This short reflection is more about the experiences that have been lost, and is not accessible to me anymore. There is always the option of going back to the smaller towns and checking out the movies in those halls to regain

I miss the movie halls of yesteryear. Yes I do. No, I am not talking about the multiplexes. A desire for a movie comes in often. And that comes too often on a rainy day.

It is during one of these rainy days here in Bangalore, I decided to see the latest Bollywood release. Bangalore in rains is bad. It is depressing at times. And what is a better way to cheer you up than watch a movie. There are numerous things that one sees when deciding to watch a movie. Highly influenced by the cast, the director and the genre of the movies, we fail to go beyond this. However there is one other thing that is a deciding factor.

In my case, the place where I see a movie has a huge impact on the entire temporal experience that is built during the movie watching exercise.

My oldest memories of going to a watch a movie has been with friends in Darjeeling in the small video parlors. As time went by, the venues have ranged from small video parlors to large multiplexes. Needless to say that there is a certain experiential factor that is associated with each place.

Showing movies in these small halls barely the size of a standard drawing room had a certain charm.  The seating area was just a bench and the rows of benches were arranged in an increasing height order. There we were, boarding school boys, out in the town for a day’s outing, eager to catch the movie on show. Having eaten our hearts out with the Chaat and the Chhole Bhature of the near by snack shop Benis café, we would sit in the small parlors. The movies would play in a print that made the characters beyond recognizable face value.  Sometimes the audio acted as the guide for the video and sometimes vice versa. I fail to recall when I stopped watching movies in these small parlors. I guess it was by when we had supposedly grown up and decided it was time to try out the other larger halls.

Following these small video parlors came the lager halls that were the Capital Theater, and the Rink Cinema. For students of a boarding school these theaters was our Cinema Paradiso, and our Gulabi talkies. It was meeting point for us, and often used as a reference in our directions. I am sure there would be many more like me who felt sad when the Capital Theater stopped functioning for a while, and the Rink Cinema was brought down to make way for a multiplex.

Time passed on, and I came to a metropolitan city for my work. Movie watching never stopped.  However, in the present day context, movie watching is restricted only to the multiplexes.

So coming back to where we were, I asked the auto driver to take me to the theater on one of the popular roads here in Bangalore.  I was dying to get a feel of the yesteryears, and was deliberately avoiding going to another of the multiplex. Little did I know that I was in for some shock that day. The old theater was now converted to a Multiplex.  Disappointed at this change, I was almost about to go away when someone suggested me to check out the renovated halls. I am thankful that I stayed back and enjoyed the experience of the movie. The structure of the new theater was the same, but the overall experience seemed different. The name itself felt out of place. Somehow, I felt that the experiences of the olden days were lost.

A class apart
The one thing I miss most in the theaters in the multiplex is the different categories of seating. The thing that baffles me always is why should I have to pay the same amount for sitting in the front row, as compared to the person in the top most rows.  So I miss the balcony, and the dress circle, and the exclusive box seats. The feeling of superiority that was provided by this class differentiation often resulted in an enhanced experience. At the outset, this differentiation opened up the cinema hall to audience of all kind of all classes and sections of a society. Have the money, take the higher-class seats. Just want to see the movie, take the lower class seats. It was as simple as that.

Which Poster?
As a kid, and in the times where the Internet was absent, the very first point of reference to know whether a new movie was in town was the movie posters and the advertisements that would be stuck on the walls of the town. This visual signifier gave information about the movie, the show timings, the main artists in the movie, and the theater in which the movie was playing. Come what may that did not change and the posters on the walls, was our notices and the walls the information hub. The joy of witnessing the poster, the hand made ones especially. One of the things that really had me awed was the presence of these huge hand painted hoardings that announced the arrival of the movie with all its pride. With the coming of the digital age, and no size being too small to get a high quality print, with a longer durability, people opt to go for the digital one.

Value for Money
Ok so let me ask you this? When was the last time you bought a ticket in black and saw a movie? In present day when advance booking of movie tickets is the order of the day, the role of the blackier is not felt in the multiplexes. I remember this one instance when we got 10 tickets at a time for the movie Titanic’s first day first show. The blackier went back a very happy man. There was a certain charm that was associated with this too.

