A hypocritical rant about watching films on tiny screens (or watching them back to front)

(My Economic Times column today)

-----------------

Occupying the top spot on my movie watchlist just now is SS Rajamouli’s epic RRR, but if “watchlist” makes you think of streaming platforms, let me clarify that I’ll see it the only way a big-canvas film should be experienced: on a very large screen. I remember being floored by Rajamouli’s Bahubaali in a movie hall, but feeling underwhelmed, even bored, when I caught parts of it on TV years later.

 

Watching RRR in a theatre will also be a small step in atoning for a movie-watching blasphemy – and an accompanying hypocrisy – that I have often indulged in. Here’s the gist of it: for years I have given friends pedantic lectures about the ghastliness of watching films – especially certain types of films – on very small screens. I list all the usual arguments, grumble that anyone who watches a film that way is only engaging with it at the plot-and-dialogue level without registering any of its visual qualities, the things that make it C-I-N-E-M-A. I quote from essays on the subject. (Pauline Kael: “Reduced to the dead greys of a cheap television print, Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons is as lifelessly dull as a newspaper Wirephoto of a great painting.” David Thomson: “How can one tell one’s students or one’s children what it was like seeing Vertigo or The Red Shoes from the dark? We watch television with the lights on! Out of some bizarre superstition that it protects our eyes. How so tender for one part of us, and so indifferent to the rest?”)

 

And yet: throughout my own career as a movie nerd (from note-taking pre-teen to professional writer), I have watched countless films – especially older films – in less than optimum conditions. On videocassette, on TV, finally on a laptop screen. 

 

In the 1980s my family hardly ever went to movie halls, so even mediocre films watched thus still seem grand and larger than life in my mind’s eye: an indelible memory of my multi-starrer-obsessed childhood is a scene from the 1986 Dosti Dushmani where the three heroes (Jeetendra, Rajinikanth, Rishi Kapoor) ride their bikes side by side, singing of friendship (Poonam Dhillon may have been perched behind one of them, feigning polite interest) – not because either song or film was good but because it was such a rare experience. On the other hand, I shudder to think that I watched some of the most visually ambitious films of that time, such as Mukul Anand’s Hum, on videocassette with animated underwear ads running across the bottom of the screen. Or that my obsession for old Hollywood – including widescreen-format films whose use of space and framing is integral to their effect – has been built around TV viewings. 

 

Recently I was comforted by a video featuring that most excitable of movie buffs, Martin Scorsese. He and critic Mark Kermode are discussing the 1947 classic Black Narcissus, about a group of British nuns in the Himalayas, unsettled by the otherworldliness of the environment and their memories of their earlier lives. 

 

When I first watched it, Scorsese says, it was heavily edited. And… [Meaningful Pause] it was on black-and-white TV. Kermode shakes his head disbelievingly, both men crack up. And anyone who knows this film will understand why. Bright, bold, unflinching in its use of colour, featuring the use of spectacular matte paintings as a stand-in for Indian landscapes, and some startling moments that centre on colour effects (such as a character’s garish red makeup), Black Narcissus can scarcely have made any sense in monochrome. And yet Scorsese grew to love it (and did eventually watch it the way it needed to be watched). 

 

The present day – where someone might, heaven forbid, watch a Blade Runner 2049 or a Lord of the Rings on a phone screen – may seem especially conducive to viewing transgressions (even if this plague hadn’t chased us out of movie halls). And yet that Scorsese interview is a reminder that hand-wringing conversations about how to watch films don’t date back to just the last few years (or to the videocassette era); for much of film history even dedicated movie buffs have sometimes watched great films in inappropriate conditions. 

 

Even within the ambit of the big-screen experience, there have been terrible traditions such as the old one in the US where viewers would come in at any point during a screening, watch it till the end, and then catch up with what they had missed in the next show: thus effectively turning a conventional narrative film into a proto-Christopher Nolan jigsaw puzzle. (This was also the catalyst for Alfred Hitchcock’s famous admonition while barring viewers entry mid-screening: “We have discovered that Psycho is unlike most motion pictures. It does not improve when run backwards.”) As it happens, I once experienced a minor variant on this when I watched Sholay on a big screen for the only time, as a child: because my thoughtless family showed up 15 minutes late, I caught only a bit of the train-attack flashback near the film’s beginning, and stayed confused for years about the exact chronology of the story.

 

So does all this mean that I’ll stop lecturing friends? No, since I have a trump card. I have never watched a film, even a short film, on a phone-sized screen – that’s a frontier I have no intention of crossing. There might not be an enormous difference between a laptop screen and a smartphone screen, but as tennis commenters say it’s a game of inches. I might rethink this though if a finger-nail-sized viewing device comes along…

 

(An earlier post about related things is here. I have also written about this in The World of Hrishikesh Mukherjee, in the context of watching Anand on a big screen with a very enthusiastic crowd)