To the movies

i made the image above in another context entirely... which i will write about some day, but i think it paints a decent picture for this post

Once upon a time I would watch movies all the time, 3-4 of them a day if I could. I would procrastinate during the 6-8 day gaps between board exams by watching movies for 5 days straight and last minute studying/cramming for the rest. (It should be noted that I scored pretty well regardless). Moving images spoke to me immediately and I was already rounding up friends as a 12 year old to act in my little comedy sketches and music videos. I would watch video essays on film studies and daydream about being both a maker of as well as someone who resided in filmic worlds. I remember coming across this book at one of my occasional but very cherished trips to Sapna Bookhouse (where we’d go to pick up stationery and notebooks for the coming school year) - Film Studies for Dummies - and reading it cover to cover. Just for the love of the game, never really taking the idea of working in films as a career seriously.

A little snippet from a book I used to hold pretty close to my heart growing up — 

“I lifted the remote control, pushed the Play button, and started the video. I guess, in that moment, I also started my new life as Cameron-the-girl-with-no-parents. Ruth was sort of right, I would learn: A relationship with a higher power is often best practiced alone. For me it was practiced in hour-and-half or two-hour increments, and paused when necessary. I don't think it's overstating it to say that my religion of choice became VHS rentals, and that its messages came in Technicolor and musical montages and fades and jump cuts and silver-screen legends and B-movie nobodies and villains to root for and good guys to hate. But Ruth was wrong, too. There was more than just one other world beyond ours; there were hundreds and hundreds of them, and at 99 cents apiece I could rent them all.”

― Emily M. Danforth, The Miseducation of Cameron Post

Of course, this is probably familiar to most anyone who has fallen in love with cinema (or anything?) - there is a little seed, a desire to escape to somewhere else, and the right thing catches you at the right time. You’re a goner. Everyone’s journey is different, but I’d say you find the same threads everywhere.

As someone who could very easily disappear into intricately crafted multi-chapter daydreams at will while growing up and be amazingly content at not participating in the present, it wasn’t very hard for me to get hooked onto these titillating audio-visual worlds. I loved beautiful visuals and costumes and sets, musical interludes, montage sequences, intelligent cuts, and stories I could stay inside after the credits rolled. I loved the unexplainable things I would feel, the way some films would simply speak to me in ways I'd never been spoken to before. I began to read and learn about film appreciation and criticism, but I wasn’t too much a critic, and mostly kept an open mind, willing to try anything once. Or twice, even thrice. I simply felt my way through everything. It's how I do most things.
Growing up, I was drawn to anything that promised me a hint of the illicit and the taboo - whatever was under the counter, inaccessible, that would open up a Pandora's box of delights to be cautiously savored by my curious inclinations. I learned to get comfortable with the unsaid, the implied, the right beneath your nose, the difficult to work with, the hard to understand, the opaque and inky, low quality, roughly subtitled, staggery, laggy, grainy, and hard to find. I’m not sure how well this has served me in real life, but it keeps things interesting I suppose.

It was all mostly a hobby or so until college. I began consuming a much wider range of films, and was exposed to a lot more than my early years of internet access had led me to (which was already quite a lot). I discovered that I wasn’t alone - that there were others like me who had hard drives filled to the brim with more films than one could care to count. Taking people through these hard drives, bartering films, showing my new friends my ‘core’ movies as a kind of love language - an invisible - ‘hey I am trying to tell you this is who I am and what I care about’ - and learning about theirs - was my favourite thing to do after classes.  And there was so much time to do so, watch literally anything and  everything we could get our hands on. There was no concept of anything being a ‘waste of time’.

I was able to take classes where I could - get this - watch films and talk about them? Write about them? As college work? Amazing. I took it seriously, more seriously than I took the classes I was probably supposed to. I moved to Mumbai after college to ‘try out’ working at a film studio, I figured I might as well. I enjoyed it. Learned a bunch. Met amazing people. Did some fulfilling and not-so-fulfilling work. Lived out a few dreams, had a few fall through, etc.