If you are from a middle class family like I am, you will realize that the price of the ticket plays a huge role in the theater that you see the movie. Therefore paying a lower price for a ticket, would still result in the same experience, or not was not something that mattered. What mattered was how cheap I could get the ticket for. Some theaters deliberately had different price of tickets for the different timings of the shows. When I spend Rs 250 on a movie ticket, I often wonder what is it different that I am gaining out of this experience. What are the things that are new to this experience?

Talking of the different show timings. One thing more that I miss is the show timings being called depending on the time. Like we have the morning shows, the matinee, the evening, the late night show. With the ever-increasing multiplex culture, the show timings have shifted randomly and the same names for the shows do not apply anymore. So now a 10 o’clock, and the 10:20 and the 10:45 are all the morning show and so is the 11 am show.

The experience build up
Needless to say the movie is definitely the most important factor in the build up of the experience. The story is important, the cast is crucial and the execution is prima essential.  In the whole it is all about the aesthetic experience that the medium of the film is creating. This experience has been studied by researchers widely.

John Dewey, who spent a lot of his research in analyzing art experiences mentions that any experience of an art form can be analyzed as a rhythmic dance of the aesthetic expression that it is made up of. This dance is primarily composed of 4 parts, namely  a) the Cumulation, b) the conservation, c) the tension and d) the anticipation. These four are present in a temporal framework, and if one was to analyze the films in this framework one gets a better idea.

Cumulation is the build up of the experience in the absence of a priori information about the experience. This is a build up over time before actually confronting the medium of the expression. The human capacity of deriving meanings over things increases in a temporal flow. Cumulation is a thing of the past, leading to the present. Without such a build-up there is no fulfillment and without fulfillment there is no aesthetic experience.  Cumulation is that part of the experience that is essential in the audience making the decision of whether to watch the movie or not. I feel that it is primarily in this part that the choice of the theater plays a huge role.

Conservation is the tendency to hold onto the some of what one has gone through before, in-order to make sense and a better experience of what is in present. Conservation is in the present. This takes cues from the past and is creating the experience along the present. An example in this case is that when you are in the movie theater premises. The experience has already begun. How do you hold on to that experience? The genre of the movie, the storyline, the seats in the theater, the acoustics of the hall, play an important role in this part of the experience.

Tension is where the fun lies mostly! This is where movie-makers make most of their money! Music invariably plays an important role in the tension. Tension refers to both the opposition of energies within the experience and between the people involved in the experience. Any resistance prevents immediate discharge and accumulates tension that renders energy intense. So the quality of the theater in which one is watching the movie enhances the experience. Thus tension appears from this compressed energy that is seeking release. And when they try to do it, another form tries to block it. This struggle is the cause of tension. Analyze it this way, say in a movie, you are in a state of conservation; enjoying the experience of the plot, and suddenly there is a gun-shot. For a moment, you freeze. It may be instantaneous, that time may be in milliseconds, but for that instant the hard pounds an extra beat. This creates that struggle within the energies that were already there with the experience you were having.

Finally comes the anticipation. As one would guess, this is for the future with the knowledge of the present and the past. This thus occurs in two temporal phases. The first one occurs before the aesthetic experience is taken pace, and the other during the aesthetic experience taking place. Thus there is an expectation build up in this. When that expectation is met, the past is conserved as if the anticipation is molded into the experience itself. When it is not met, the conservation is breached. Often this would also lead to tension and then further lead back to conservation.
In Conclusion

No, do not get me wrong. I am not opposed to the Multiplexes, and I have enjoyed the experience of it every time I have visited one. If one were to go on the facilities and the overall comfort that the multiplexes provide, they win hands down.

This short reflection is more about the experiences that have been lost, and is not accessible to me anymore. There is always the option of going back to the smaller towns and checking out the movies in those halls to regain those lost experiences. It is this conversion of the traditional movie theaters into multiplexes that I sigh upon.

Tags: Cinema, Cinephilia, Indian Cinema, Movie, Multiplexes, November Issue no-7 2009

Posted By Kshitiz Anand | Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 | Filed under Cover Story