Slum-side theatres

A few years ago, while doing research for a story, I visited a theatre called Moti Talkies in old Delhi. A quick look around gave me a sense of how the communal film-viewing culture in this part of the city was fading. Families rarely came together to watch films now, one of the theatre’s employees told me, so there was little motivation or money for revamping. The barely maintained hall with its crumbling seats specialised in irregular screenings of Bhojpuri films: B-movie posters on the walls showed buxom heroines, street-Romeos trying to look cool in shades, and leering policemen twirling phallic batons.

All this was incongruous with the world I’ve inhabited for the last few years as a multiplex-goer watching the slickest new mainstream films, thinking little of paying Rs 180 for a ticket. But even halls like Moti Talkies seem plush compared to the milieu depicted in an excellent new documentary titled Videokaaran, directed by Jagannathan Krishnan. Shot largely with a handheld camera, this film is about the world of underground video parlours, where viewers gather to see films on the cheap in makeshift settings, and cinema is a passion as well as a business.

The establishing sequence in Videokaaran shows a filmi discussion between a group of lower-class young men. Discussing the relative merits of Rajnikanth and Amitabh Bachchan, they rib each other good-naturedly; one of the boys defensively mutters that he doesn’t get worked up when someone says something bad about his favourite star, but his expression tells a different story. Occasionally the sequence seems staged rather than impromptu, but then you realise that these are people who have been moulded by the movies, so that they are already natural performers — the swagger and the cockiness comes easily.

One face takes over the scene — a young man explaining that every Rajinikanth film has a “message” for society. For instance, in a film where the Tamil superstar played an autorickshaw driver, he resolves that if he sees a pregnant woman walking on the road, he will give her a lift for free, even if it means telling a passenger to get off.

The young man is named Sagai Raj — he used to run a video theatre near a slum — and his personality plays a big part in making Videokaaran such a compelling experience. Partly a philosopher, partly a giggling sociopath, Sagai holds forth on a variety of subjects. He tells stories about smuggling a stack of porn DVDs by passing the package off as a “Mother Mary statue”, and about splicing “masaledaar” scenes into a film to make it more appealing to an audience (“our marketing is more effective than that of filmmakers who spend crores”). Horror and gore films seem childish to him because he’s seen far worse in real life. He’s a street savant, cocksure with just a hint of vulnerability; his laugh is like a horse’s neigh, an odd mix of nervousness and brashness.

Even though this is a documentary, it’s hard not to think of Sagai as a “character”. He is our entry point into a setting where films can be character-building but can also endorse perversions and misconceptions. (Watching a blue film, he says at one point, can help a man “read women accurately”.) And where, even in moments of extreme crisis (such as when the theatre is demolished), one might get succour from inspirational songs sung by movie heroes. This is a story about people whose relationship with cinema is immediate and intense, in ways that most multiplex-goers wouldn’t be able to fathom.

Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer