Cinema is dying and we’re killing it
Written in May 2019.
The recent release of Avengers: Endgame is pretty much all you can see on social media these days. I know it’s marketing genius when even my dad, who’ll wax poetic about The Godfather any given day but couldn’t care less about what was in theaters right now unless I told him about the new Scorsese movie, asks me over the crappy connection, “Have you booked your tickets for Endgame?” But what I hear quite often alongside my friends’ accounts of how they saw Endgame is the complaint that the crowd wasn’t good, people were hooting and whistling, the hall was too full. A friend even went so far as to find hidden deep somewhere a screening where his three friends and him would be the only patrons in the hall. I feel perhaps these friends, some of them filmmakers themselves, misinterpret the intent of a filmmaker or maybe it’s us filmmakers who project the wrong intent.
To watch a film of such grandiose spectacle as Avengers: Endgame in an empty cinema in silence would be quite a travesty in my opinion. While there are certain films whose directors would perhaps appreciate that the audience sit in mute silence for 3 hours and then clap and get up and leave, certain films that would benefit from this style of watching, most films however are not those films. The communal experience of film watching is all about reacting to the story playing out in front of you.
“Cinema is gone”, Martin Scorsese says, “The cinema I’m making and that I grew up with is gone.” In an interview[1] he asks what kind of experience the communal filmgoing experience will be. He pointed to the proliferation of images and the overreliance on superficial techniques as trends that have diminished the power of cinema to younger audience. As a lover of movies and as a filmmaker I have great reverence for Martin Scorsese and his films. But I have a different idea about why cinemas are perhaps already gone.
The reason why I love the cinema is that you can see immediately the reaction to a movie. When a film is made the filmmakers put great effort into making a film that will elicit a reaction from the audience. Laugh! Cry! Go “Woah!” when something just blew your mind. The filmmaker surely wanted that.
In this interview[2] with Kasim Baig, the projectionist at Chandan cinema[3], he talks about how he could predict the success of a film by the number of coins being flung at the screen and the volume of the claps and whistles. The director Rohit Shetty has talked about how he learnt filmmaking by observing the Chandan audience’s reaction to the film. While directing he knows what shot’s going to make the audience leap off their seats cheering their hearts out.
What’s killing the movie theater is that people aren’t reacting. Or, it’s that they consider reacting to films to be a bad thing. Well if you feel the person sitting next to you is being an irritating asshole by cheering when the hero magically attains superhuman strength and bashes the villain to the deepest recesses of hell what do you do? Stream the movie on your amazing home theater system that has the best picture quality and sound. Streaming isn’t what’s killing the theater. The attitude that movies should be seen in absolute stillness and silence with no distractions from the image whatsoever is what’s killing the theater.
Now make no mistake, this is not an argument for barbarous acts like talking over the movie or using your phone. That is disrespectful, not just to the movie but to your fellow patrons of the cinema. But dear god please react to the movies!
Those big, awesome action sequences aren’t directed for you to silently stare at them. They’re directed for you to get all pumped up about them. The art of making cinema is partly the art of orchestrating your audience’s reaction. And you want them to react to those moments you worked so hard to create. You aren’t disrespecting any artists or taking anything away from your enjoyment of the film by enjoying it communally.
The reason for loving the theater, to me, isn’t the projection technology used, it isn’t the size of the screen or the quality of the speaker system, though sure improvements in those areas are appreciated, it’s the ability to enjoy the movie together with other people and see how they react, make a snarky comment here and cheer there.
[1] https://www.apnews.com/931d13ebfb6245e0b00169d7447208d2
[2] https://www.filmcompanion.in/bollywood-stars-remembering-the-iconic-chandan-theatre/
[3] An old single screen theater in Mumbai.