Watching RRR would also be a small step in atonement for the blasphemy – and simultaneous hypocrisy – that I have often indulged in. For years, I’ve given pedantic lectures to friends about the horrors of watching movies—especially certain types of movies—on a lot. small screen. I list all the usual arguments, grumbling that anyone who watches a film like this is only involved in it at the plot level, without registering any of the visual qualities that make it a cinema. I quote from essays. (Pauline Kell: ‘Reduced to the Dead Grays of a Suspended Television Print, the Magnificent Emberson is as lifeless as a newspaper wirephoto of a great painting.’)
And yet: Throughout my career as a nerd, I’ve seen countless movies – especially older movies – in less than optimal conditions. On video cassettes, on TVs, finally on laptop screens.
In the 1980s, my family rarely went to theatres. Hence, even mediocre films thus watched now seem larger than life in the eyes of my mind. An indelible memory of my multi-starrer-obsessed childhood is a scene from the long-forgotten 1986 Dosti Dushmani directed by Tatineni Rama Rao where the three protagonists – Jeetendra, Rajinikanth, Rishi Kapoor – ride their bikes, singing friendship renditions. Huh.
On the other hand, I shudder to think that I watched visually ambitious films like Mukul S Anand’s 1991 Hum video cassette, with animated underwear ads running across the bottom of the screen. Or that my passion for Old Hollywood — which includes widescreen-format movies whose use of space is integral to their impact — is built around watching TV.
Recently, I was comforted by a video featuring Martin Scorsese. She and critic Mark Kermode are discussing the 1947 classic Black Narcissus, a film directed by Michael Powell and Emerick Pressberger about a group of British nuns in the Himalayas. ‘I saw it for the first time,’ says Scorsese, ‘on black-and-white TV.’ Karmode shakes his head in disbelief. Both men break down. And anyone who knows this movie will understand why.
Bright, bold, immaculate in its use of color, featuring spectacular matte paintings as a stand-in for the Indian landscape, and some shocking moments that focus on color effects (such as a character’s red-hued makeup) Well, Black Narcissus hardly made any sense in monochrome. The present day – where one might watch Heaven Forbid, a Blade Runner 2049 or a Dune on the phone – seems particularly conducive to watching crimes (even without this plague us movie halls). keep out). And yet, that Scorsese interview is a reminder that for much of film history, many serious movie buffs have seen great movies in inappropriate circumstances.
Even within the big screen experience, there have been terrible traditions such as the one (in the US) where audiences come to a screening at any time, watch until the end, and then capture what they have missed. The next show, thus effectively turning a regular narrative film into a proto-Christopher Nolan puzzle. (It was also the catalyst for Alfred Hitchcock’s famous advice, while denying viewers a mid-screening entry: ‘We’ve found that Psycho is unlike most movies. It doesn’t improve when running backwards.’)
I once experienced a version of it when I saw Sholay on the big screen as a kid. Because my thoughtless family was 15 minutes late, I initially caught only a small portion of the train-attack flashbacks, and remained confused for years about the story’s chronology. So, does this mean that I will stop lecturing friends? Not really, because I have a trump card. I have never seen a movie on the phone, not even a short film. This is a limit that I have no intention of crossing. There may not be a huge difference between a laptop screen and a smartphone screen, but as tennis commentators say, it’s a game of inches.
In the meantime I’m hoping a fingernail-sized viewing device isn’t on the way.
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