This will permit a deeper understanding of the Indian fine arts market and will be made available for free to the public. With this launch, India will stand to become the first country in the world to make available the full economic databank and history of the subject free of cost to the user.
All of these knowledge bases will become a core component of content for schools, colleges, universities and independent research institutions across the world, as a deeper global awareness of Indian & Asian Art, Cultural and Film Studies radically changes.
Lastly, in the months to come the virtual world of theosianama.com will create many synergies with the four major physical platforms of the Osian’s Group – the Auction House; Mapin-Osianama, the new Publishing & Design House, launched at the World Book Fair in New Delhi in February 2013; India’s first museum for the Arts & Film – Osianama at the Kila and Osian’s – Cinefan: Festival of Indian, Asian & Arab Cinema (17-26 July 2013). This ‘virtual-physical’ synergy will be embedded in a new daily living experience with the creation of master-classes, seminars, workshops, conferences, exhibitions, auctions, live musical performances, book launches, and film festivals.