KERALA Journal home][books][women[movies

Quiet

My Life at the Movies
By Thomas Palakeel

As a boy growing up in India, I never really believed that movies existed. Once my sister rolled up the edge of her textbook and let the pages unfurl quickly, trying to demonatrate how pictures appeared to be moving. I remained skeptical until my father took me to a movie that summer. It was also the first movie for my mother, not to mention my sister, the movie expert.


On our way to the distant town of Pala, I heard the driver talk about the famed movie. Best picture of the year in all of India. Winner of the President's Gold Medal. Made in our Malayalam language. Shot in Eastman color, starring Satyan, Madhu, and Sheela. Based on the famed novel, Chemmeen (Prawns, 1966. Director: Ramu Kariat) was now heading out to the foreign lands, Russian, China, and the United States. 


When the show began all of a sudden with a loud trumpet, I panicked. The rumor is that I cried. The opening scene left me bewildered, as the flat silver screen suddenly acquired depth and color and motion, violent motion. A shabby hut in a fishing village. Early morning. The heroine is warming her feet by the hearth. Her mother rushes into the kitchen and floors her with a kick to her back. Fire leapes out of the hearth. It would have scalded me, if it werent't for the movie magic that wiped the fire clean with the image of the vast blue sea, the seashore, the undulating coconut trees, boats arrayed on sand, birds, plenty of birds. Another scene. Another home. Another story, another act, of violence and work and love, and there were songs every ten minutes, songs that I would remember forever. As the waves clash on the sand, men wearing enormous hats, struggle to push a fishing boat into the water. While they clamber on to the speeding catamaran, one of the fishermen miss it--he is denied--and there is a close-up showing his sullen face turning into rage. I am told: that's him, the legendary star Satyan. Of all things in the movie, what I love the most is the way Satyan tosses his hat into the sea and stomps away with a new resolve, and I am hooked forever.


Three years later news broke that a movie theater was going to be built in Thidanad, our tiny village in central Travancore, and my first thought was that I was not an adult yet. In the three years that lapsed, I had seen only one more movie, Moonu Pookal, which opened my ears to music lyrics, and since my family purchased a transistor radio, I was able to listen to the great songs from both of the movies I had watched, and in these songs I recognized for the time my skeptical spirit: one of the songs Vinnil irunnurangunna Daivamo I sang in the shower with delight: God dozes off in heaven, man gropes about on earth, who is the blind one, who is the blind one? Everything about that lyrical questioning brought me deep satisfaction, and I felt a certain degree of power, secret power, and I wanted more than just two movies and half a dozen songs.


As the theater began to rise from the ground, I watched the construction with much anticipation, visiting the site as dutifully as the owner himself. First the workers erected two dozen ccconut poles on an elevated platform. Then the carpenters raised the roof, and in a week, it was thatched with coconut fronds brought in from neighboring villages on bullock carts, the last of its kind. They walled up the building with hundreds of bamboo mats, painted black with tar, to block out the sunlight. And finally, the 35-millimeter projector arrived, and Thidanad Saji Theater was ready for the show.


The inaugural movie was going to be Kayal Karayil (On the Backwaters) starring Prem Nazir. Ahead of the grand opening, I had my mother approach my father with the delicate request. He granted permission without resistance. Two of the servants who worked on our land offered to take me with them. When my father, finally gave me the money, (55 paise), it was on condition that in the future I would not ask for such permission, and that I would devote myself solely to my studies.


On the opening day, I wedged my way into the huge crowd so skilfully I was one of the first in the crowd to get hold of a ticket. The humidity was so high, some men who sat near me had taken of their shirts. One man squeezing sweat off his shirt. One of the servants said loudly to another sweaty faced man: "Heh, a woman's breast poked me so hard in the crowd, my back's split into two. I thought I'd die, oh those breasts!" The men laughed, lewdly, dwelling endlessly on the topic; I laughed, too, but I felt ugly and confused that they would speak so explicitly.


