Split screens

Rubrics can be misleading. The word "marquee" evokes a grand theatre, where films are screened in the way they were originally made to be shown. Yet writing a column with that name feels a tad dishonest given how rarely I view movies - old movies, at least - in marquee-like conditions. When it does happen, the effect is invariably magical. Early this year I saw a few Hollywood classics, including Joseph Mankiewicz's All about Eve, in a south Delhi restaurant with a private screening space (sadly the place has now closed). These weren't genuine "big-screen" experiences - at a rough estimate, the surface area was around 12 times larger than that of my plasma TV at home - but they came close enough. Besides, it was a darkened room with soft lights lining the wall to simulate the theatre experience, and the small audience was polite enough (and invested enough in the film) to keep their cellphones on silent.

Similarly, a highlight of my Mumbai film festival experience in October was watching Victor Erice's 1980 film El Sur at the venerable Liberty hall. The seats were creaky to say the least (I had to get up twice before I found one that allowed me to stay more-or-less upright) but there was something apt about experiencing Erice's stately paced, magnificently photographed work - about a girl pondering the mysteries of the adult world through her father's past, moving between reality, memory and speculation - in this relatively empty hall. By tilting my head at a certain angle and narrowing my eyes only slightly, I could pretend I was alone with the events unfolding on the large screen before me. Nothing on the periphery, no distractions - pure immersion.

Hearing about the death of Peter O'Toole this week, David Lean's sprawling epic Lawrence of Arabia came instantly to mind. Anyone who has seen that film in the widescreen format, in a big hall (pretentious columnist alert: I haven't), will tell you that its vast desert setting is a presence unto itself, informing our view of characters and events; watch it in a smaller format, and in an important sense you are seeing a completely different film from the one that was made. Besides, given the reductive qualities of the content - the populist approach to history, the simplified portrayal of Arabs - one can argue that the best reason to watch Lawrence of Arabia is for its visual qualities anyway. Yet in our world today there are YouTube screens, and smart-phone screens, and people happy to watch even this sort of movie on them.

Of course, old ideas about what cinema is have been falling away for some time. In his book The Big Screen, the critic David Thomson - who, being in his seventies, could be forgiven for having conservative views about how films should be watched - pragmatically accepts that the definition of "screen" must encompass everything from old-style single-screen halls to the tiny screens that now hold us in thrall. "Once upon a time, we defined screen as a place where things were shown" he says wryly, as he contemplates the omnipresence of cell-phones in modern life, "but now an older meaning has crept back - a screen can be a masking device behind which things and humans may hide."

The revolution has many upsides, of course. Some of the most dedicated movie buffs I know watch rare films the only way they can, though online streams. When NFDC recently uploaded its restored prints of "parallel" films from the 1980s and 1990s - films that were once holy grails - on its website (http://www.cinemasofindia.com/), it was a welcome egalitarian step. But there are cautionary lessons too: movie buffs have pointed out that the original aspect ratios have been altered to fit the computer-screen format. And if that sounds like technical jargon or nitpicking, it basically means that the images on the screen are unnaturally stretched out (making Laurel look like Hardy, or KK Raina like Amjad Khan), which can't be a good thing for even a casual movie-watcher. Clearly, for all the fine work that is being done, a balance needs to be struck between functionality and the preservation of aesthetic virtues. I wonder if the logical next step in film-watching will entail the use of special lenses that will replicate the immediacy and grandeur of the big-screen experience even on a tiny screen. If that happens, our species may never need to look up from its phones.

Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer
jaiarjun@gmail.com