[Reader-list] khetro broadsheet02 articles- Rekindling The Box Offices

[Arijit Paul]

Dear friends,
I have got of the khetro broadsheet02. This issue focuses on the ongoing debate about the changing shape of cinema and theatre with the intervention of newer  technologies. It also carries articles on Bengali desktop on Linux platform, and the development of interactive identification keys for monitoring biodiversity. I think the articles will be of interest to many of you. So I am posting them for open reading and discussion.
Arijit.  
 
SECOND POSTING:
 
 
Rekindling The Box Offices          
Nilotpal Majumdar      

 

The last time I visited New Tarun for a night show was many years ago. I didn�t even remember the film. The unbearable stink and the quality of audience, its ecstatic allegiance towards the mystic world of moving images, the filthy noise of appreciation made me leave the show much before the last frame. It was an enigma of shafts of light on the burnt out screen, the suspected rapist being thrashed, the dance, the car chase and the anguish of futile love. I was married then and had opted to be a compulsive, overtly protective husband. It was raining and we had laboured to set out for an outing. But we left the auditorium when a drunken man threw up in the row ahead. Graciously, I would like to put it as �cultural shock�.

 

New Tarun is a cinema hall in the northern fringe of Kolkata. It was then a highly charged center of great attraction for many of those city humbugs who now are in their mid-life crisis. The New Tarun had been the biggest influence in my post-childhood corruption. It made me believe that for a front stall ticket, either you have to fight or have to sneak in violating the norms of queues. No one could afford to be civilized and miss the show. I used to sell our old newspapers to raise funds for entry tickets. The thickly crowded lobby, the chanting ticket �blackers�, the hairclips and Afghan Snow and the police baton-charge on the vulnerable front stall counter - all had been part of the light of life in the magic fount of Lumiere marvel. The glass-covered display board was screaming with photo-mounts of matinee icons, exposed cleavages of celluloid seductresses, the swords, revolvers, firearms, the spinning frills of cabaret dancers, the spill of blood or severely butchered �baddie�.
 It was a beehive buzzing day and night. It had pushed me to seek solitude in the bathroom for an intensely delicate reason for hours between euphoria and sainthood. The theatre dared me to dream symptoms of Robin Wood. I signed up for membership of a bodybuilding club after watching Samson and Delilah and the same film inspired me to compose my first love letter, a yearning for eyelids and glowing nails. If I turned myself out to be a notorious �matribhakto�, the ominous suburban cinema hall had been the lone preacher. New Tarun provided all that I looked for in adolescent thrills. The theatre campus was actually a captive breeding ground for non-elitist activities of the economically marginalized. Foodstuff and tea-stalls, paan-cigarettewallas, the �luchi baudi� and the school dropouts � it was a space throbbing with anti-academic, anti-establishment guts. With the blackers, the dadas, clerks, bribe-seeking constables of the Calcutta Police, the teachers of geography and woodcraft,
 liquor barons and fishermen - the theatre campus was a happy world of people of all classes. In this pluralistic hierarchical order the boisterous ushers and the box-office men were on a high. 

 New Tarun is now a haunted place with a wrecked neon sign hanging overhead. It has a lone paan shop, a super lotto agent opposite, hammy adverts of the next release of a film in the multiplex through a crackling Radio Mirchi bulletin. A few blackers and dadas have switched over to real estate or become Marxists. Some of them died during the turbulent seventies chasing the obligatory dream of a model classless society. But those powerful men of the past � the ushers, guards and the box office countermen bargain in limbo where the pull-down mechanism does not crank even once a day. It is a dilapidated assembly where all the ceiling fans are not powered and roof lights do not glow. A rusted jumbo can is a refuge for cockroaches, rats race around on the cracked floor. The margerine-yellow screen has turned almost copper. On a lone poster of a sex-education film the female protagonist�s skin is enveloped with opaque blue. They all wait, suspending disbelief, for the crowds to come. The
 ushers wait with their dim torches. The muted lobby yearns for the tramping of hurried feet. The commerce of illusion, however, does not bring people in. At the end of the third bell the ushers either cancel the show or together watch a particular reel for juicy content. How long will New Tarun remain as a non-functional theatre before it converts itself into a marriage-hall or a residential complex? 

 

One sunny day, a drizzle of postcards suddenly buffs our sky of hope. The prophecy is irreversible � we got to know another revolution called Digital, the age of total interactivity beyond cultural and emotional frontiers. The media artists discern the thrill of autonomy � the freedom of articulation from political, economic and distribution control. The digital revolution has, as saying goes, democratized visual expression all over the world and has reduced the dependence of a film artist on finite audience, skilled technicians, money power and mystery of bulky technology. Progressively, the horizon is opening up to the author from creation to screening for infinite viewers. It is possible for any one to evolve a visual vocabulary that interprets our time and space. We started enjoying the idea that our expressions would have a desirable interactivity and create a niche market for cultural products. The demon of the Hollywood narrative regime is suddenly taken aback. The age of
 independents has arrived and has reversed the grim protocol of storytellers� aesthetics � that is how the modern myth goes! 

 

The digital scope and hope indicate that the audiovisual industry is soon going to be the greatest enterprise in our times. Enter the management gurus, corporate support, institutional finance, erudite brand developers and marketing jargon. Now the audience of cinema is envisaged to be a gang of passionate shoppers with defined brand loyalties! How many New Taruns will be converted to malls with digital projection? The business of illusion is shifting its prospect base to multiplexes � essentially shopping malls of garments, jewellery, innerwear of international brands with burgers, beer pubs and massage parlours of freaky games. It implies that the future of cinema is seeking shelter in the glossy supermarkets! 

 

I am sure I won�t see �luchi baudi� any more. She does not have any relevance in this �multiplex� world. Her frying pan and gleaming oven during intermission of shows had been a viable initiative, I knew. The dream is soaring all over that neo-supermarkets� box offices would finance and support independent artists to create a viable, effective visual narrative. Does not it sound too surreal? Who are we are going to sell our freedom for � multiplex chain owners or corporate professionals? Or even to the super god of capital who does not have the perception of non-viability. The digital monolith would be nurturing a cultural revolution that we did not possibly dream up. The bubbles of multiplex and imaging for upmarket consumption equate disastrously the present state of affairs of New Tarun. Hope Tarkovsky won�t mind if Nostalgia is screened free for those who buy a pair of hotdogs. 

 

 * Nilotpal Majumdar is a filmmaker presently heading the Editing Dept. in Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, Calcutta.      



		
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