Opinion Anubhav Sinha writes: Where cinema belongs

Since the Lumière brothers screened eight of their short films on December 28, 1895, at the Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris, since the first film theatres were set up in 1910, the relatively young art of filmmaking has grown through a collaboration of several older art forms — writing, theatre, music, painting, sculpture, and photography. Its practitioners and critics have debated for a century its various aspects but the singular aspect of the business that has never been in doubt has been the collective experience of the audience. And so it remains.

Watching a film with a group of strangers and friends in a theatre is somewhat like eating with family or friends at a fine-dining restaurant. You can order the same food home; the ingredients and the recipe would be the same but you wouldn’t have the ambience, the chatter, the energy. That is what collective experience is about. Food is experienced with the five senses. Cinema, too, demands that.

In popular conversation, cinema is wrongly lumped with television, and increasingly, with streaming platforms. But it is different. To create a “new” experience every time you go to a theatre for a collective experience is cinema’s inherent endeavour. That’s where it earns its joy and money from. Streaming platforms and television are a different experience, a different recipe. They play in a domestic or personal space, on a television, computer or phone screen. I have written, directed and produced for both over the past 30 years. They are less about your experience and more about your attention. They earn their joy and money from how long you were watching. Experience is a priority, too, but only to make you stick around longer.

How do they know how long you will stick around? Well, the algorithm. Before we speak of algorithms, however, we must speak of samosas. Our collective experience of samosas is that we have our favourite streetside shops that we think make the best ones in the world. When a food giant decides he will be the biggest samosa company in town, he will buy and hire all the existing samosa manufacturers. He will conduct a survey: Why do people like samosas? Why do some people eat more samosas than others? Why do some samosas sell more than others? He will collect data from across the city about the patterns and scales of samosa consumption. He will build an algorithm. And he will use this database to “standardise” the production and taste of samosas across the city. The samosa company is driven to maximise profits. The individual artistic innovation of samosas across the city — more green chilli at the Chowk, more coriander at the Ghantaghar — holds little value for it.

The algorithm understands you. You watch three reels about strength training and you are inundated with similar reels. You shape the algorithm but eventually the algorithm shapes you. The algorithm wants you to stay longer, makes you stay longer, makes you follow a predictable pattern. It is a cage. It tries to standardise art and that is the death, or near-death, of it. You stop taking chances.

That’s the reason cinema should relentlessly try to create new experiences. Art wants you to experience new skies. The leap of faith doesn’t tell you where you will land. You may crash but that is the fun of the flight.

Sadly, we are atomising as a society and the idea of collective experience is declining. At bus stops, on trains, in restaurants, at home, in parks, people are just not together. They are on their devices caged inside their bespoke algorithms.

Money is shrinking, upwards. The budget for entertainment, let us assume, remains the same. The avenues for entertainment are increasing and so is the idea of entertainment. Attention spans are declining. Going to a movie theatre is a big investment, not only financially but also in terms of time. Devoting yourself for three hours to a movie is a big deal. The audience will slowly exhibit a pattern, the producers will see it. The filmmaking economics will change. It’s all in churn at the moment. Some films will be Friday films, some will need a longer run. The exhibition sector, too, has to hold the hand of both kinds of films. Hopefully, in times to come, money will trickle down better and we will all venture out more.

What should worry us more is protecting and nourishing the idea of being with each other. Holi, Eid and Diwali aren’t quite the social glue they were; in bigger cities, they are increasingly becoming occasions for out-of-town holidays. We need to rediscover and rekindle the joys and frustrations of sitting together, talking, arguing, laughing, and eating together.

Cinema will find its new equilibrium. There will always be big-ticket films that aspire to hit the jackpot and there will always be films that innovate, experiment and say the unpopular. Sometimes they will land, sometimes they will crash. Films will have different intentions and different box-office results. Both La Nouvelle Vague (French New Wave) and Dogme (Danish avant-garde film movement) had seminal impacts. It is not very wise to compare the box-office collections of Mission Impossible with The Banshees of Inisherin (2022), or Chhaava with Laapataa Ladies (2023). Some films are easy to fund; some are not.

The audience will be surprised to know the way films are funded but that is not their business. Their business is to like films or not. Let it be ours to keep trying to find a balance between the films you like and the ones we want to make. The film business is attractive from the outside and treacherous from the inside. Even the most seasoned businessmen do not get it. Only those who have played it long enough begin to understand how super-strong equations on paper end up losing money and the improbable ones win.

Films have very unconventional revenue streams. It is not the business of the audience to figure out which one is a hit or a flop. You don’t care whether your favourite restaurant, shoe brand, ice cream or mobile phone company makes profits or losses. You like them and you consume them. Films are no different. Not every film will do 100 crore at the box office. Not every film that does 100 crore is a hit. Not every film that does 30 crore is a flop. There is so much more data nuance that will never reach you. Simply sit back, relax and enjoy the movies. It is that simple.

The writer is a filmmaker and producer