Perhaps we should recall that cinema came to be as an extension of theatre with the help of technology. Now, technology wants to cut cinema to size and make money of it.
The efforts of online streaming portals to fit cinema into a template targeting those who can afford it should be seen with caution.
However, the prevailing worry that online streaming platforms would eat into good cinema and film appreciation, as it has always existed, is rather out of place.
It is a fact, each time and age would have fads that gradually fade away, when profound understanding of reality would throw open the doors of perception and force the collective to reclaim something that was on the brink. Good cinema should not be reduced to apps to be salvaged later.
Such a pitiable state should not befall cinema. And that is where film festivals are crucial. To celebrate cinema in true dimension and scale.
Surely, online streaming do help to widen the reach of good cinema. Perhaps a film like Roma would not reach a certain audience if it weren’t for Netflix.
As the 11th Bengaluru International Film Festival wraps up, there is an urgent need to put the record straight. Film festivals are to remain, streaming or not.
Streaming is just a vehicle at the ready. It does, indeed, help augment the cause of good filmmaking by ensuring reach, but would never have a bearing on the direction which cinema as an art should take or will take in the future.
A film festival brings people together who are driven by the sheer power of the medium to influence thought and reflection in a collective. Nevertheless the film festival is occasional, the cultural riches that it leaves you with is far greater in comparison when you are boxed in a corner glued to your TV watching a flick.
It is an organic social gathering too -- a true social medium of sorts if you like. A get together where all aspects of a film are celebrated by the viewer, the critic and the maker after a screening -- a rare occurrence in itself.
A streaming portal cannot provide any of these facets of organic human interaction and reflection which is dwindling by day as we all shrink into our gadgets in isolation. Most celebrated films deal with human relationships. So, isn’t it better to reflect on cinema person-to-person once in a while?
So much thought has gone into the evolution of film, and most definitively, all that wasn’t to package it and sell it till the last viewer -- that too a viewer who can pay a premium, at least in the Indian context.
To digress, for instance, we did communicate, with much more clarity and affection towards one another until a time came when we were forced to express ourselves in emoji and suchlike. Ease of access should not belittle the value of any mode or form of communication, if we are to see cinema as a mode of profound human reflection.
About a couple of decades ago we were social in the truest of senses, before the onslaught of social media on our discourse. We wrote letters, sent postcards and booked trunk calls then.
But the so-called social media has awakened all sorts of demons now, and as we speak is spawning confusion largely, apart from triggering depression in teenagers to mob lynchings. It is turning out to be the most antisocial space humans have ever created.
It has skewed our perception, made us all increasingly non-receptive, indeed rendering us to a state of confusion. And that confusion is no good for art, and especially for cinema.
In such times, film festivals are not to been seen as relics from the past. They shall so remain as a curated place where human-to-human interaction is celebrated with cinema taking centre stage -- where great stories from far and wide are told on a wide canvas.
A streaming app strips cinema of its glory, reduces it to the level of discourse that we come across online of late. Do we want to discuss serious film there, where being oneself is often questioned? Are we even discussing anything at all there in context of late?
The art of cinema cannot and would not shrink to handheld devices or online entities that charge a fee. That goes against the very idea of good cinema. And of course, film festivals are at the heart of that idea and will always be whenever or wherever a great film is made, released or distributed. It shall definitely reach you at a festival if it has to.
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