Watching a movie-in a cinema hall

Went to see a movie in a cinema hall, actually it became two movies in quick succession in Mumbai and Pune. Thought I'd write about it earlier, but with the half-crazy schedules I've been keeping of late, it wasn't possible to write earlier.
My memories of cinema halls and whole experience of watching a movie are coloured by my experiences from earlier days in India when cinema halls were an entirely different species.
The cinema halls now were far superior in the picture and sound quality. With digital projection, the images were crisp and sharp, colour rendition was immaculate and the sound on Dolby and DTS systems was absolutely terrific, enhancing your whole movie going experience.
In a first day first show movie, it was a bit difficult to decide if some of the crowd were not a 'paid' one. Then there were the TV Crews outside, wanting 'bites' as they call them- the colloquial version of short snippets for TV or 'sound bytes'.
But yes, technically the experience of the cinema hall was quite breathtaking. Add the crowd to that and you can understand once again the longing for the 'cinema' experience. The sheer 'immersive' nature of the cinema hall experience doesn't quite come back in the home theater or small screen experience.
It would be tempting to say that certain stuff like pornography maybe better as individual private experience, but the success of Sunny Leone and the moving of soft-porn into the respectable sections of film production lend the whole thing a different dimension.
So do we belong to the cinema? Yes i do, too old to change that now.
Or maybe especially so now, when the boundaries have all merged into the 'moving image' business.

A Time to Ponder

Back at my Meerut base after two months of shuttling between Pune and Mumbai.

Teaching at different places, watching a few movies and a few job interviews- that was my time away at Western India.

Teaching was easy sometimes- like in teaching TV at MIT-ISBJ. I'd worked that out already, so it was not too tough to adapt to the knowledge level of the students.

Then came the tough one- teaching about cinema and the plastic arts. Had a tough times simplifying this to a level where the students would comprehend it all.

Yesterday it all came back to me when I began reading Andre Bazin's What is Cinema after a gap of thirty years or so and found that I had imbibed it in detail. All the theory coming out of my head was straight out of Bazin! My head spun when I realised that. How long do things stay in one's mind? Now I don't know, a few days back I might had a pat answer but not now.

The theory teaching eventually went off well, at least for me. Don't know how it went for the students as they seemed more eager to learn more 'practical' things. Its a classical problem, the students do not yet understand the relevance of theory to their work as artists, they only want to learn practical stuff- technical and craft knowledge.

All this became clear to me even more when I saw the dissertation films of the final year students. The work was interesting, innovative, full of glimpses of talent that could mature beautifully. But clearly without the knowledge of theory they lacked the ability to position themselves in a tradition and hence explore the limits of their work.

OK, all this is difficult stuff when you're younger and still struggling to find your 'voice'. I mean I can state now when I've been through these stages. But I guess its important to explain these contexts to the student-artists- that they work in a context, not in isolation.

That must have been the greatness of the Ajanta or Mahaballipuram artists- knowing and living their traditions, while today we have to struggle to find our traditions.