Ardeshir Irani
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Ardeshir Irani (December 5, 1886 - October 14, 1969) was a writer, film director, film producer, film actor, film distributor, film showman and cinematographer in the silent and sound eras of early Indian cinema. He was renowned for making films in Hindi, English, German, Indonesian, Persian, Urdu and Tamil. He was a successful entrepreneur who owned film theatres, a gramophone agency, and a car agency.
[edit] Life and career
Ardeshir Irani was born into an immigrant Persian-Zoroastrian family as Khan Bahadur Ardeshir Irani on December 5, 1886 in Pune, Maharastra. In 1905, Irani became the Indian representative of Universal Studios and he ran Alexander Cinema in Bombay with Abdulally Esoofally for over forty years. It was at Alexander Cinema that Ardeshir Irani learnt the rules of the art of filmmaking and became fascinated by the medium. In 1917, Irani entered the field of film production and produced his first silent feature film, Nala Dayamanti, releasing it in 1920.
In 1922, Irani joined Bhogilal Dave, the former manager of Dadasaheb Phalke's Hindustan Films, and established Star Films. Their first silent feature film, Veer Abhimanyu was released in 1922 and starred Fatima Begum in the female lead. Dave, a graduate of the New York School of Photography, shot the films, while Irani directed and produced the films. Star Films produced 17 films before Irani and Dave dissolved the partnership.
In 1924, Irani founded Majestic Films, joined by two talented youngsters, B.P. Mishra and Naval Gandhi. At this establishment, Irani produced the films and either Mishra or Gandhi directed the films. Despite its success, fifteen films later, Majestic Films was closed, giving way to the equally short-lived Royal Art Studios which had the exact same life-span as the earlier two, however, it became famous for a certain type of romantic films. Irani improved on it, using new talent to great effect.
In 1925, Irani founded Imperial Films, where he made 62 films. By the age of forty, Irani was an established filmmaker of Indian cinema. Ardeshir Irani became the father of talkie films with the release of his sound feature film, Alam Ara on March 14, 1931. Many of the films he produced were later made into talkie films, with the same cast and crew. He is also accredited with making the first Indian English feature film, Noor Jahan (1934). He completed his hat-trick of earning fame when he made the first colour feature film of India, Kisan Kanya (1937), although the trend of colour films began much later. His contribution does not end only with giving voice to the silent cinema and colour to black-and-white films, he gave a new courageous outlook to filmmaking in India and provided such a wide range of choice for stories in films that till date, there are films being made which have a theme relating to one of the 158 films made by Irani.
In 1933, Irani produced and directed first Iranian talkie Dokhtar-e-Lor (Lor Girl), script of which was written by Abdolhossein Sepanta, who also acted in the movie along with local members of Parsi community.[1][2]
Irani's Imperial Films introduced a number of new actors to Indian Cinema, including Prithviraj Kapoor, Mehboob Khan, Yakub, and Mubarak among others. He also interfered with the medium. He produced Kalidas in Tamil on the sets of Alam Ara, with songs in Telugu. Irani visited London, England for fifteen days to study sound recording and recorded the sounds of Alam Ara on the basis of this knowledge. In the process, he created a whole new trend unknowingly. In those days, outdoor shootings were shot in sunlight with the help of reflectors. However, the outdoor undesirable sounds were disturbing him so greatly that he shot the entire sequence in the studio, under heavy lights. Thus, he began the trend of shooting under artificial light.
Irani made 158 films in a long and illustrious career of 25 years, between the First and Second World Wars. He made his last film, Pujari, in 1945. Irani was not compelled to live like Dadasaheb Phalke for he realised the war was a time not suitable for film business and therefore he suspended his film business during that time. He died on October 14, 1969, at the age of eighty-two, in Bombay, Maharastra.
