Good movies are meant to be seen on the big screen

I could see her point. Chastened, I put the phone away. The film was Shyam Benegal’s Manthan (1976). The restored print was gorgeous but it was a version without subtitles. The man next to me and his companion were both French-speaking. Stranded in rural India without subtitles, they started murmuring to each other in French.

Right on cue someone’s phone started ringing in the row behind me. The woman rummaged in her capacious handbag and finally managed to extricate the phone. It glowed as bright as a casino in Las Vegas while it sang its merry tune at top volume. Everyone started clucking and hissing. The flustered woman told the people around her, “I am trying to mute it. But I don’t really know how. Here, why don’t you try?”

I realised it had been a long time since I had been in an old-fashioned movie theatre. I’d forgotten its little dramas, the rules of etiquette and how things that would not bother me while watching something on TV infuriate me inside a movie theatre. But most of all, I had forgotten how good movies can look on a big screen, the way they were meant to be seen.

Until the covid lockdown I regularly went to see films in theatres. Covid changed our viewing habits. We discovered binge watching on OTT. After covid faded we resumed much of what we had been used to. We went out to bars and restaurants and went on vacations again. But somehow I didn’t return to the theatres.

There was an occasional 3D superhero film that enticed me back, but they were few and far between. Mostly, I would wait for movies to show up on a streaming service. When I went to the theatre, the ads for Lyra leggings and Vicco Vajradanti toothpaste and the interminable intermission annoyed me. The popcorn prices, always high, now felt criminal. And at the end of the film, I felt as if I would not have missed much if I had watched it at home. I could have fast forwarded the boring bits. I wouldn’t have to worry about Ubers or parking. Movie-going felt doomed to become increasingly niche—either reserved for the big budget special effects-laden superhero film or the nostalgia fest marking the 25th anniversary of a Kaho Naa… Pyaar Hai.

But recently I went to see the remastered version of Satyajit Ray’s Nayak (1966), which had just been re-released in theatres. It was a film I remembered from television. On a big screen, the film, painstakingly restored, was utterly luminous. Some things felt strange. In 1966, the hero didn’t think twice about smoking a cigarette in a train dining car or inside a coupe with a sick girl occupying the upper berth. When the hero Arindam Mukherjee, played by Bengali superstar Uttam Kumar, wakes up in the train, his first, almost instinctive action, is to light a cigarette. He leans back, takes a drag and blows out perfect smoke circles and I felt if I just reached out, I could touch them.

Looking at those smoke circles, each one a perfect moving image, even I, a non-smoker, understood the seductive power of film. In that darkened theatre, surrounded by the silhouettes of strangers, we were all inhaling deep. Streaming might feel magical because of the power it grants us, but a movie in a theatre can be magic and there’s a difference.

Some of it is obviously about size and scale. Little details that pass unnoticed on our television screens are magnified on the big screen. In Nayak, the dimple on Sharmila Tagore’s cheek, the pen stuck in her blouse, Uttam Kumar’s cool insouciant glance. In Manthan, Smita Patil’s smouldering eyes meeting Girish Karnad’s bashful hesitation—all of that gets imbued with an extra charge when blown up large on a screen.

When I saw Manthan years ago on Doordarshan, as a boy, it had felt almost like a documentary. The story of setting up a milk cooperative had felt very removed from my urban life where milk came in polythene packets. I remember being impatient with its pacing, the story did not have enough drama or romance for me. But on the big screen it felt like a different film. I noticed the expression in the eyes of the secondary characters, the little goat on the corner of the screen. The shadows which were just smudges on the small screen, now crackled with life and tension.

Part of the change is because of us, the viewers. Reviewing the restored Nayak in Hollywood Reporter India, Arshia Dhar writes that in that film, Ray examines our relationship with the people we deify whom we are also quick to demonise. “It’s a sentiment that doesn’t change even in the age of social media when we are made to feel closer to the stars lounging in their bedrooms in their pajamas,” writes Dhar. But it’s also about us, lounging in our bedrooms in our pyjamas, watching the stars on our small screens. It changes the gaze somehow because the movies are on tap, available at our convenience. Netflix and Amazon Prime are watching us too, feeding us into their algorithms.

As film reviewer A.O. Scott wrote in The New York Times when movies just become content, “as long as we’re still watching Netflix, Netflix doesn’t care what we’re watching on Netflix or whether we’re also texting.” (I frequently do the crossword while watching something on OTT). Its business model “depends on a state of indifferent attention paradoxically known as engagement.”

But when we take the trouble to go to the theatre, we must regard it with more seriousness. As Sharmila Tagore’s character interviews Uttam Kumar in the dining car of the train, we are right there, as if sitting at the tables around them, trying to eavesdrop on their conversation. That is true engagement. When the lights come on, we look at each other and smile, silently acknowledging the time spent together.

At the French Film Festival in Kolkata where Manthan was screened as part of a section on Indian films that went to Cannes, people lined up before every film for the first-come, first-served entry. They carried printouts of the schedule where they had circled the movies they wanted to see. They talked to strangers about the ones they had seen, solicited suggestions about what they should see. Someone was queuing for The Shameless (2024) because she wanted to see it on screen, not on her laptop and she didn’t know whether a lesbian love story set in a brothel would ever get a decent theatrical release in India. Someone else remembered a long-ago film festival where Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai played at 6. Is it hard at 6pm to get to the Nandan movie theatre from office, someone asked. It was at 6am, he replied. It’s fleeting, but for a few hours we are joined together by common purpose, without the mediation of social media.

In a masterclass in Kolkata during his recent tour of India, German filmmaker Wim Wenders talked about a “deadly form of loneliness, which is digital loneliness.” “Storytelling is disappearing. Instead of storytelling we now have story-selling,” said Wenders. “We are all losing the patience for story telling. Because a story needs time.”

In a darkened theatre we give ourselves that time. It is a precious gift and for a moment it seems that if we all collectively hold our breaths, that perfect circle of smoke from Uttam Kumar’s cigarette will linger as well, held in place by the magic of cinema.

Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.

Sandip Roy is a writer, journalist and radio host. He posts @sandipr.

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