'''New Theatres'''


Main Bengali studio and one of the élite
banners in pre-Independence Indian cinema.
Set up by Birendra Nath Sircar (1901-80) in
1931 as a sound studio in Tollygunge, Calcutta,
following on from Sircar’s silent International
Filmcraft (Est: 1930 in association with Charu
Roy and Prafulla Roy). New Theatres acquired
Tanar equipment and the services of Wilford
Deming, a Hollywood sound technician
imported by Ardeshir Irani. The studio
attracted major technical and creative talent
from several smaller silent studios then on the
verge of collapse: Indian Kinema provided
Nitin Bose, the writer, scenarist and filmmaker
Premankur Atorthy, the stars
Durgadas Bannerjee, Amar Mullick, Jiban
Ganguly, etc.; from Barua Pics came P.C.
Barua himself and Sushil Majumdar; British
Dominion Films supplied Dhiren Ganguly.
Sircar aimed for a cinematic equivalent of
literature: ‘Immediately after the establishment
of New Theatres, the first film I made was
Saratchandra [Chatterjee]’s Dena Paona (1931).
The first director of New Theatres was
Premankur Atorthy, the famed litterateur. The
film was not a success. Yet, I could perceive
that following the path of literature would lead
to the discovery of the right path. Seven
subsequent films met with the same fate but
each film pointed to the ultimate way’ (1961, in
Jha, 1990). This formula had been launched at
Madan Theatres when they purchased
exclusive film rights to all of Bankimchandra
Chatterjee’s prose and was followed by New
Theatres, leading to such cinematic oddities as
the big-budget Natir Puja (1932), credited
with Rabindranath Tagore’s direction. New
Theatres then opted for a more melodramatic
mode with Debaki Bose’s Chandidas (1932).
The most famous New Theatres productions
were the P.C. Barua and Nitin Bose films and its
major star was K.L. Saigal. The studio had
many directors on its payroll (most studios
managed with one in-house director, using Bfilms
made by assistants or other employees to
keep the production flow going) and invested
massively in technological innovation (e.g. the
work of sound recordist Mukul Bose). The
decline of the studio is usually linked to the
resignation in 1941 of Nitin Bose, one of their
top directors and head of the technical units. Its
fall is also connected with the rise of the
Western and Southern Indian markets during
and immediately after WW2, as the studio had
never established its own outlets and was
increasingly at the mercy of professional
distributors charging crippling commissions.
There are several accounts of the studio’s
outright sale of film rights to groups like the
Kapurchands, often at a loss. In 1944 Bimal
Roy made an influential debut (Udayer
Pathey) initiating a trend mainly realised in
Bombay (e.g. Hrishikesh Mukherjee). The
studio finally closed in 1955, although Sircar
remained closely involved with film industry
organisations, being on the board of the FFC
for some years.

[[Studio]]