Unlike Chemmen, which has remained in print as a classic, Kayal Karayil was shot in black and white; I have only vague recollections of the story, basically two men fighting and dying for the love of one woman, which was pretty much the story in the first movie. I didn't really appreciate the fact that women were such big deal. What was there to die for? I had no clue. One of the servants--his name is Kochu, he is now a blacksmith; the man has not changed a bit in 40 years--he taught me later that all movies are based on a "formula"; over the years he narrated the stories of dozens of films he had seen, and I routinely counted those among the films I had seen as well; I had, I could picture them, vividly, and I could see through the formula..


Since Thidanad Saji was only a temporary theater, the movies shown there were at least a year old, and sometimes, the movies didn't even run a whole week, causing the management to switch films midweek; for such short runs, they often brought a film made in Tamil, Hindi, or English. Every time I asked for permission for a movie, I was browbeaten and even punished, and I ended up spending hours thinking of all those movies that came and went. I wished I were a street urchin so that I could beg for money for the movies.

I got to see only two more movies that year: Kumara Sambhavam, the story of Shiva's family, and Karutha Kai, a thriller about a masked ganster who wears a black glove. I missed at least 50 movies! I did not even try to ask for permission. What is the point? Art or entetertainment simply never  figured in the life of a large family, but I tried to absorb whatever I could from the 8-page daily newspaper, Deepika. I started reading so that I could read about all those great movies I was never going to see, and soon I was talking about movies with some authority.


Once I ended up making a bet with one of my cousins. I claimed that "The Bible" was an English language film, but my cousin argued it was only a Malayalam movie. If I were proved right, I would get 25 paise, and the burden of proof was on me. I was certain I had seen a two-inch advertisement for the Hollywood film "The Bible" in the newspaper, and I took it upon myself to locate that old newspaper. For weeks, I paged through pile after pile of old newspapers in our store; failining, I traveled two miles to my mother's house, where they kept copies of at least 5 years worth of old newspapers, and I set out on my first research expedition and I located the advertisement and disproved my cousin, but my cousin said he wasn't serious about the bet; he did not pay me my 25 paise. He teased me that he just wanted to see how gullible I was, but I did not divulge how much I enjoyed the research.

My research in old newspapers helped me graduate into American magazines. This was a time my brother George came up with a promotional idea at the store. To compete with his rivals during the school season, he gave away free book wrappers to students: a couple of sheets torn out of old copies of Time and Look. Students prided themselves about wrapping their books in the famed "American Magazine." Tired of wrapping their notebooks with boring newspaper sheets, students started to make their first fashion statements by slick wrappers showing advertisements for toasters and macroni and cheese, which all seemed infinitely delicious. And these colorful, slick wrappers also offered me hints of some brave new world out there so far away from Thidanad.
I smuggled out several copies of magazines inside my shirt and gradually built up a secret library under my bed: a dozen issues of Time, one copy of Life, one movie magazine with color pictures of Marilyn Monroe, Esther Williams, and Elizabeth Taylor, and there was another woman whose breasts were nicely visible. Though I could not read English, I understood the photographs: America, cars, Vietnam, Israel, Hollywood, Egypt, lands of war, famine, wealth, and of course, the mission to the moon. Next year, though my brother could not find a steady supply of old American Magazines, by yet another twist of the Cold War, almost every home had begun to subscribe to a new magazine: The Soviet Land, which I found absolutely uninteresting, staid, but I loved the smell of the Russain paper. Years later, when I started reading the great Russians, and eventually, came very late, to the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, I had this smell of Russian paper as an olfactory reference.

Tantalized by all the films that kept coming, and going, year after year, (Godzilla, Kattabomman, Sringarikalude Valayil CID, Nadhi, Katalpalam) I reached a point when I could not hold myself any longer. I considered sneaking into the theater, walking alongside some adult, pretending to be his child, but I was too well known in our village, and almost anything I did in public was reported home by servants and neighbors.


In the end, I made a deliberate effort "to go to the movies"; I crawled into the fenced banana grove behind the theater during a matinee, an intrepid movie thief; I picked a flint from the ground and drilled a hole in the bamboo wall and boldly placed my eye at the bamboo hole. The silvery black and white images drew my whole being inwards through that tiny hole. It was an intimate experience, a sorrowful embrace that brought with it a pleasure mixed with a terror that I could not bear; I took a few more peeks and left, with a feeling that I had embraced something larger than myself, literally the whole theater.


