The history of BGM

Have any of us ever thought about the early days of cinema? The days when there were no sound or dialogues, but only a picture. The days when they used placards to make people understand the context. I am dating back to such days to make you understand one of the integral portions of modern Cinema.

Ok, can you think of why there is background score in movies? You would probably say that the movie is adeptly supported with the help of BGM, rendering the viewers to feel that the movie characters' emotions and situations are better explained. We can't imagine how a movie would be without BGM scores. There were some experimental movies without BGM; but when I happened to see one of them, I felt the movie would have been much better with a proper BGM. Such is the extent we are convinced that a motion picture and BGM are always inseparable.

But the real reason why BGM is included in a movie is quite interesting. In India, this happened in pre-indepence era, to be precise sometime during the late 1930's. The projectors of that time were not technically great. They produce lot of noise while operating and they couldn't be operated from a long distance. So the projector has to be at a short distance from the screen and it was producing lot of noise. So to overcome this noise, they decided to bring in music bands who were playing for stage plays, made them sit near the screen at a lower level than the ground level and they played the music all along the movie to cover up the noise produced by the projectors. This was how the BGM had come into existence.

There are many other interesting things to share about the olden days' cinema. During the initial days of Indian cinema, some patriotic movie makers interluded freedom and independence related messages, dialogues, songs in their movies. So the British came up with the idea of Censoring it before releasing it for public view. Those days, the police commissioner was the authority who decided on what was to be there in a movie. This was how even the censor board came into picture. Due to these difficult times, the movie producers didn't want to land up in trouble, making real-time movies or current trend topic and they resorted to Indian mythology. There were many successful stage plays which were mythology based during that time. The producers just hired the entire troup, made them travel to Bombay or Calcutta and recorded the movie in a single place. There was nothing much of a difference between a stage play and a movie. The actors entered into the frame from sideways as they did in the stage, spoke loudly in the same manner as they used to in a stage play, stood only in one particular angle, i.e., facing the camera straight and there were no other angles. The camera was not moving. It was kept stationary at front angle alone.

The concept of re-recording was not there during those times. So, while shooting, the dialogues had to be recorded live on the sets, even the music band also arranged themselves nearby the mike so that they can score the BGM. The difficulty here was that the camera has to be positioned in such a way that only the actors were visible in the frame but not the music band that was playing the BGM. So the movie makers had very limited options with the possibilties of camera. Also, until re-recording was available, the actors had to possess singing skills as well as there were so many songs involved in Indian movies right since the beginning.

I got to know about all these information from a Tamil book named "Yem Thamizhar seidha padam" by "Theodre Baskaran" who has done many researches and published articles on Cinema and forestry. Thanks to him, it was a very good read and I like all the articles in it.