The 70th edition of the Cannes Film Festival kicked off with a shiny new controversy. The fracas between Netflix and French theatre owners continues to make headlines around the world, even as some Indians swoon over the gowns worn by Aishwarya Rai and Deepika Padukone. The inclusion of the Netflix productions Okja and The Meyerowitz Stories in the competition section has enraged French theatre owners. They are opposed to the idea of Netflix skipping a proper theatrical release, as is the rule in France, and putting the films directly online.
The chairperson of this year’s jury, the celebrated Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, has declared that he considers the theatrical moviegoing experience to be supreme, with the large screen having an unmatched capacity to hypnotise viewers.
The issue has fascinating implications for India, the world’s most prolific movie-producing nation. Remember the 1980s, when video cassette recorders appeared and middle class audiences abandoned the cinemas? Who wanted to rub shoulders with the hoi polloi when you could watch the latest Amitabh Bachchan movie at home?
Thirty years later, things have come full circle. While multiplex chains are rolling out the red carpet and building expensive auditoriums where you can sip champagne on plush recliners, Netflix and white goods manufactures are invading our tiny homes with huge television sets that magically obey our commands and bring up movies at the flick of a button or even a voice command.
The fear of theatre owners is entirely valid. If you can watch the same film, and tens of others, every month, for the price of a couple of cinema tickets on a TV screen that gets bigger, brighter and shinier every year, aided by broadband connections that support 4K streaming, why would anybody make the trip to the movie theatre? Multiplexes services a limited geography and demographic, and have to contend with very expensive real estate space and escalating manpower cost to bring us a new film every Friday.
There is a broad parallel between the rise of online retail and video on demand platforms, and the reasons are often quite similar. The way we consume content is changing rapidly. When I peer over the shoulders of commuters on the Singapore metro, I see Korean TV dramas on every second screen. While handheld screens are not the best way to properly appreciate, say Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s The Revenant, these devices do satisfy the basic hunger for stories. But what happens to serious independent cinema in the whole bargain? What about those hundreds of filmmakers passionately toiling away, trying to create that piece of art that is best enjoyed in a dark room, on a very big screen? There is no good answer to that question.
The charm of the darkened cinema hall is eternal. Large TV screens still cannot provide the collective gasp when Leonardo DiCaprio fights off a giant grizzly or the hushed silence of the audience as it walks out after a three-hour viewing of the same-sex romance Blue is the Warmest Colour. But for the time being, Netflix and other streaming platforms are extending a critical lifeline to independent cinema.
Living outside India, I can only thank my lucky stars when a film like Chauthi Koot, Gurvinder Singh’s masterful take on the Punjab insurgency of the 1980s, pops up on my TV screen. I have seen the film twice on a big screen, including at an important film festival in Singapore where it won the top prize. Both times, the quality of projection wasn’t the same. The picture was darker in one instance and the size of the projected image vastly different. Watching that same film on a large screen TV through Netflix should have been an inferior experience, but it was not.
The theatrical release that the French are clamouring for is a dream for independent filmmakers in India. A recent case in point is Subhashish Bhutiani’s Mukti Bhavan, which despite universal critical acclaim hardly made a mark at the box office. It is not that viewers don’t want to watch these films, but there is a lack of screenings at convenient times and the minor inconvenience of ditching your friends who may want to catch the latest Bollywood flick.
The availability of such gems on a convenient VOD platform ensures that films find their rightful audience and also keep serious filmmaking alive. Most of the better independent movies made in recent times, from Nagraj Manjule’s searing Fandry and Chaitanya Tamhane’s brilliant Court, are available on VOD platforms to be enjoyed at leisure.
Another factor is the quality of the print. In the older system, a non HD 480p DVD print was the best bet, but now these films stream in full HD, much closer to how they were meant to be appreciated.
Censorship is another important factor to consider. Shlok Sharma’s Haraamkhor, which suffered in its brief theatrical outing due to censor cuts, comes together beautifully when viewed online. Filmmakers are struggling to make challenging content, and if we take away self-censorship, then Indian cinema is much better off.
Historically, film evolved from theatre, and the size of the cinema screen roughly approximated the width and height of the theatre stage. When television, with a roundish and very convex black and white screen arrived, cinema was already captivating audiences in full colour and Dolby sound on gigantic screens. But the small format TV certainly did not stop anybody from enjoying films at home.
While technology is changing our consumption habits, the question is this: how do we relate to a piece of art in a digital environment? The sublime experience of contemplating a Rembrandt masterpiece in a museum cannot be replicated on a laptop, but that digital screen can enable us to get impossibly close to that same work of art and appreciate individual brushstrokes. So how does cinema cope with this challenge, especially when it is conceived and created as a work of art and not as commodified entertainment?
It is a difficult question that will resolve itself as the quality of technology available at home improves – think cheap virtual reality headsets that immerse us in Lawrence of Arabia as we lie flat in bed, in our own “gold class”, having minimised our carbon footprint by not making that trip to a downtown mall.
And Pedro Almodovar may yet live to eat his words. Television screens bigger than 100 inches will absolutely dwarf us when we sit six feet away from them, which gives a better ratio than being 60 feet away from a 40-feet wide screen, not to mention your popcorn-munching, cola-slurping, Whatsapp-addicted neighbour.
Hollywood superstar Will Smith defended Netflix at Cannes, saying that he was happy that his children could watch films that were not playing near his home. This is a debate that is bound to become as personal as the smell of a new book versus Kindle. Until then, we should count our blessings and enjoy cinema on the biggest screen we can find.
Amit Agarwal is a Singapore-based filmmaker.
