For a diehard Hindi movie buff, even the inane potboilers produced in the 1980s — when a lot of us were still school-going kids — were a source of entertainment. ‘Entertainment’ is the key word here as those were the days when a visit to the cinema showing the latest release featured prominently on the weekend schedules of families. This may still be the case in the metropolis and big cities, but in the smaller towns movie viewing in the theatre has been a dying habit. The glory days of cinema as the singular mode of popular entertainment have just petered out almost in the blink of an eye.

Almost all Indians of even not-so-earlier generations in the small towns and cities had fed on a staple diet of films of the commercial variety. Leave aside the works of celebrated filmmakers which appealed to connoisseurs, run-of-the-mill movies were the same in all the Indian languages. That is why one could watch a Malayalam ‘feature film’ (as the term was used) on Doordarshan on Sunday afternoons and follow the storyline even without understanding a single dialogue! The commercial movies are still the same in all regions of the country.

In those days, the masses were so much taken in by the larger-than-life antics if screen heroes that they even devoured the assembly line of Chinese kung fu flicks starring Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan or a clone with their gravity-defying action sequences. So much for average cinema viewers with ‘esoteric’ tastes. It is not that there has been any slump in movie making in Bollywood or other regional film industries. With slick production values, cinema has emerged as a multi-crore-rupee business with stars commanding astronomical prices more than ever before. But there seems to be a dearth of takers for such fantastic reel spectacles in the magnitude witnessed even a little more than a decade back.

At least this is the impression that one gets by looking at the thin audience presence in the remaining cinema theatres in Assam. Theatre halls, which have already closed shop, are now being used as godowns or bank buildings as had happened in Jorhat, often referred to as the cultural capital of the State. Others are simply crumbling down as they lie unused.

It is anybody’s guess as to how the cinema halls in the smaller towns are still operating. It is hard to imagine that those used to be bustling, overcrowded places in the not-so-distant past. Ticket ‘blacking’ (a desi term for touting) sounds like a big joke today. So does a house-full board.

Too much professionalism, too much detailing and too much packaging, coupled with more refined audience tastes, have given rise to a plethora of choices and no compulsions. The glut of movies, releasing right, left and centre and possibly in all languages (Hollywood productions are now dubbed in Hindi and other major Indian languages, too), gives the viewer hardly any chance to relish the cinematic moments, so to say. The lack of performance is made up by use of great technique and craft.

So earlier films were made either for classes or masses. There is no such distinction now as this is the era of crossover cinema. If anything, there is an increasing trend to cater to the tastes of the multiplex (the mini, state-of-the-art version of the conventional theatre to rope in the moneyed, consumerist viewer) audiences.

How the cinema trade pundits judge a hit or a flop nowadays is a mystery. No wonder the classifications have widened with ‘superhits,’ ‘hits,’ ‘semi-hits,’ ‘averages,’ ‘flops’ and so on. At this rate one wonders whether any modern-day film will live in the public memory after it is out of the theatres. Of course one can still see a movie on the video in the comfort of the drawing room, but this hardly appeals to the sensibilities in the manner a picture on the big screen does.

Films like Sholay, Deewar and Bobby, produced in the 1970s, set benchmarks for the Bollywood film industry. Not to forget the social and comic gems like Anand, Bawarchi, Mili, Abhimaan and Golmaal directed with such enduring quality by the late Hrishikesh Mukherjee. Do we have any film in the recent times which really stayed on the audience long after the end credits rolled.

More than anything else, today’s actors and filmmakers are perfectionist who believe in a great deal of method and technique. In their well-planned forays, they sometimes miss out on the soul.

The morass in which the cinema halls in small towns and cities have been stuck seems to have no immediate respite in sight. The advent of 24x7 television, coupled with the easy availability of VCDs, both pirated and original, have sounded the death knell for many of them.

Such is the situation that the theatre owners do not even seem to be recovering the costs if screening movies, let alone make profits. Many films, which do well in other centres, fail to make the turnstiles click in the local theatres.

When asked if it was possible to get the family crowds again by improving facilities and quality of service, a cinema operator in Jorhat pointed out that it would entail a hike in ticket rates. “Will the audience be willing to pay more for a ticket in Jorhat or other smaller centres?” He posed. “Our people are spending money on cars and clothes,” he stressed. But they have no time to indulge in the old pastime of going to a theatre to see a movie, he said.

The concept of mini cinema halls is also not at all economically viable, the cinema operator felt. What is the guarantee that all 500 seats in a mini hall will be occupied? He asked. Setting up such halls will also require substantial funds which stand in danger of being lost if people do not take any fancy to them, he feared.

The matter of serious concern is that there are not many takers of Assamese films in the small centres of the state, too. The village audiences are simply missing.

jchangmai@gmail.com

Jitu Changmai