Free movies for a hungry soul

Forty years ago, my elder brother and his wife setup an eatery on the Puttur-Mangaluru main road to earn their independence and livelihood. The economic conditions of large middle-class families in those days necessitated innovative ways to get ahead in life amid the severe austerity measures!

Soon after the eatery was established, my brother was approached by a theatre representative from the town with a proposal to use the space outside the eatery. A free pass with the privilege of one movie ticket for every new movie was on offer. My brother, a movie buff who collected pamphlets and song books of popular movies and tracked their box-office performance, readily agreed, though he had no time to visit movie halls.

That’s when yours truly, just out of high school and into junior college, entered the scene. I was initiated into the tradition of watching movies. I presume it was also my reward for helping him run the business after school hours.

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With free entry to movies, I watched them all—family dramas, horror movies, comedies, romances, documentaries, world movies, and some unpopular experimental movies. I could watch even the morning shows that were mostly Hollywood movies. Fortunately, the owners had a good sense of quality, and they brought in reasonably good movies. The audience in those days was a mix of educated families, students, and intellectuals with unattended beards.

Soon, I expanded my coverage to include another theatre in the town. I built a poster holder with my own hands and tools, using cardboard sheets and wooden frames, and struck a deal with that theatre. More movies meant increased exposure to the outside world and the philosophy of life, which otherwise was only possible through books, newspapers, speeches, and discourses.

I also joined the movie club in my college, where experts discussed movie-making, the works of Satyajit Ray, Ingmar Bergman, M S Sathyu, and others. When I moved to Mysore for my higher studies, as if by divine intervention, my study buddy’s father was a manager in a twin-hall cinema. Needless to say, our combined studies often ended with free movies in one of those two halls.

It was beyond our imagination that movies in the future would be conveniently watched on demand using devices at home and that the number of theatres in my town would reduce from four to none. The quality of movies shown there, as well as their audience, changed dramatically long before the aforementioned future.

My passion, which gradually changed to “our passion,” continued as I moved across cities and countries, albeit with changing modes of consumption. In response to my children’s request, I am now beginning to list the movies I have seen and share my reviews. Ingmar Bergman said, “Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark room of our souls.”