What was happening around this time though, was that I kind of fell out of love with watching films. I found this little note I’d written - around 4 years ago I think - right around the time when I’d just moved to Bombay, in a kind of post-covid world. Sharing it with some edits.

i haven’t been able to rekindle my love for film in a long long time which sucks because one day i am going to write a book about how watching anything and everything i could get my grubby red nail polish chipped hands on changed my life (how torrents and private trackers and members on dying out forums or ephemeral chatsites or that one kid you followed on tumblr who is probably in college now, how the weird ways new things fall into your lap cuz of the internet also changed my life, hard drives stocked with all the things i’ve ever seen and so many i haven’t)

i hold out hope that i will fall into another cinephile phase yet again, now that i think of it, one of the reasons I fell in love with cinema was because i was out on the hunt for every queer film i could find, ones that even just barely hinted at it and i sat through sooo many art films with promised ‘queer themes’ lmao and suddenly found myself interested in things like auteur theory and cinematography and mise en scene etc

i miss when there was no netflix no streaming subscriptions miss when all the movies that were gonna be on the tv for the week were listed down in the newspaper and i would circle the times and then watch all these weird films that had no business being on indian cable tv and record the more questionable ones and watch them when my parents were out, and then seeking out more more more on the internet and going out of your way to discover what was out there cuz there was no place to 'curate’ any of it for you so your taste was really as vast and varied as the many rabbit holes you could go down on the internet, and the recs came from the many million people i met for minutes on here, our long winding internet histories crossed for a second and enough to send me down so many more trajectories, or comments left on old af forums or yahoo! answer questions or whatever years ago that gave you a tidbit a word to further fall into and discover a subculture or idea or genre that would change your life oh my god i love the internet man it’s so great and it is not the same anymore right? or am i just old?

and now it’s all so laughably down the same funnel cuz even all the edgy internet people have a 'list’ and others follow that list and don’t really find the new and wonderful for themselves yknow or am I just being blinkered and blinded

I did not end up falling into another cinephile phase again. There were some spurts, here and there, but for the most part it kind dwindled and dawdled and sputtered and now it doesn’t hold the same place in my heart anymore. Which I have mourned enough, along with other things, like my childhood/growing up etc. and mostly don’t hold on to too much anymore. It was very much an identity thing too - being a film person - and then all of a sudden, slowly but surely, I wasn’t. Maybe I didn’t have so much time anymore, the practicalities of adult life caught up with me, and I couldn’t sit around through 2-3 hour films just because. Maybe working with so much video/audio content kind of fried something. That doesn’t feel fully true. Maybe I became a little cynical, a little jaded, distracted, disillusioned, tired. It was harder to play make believe. I couldn’t keep running away. That doesn’t feel right either.

Another likely place to look is probably the insane streams of content and information that hurtle past us every day, and the impatience and unwillingness to just, sit, with something that doesn’t immediately give you a payoff within seconds. Why would you? Sit with the difficult, the inane, the obscure? Something that doesn’t connect with you immediately? The slow burn, the seeping ink, wait for it to engulf you? Sit with anything at all? You can tell that films these days pre-empt this - some of them are still quite good, and some of them don’t cater to it at all. But I think this is not my point.

I guess I’m still chasing a certain time, innocence, need - when I was just trying to find anything, something, that would make me feel less alone, take me somewhere else. Now it just feels like everything that has to be said has been said, all the edges of the map filled out. What’s the point? What are you looking for? There are fewer reasons to lose myself and give myself completely over to something else.

And I guess sometimes you just… lose interest. It’s a tough pill to swallow. It happens.

But I felt like writing this post because I find myself looking for new worlds again. And because I think I have a nagging suspicion that maybe these passing feelings are simply not fully true.

It’s natural for me to immediately seek out solace and comfort in the moving image - 1-2-3 hour time stretches alone in my room where I don’t have to be in the present moment. I can jump into a hole and emerge a while later. I keep trying it out to see if it’ll work - sometimes it does. I’m really happy when it does. I hold out hope for another little film phase again. Maybe it won’t come back in the wide eyed teenage form I keep imagining it as. And I am going to make movies again, even if not in the way I thought I would. I guess I have a few things to hold onto.

In the mean time, I’m going to rewatch Y tu mamá también today. And maybe Bande à part tomorrow.

 

“But if renting all those movies had taught me anything more than how to lose myself in them, it was that you only actually have perfectly profound little moments like that in real life if you recognize them yourself, do all the fancy shot work and editing in your head, usually in the very seconds that whatever is happening is happening. And even if you do manage to do so, just about never does anyone else you’re with at the time experience that exact same kind of moment, and it’s impossible to explain it as it’s happening, and then the moment is over.”

― Emily M. Danforth, The Miseducation of Cameron Post