We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
July 1941
FILMINDI A
Leela Chitnis may make a good viilk maid one day, the way she goes about in ''Kanchan".
509 cinemas under contract with the 20th Century Fox for screening newsreels from week to week.
Calculating 200 persons per performance and three performances per day nearly two million people see the newsreels per week and over 100 million per year.
With all their defects, and many were admitted by Mr. Newbery, Indian audiences seem to have liked the Indian version newsreels, as over 75% of the exhibitors have renewed their contracts for the second year.
In addition to this 122 cinemas in India have been regularly showing the original English version newsreels all along as before.
These figures ought to give a fair idea of the immense field that is waiting to be exploited by some concern. The field work done by Newbery, can be useful to the first enterprising Indian who would launch himself into this business of newsreels. If there is an Indian with that enterprising foresight.
In the meanwhile we feel compelled, reluctantly of course, to support Mr. Newbery in his enterprise for two reasons: because he is making the Indians more newsminded by giving the latest war news as quickly as possible and because he is doing precious war propaganda which in sheer value is worth a hundred times more than the activities of the Film Advisory Board and the erratic advertising of the Advertising Committee combined.
Another aspect of vital importance to the indigenous industry is that Newbery is making a space for indigenous Indian newsreels.
After the war, people won't be so anxious to see Fox Movietone News which usually show the travels of titled and tailored nitwits and the blank can be usefully filled by indigenous educational shorts and news items.
Till then "filmindia" congratulates C. B. Newbery of 20th Century Fox for his initiative and perseverance in the face of odds and ends from friends and foes.
THANKS, JAGANNATH PATEL!
War or no war Jagannath Patel is always at war. Years before when he first entered the film field, he had promised me to bring into the country a reproducing equipment which would be within the pocket range of small exhibitors.
Mr. Jagannath Patel has been all along alive to the vital need of Indian villages — which incidentally constitute the real India — for visual education. It was possible to meet this demand only by importing equipment with reasonable cost as the villages could not afford to pay for fancy high boosted machinery.
For years, Jagannath struggled with the Bauer projectors and at last took them into the interiors opening out over 400 new cinemas and making the existence of these cinemas economically possible.
With the cinemas travelling further into the interior every day. the other manufacturers who had till recently contented themselves with huge profits and small turnover were compelled to wake up and take notice of Jagannath Patel with his Bauerblitz.
Miss Bibbo gives a fine rural portrayal in "Akela" a Great India picture.
9