Soon I was collecting movie trivia, and fantasizing about becoming a boy director. (I didn't want to be an actor. No way would I run around trees with women, no matter how much I loved all those lovely faces that stared at me from the deep interiors of magazines.) When the drummer and his boy traversed the village, advertising each new film, I followed them, begging for a handbill. The drummer--a butcher's assistant on Sundays--always shooed me away. He did not waste the handbills on kids. Sometimes I dogged him until he tossed me a sheet with a grunt and stare. I perused these shoddily printed sheets and copied important data into my "cinema journal". A plot summary, names of actors, studios, directors, cinematographers, and lyricists, and even my weighty opionions about the movies I had no expectation of ever seeing.


On my way back from school, I always stopped by the theater and lingered there, studying the posters and the still photographs like a little Romeo in love with movies. I waited at the foot of the wooden ladder that went up into the projection room, pining for entry into the higher sanctum where the projectionist was constantly tinkering with his machine. He seldom looked out the door, rarely did he notice his admirer. When he swept his room and threw out broken film strips, I salvaged them along with spent cabon rods, which resembled bullets when lined up on my study desk. Once I found  a strip of film several  feet long, much of it depicting the same dance scene, frame after frame. That moment I understood the technology of moving pictures. The holes and the lines that bordered the film strips made sense, and I often lectured my friends and even adults about how it all worked.


I even built a projector. It was simple, a flashlight, a box, a spool, and a lens. Viola! My bedroom became my own movie-hall. In the absense of a motor I had to pull at the reel, trying out varying speeds. But the pictures I projected on the wall never moved. I saw no dance, no sword fight. Saddened I abandoned technology in favor of art. I continued to visit the theater and the concession stand, eventually I was able to start a friendship with the men inside: the gatekeeper, the drummer, the projectionist, and of course, the film-representative, who came with the reels; a rep's trademark was a pair of wide chisel-shaped sideburns and bellbottoms.


Once I confessed to my older brother that I wished to be a film-rep when I grew up. How easy, he said: "Get those big chisels from Carpenter Appavan. Glue them on your cheeks. You got it made, a kid: a film rep!"


By then I had memorized the titles of hundreds of movies and names of artists, and I could rattle off the names every theater in Kerala, although I had seen only four more movies, a total of seven. Now the men at the conession stand never chased me away. Even the projectionist listened when I talked in enthusiastic superlatives. Satyan is the greatest actor of all, you should see the way he tossed his hat into the sea and stomped away, in Chemmeen, I declared to the adults at the concession stand when the news came that the great star had died; I actually bought a quickie biography of the actor that went on sale next week, it was the first book I bought.


In addition to the stars, I also learned about the producers and directors, and I was particularly drawn to Melli Irani, the great cinematographer--it had to be his name. Early on, I also identified Thoppil Bhasi as the man who wrote the best stories and dialogue, the screenplays. I recognized the genius of two of the lyricists: Vyalar Rama Varma and P. Bhaskaran, two music-directors, Baburaj and Devarajan, and the two great male singers, Yesudas and Jayachandran, and the divas. Many years later, living in the US, I saw six of the divas lined up, in a photograph, and I burst into tears at the sight of them together!


That I would become a director when I grow up was prophesied by the men at the concession stand, quite early on, but I was not so sure about it, having seen photographs of great Malayalam directors in action--Ramu Kariat, K.S.Sethumadhavan, Kunchacko, not to mention Satyajit Ray, whose name I had just started noticing in the newspapers. That kind of skill, the absolute power, of their command, and the certainty of their vision, which they had to communicate to the artists and the technicians, I didn't think I would ever possess, but I was confident that I could write screenplays, and already I was writing story ideas in a notebook. For a boy who had to make do imagining movies instead of actually watching them, screenplays ought to come easy.


Before I turned thirteen, modern theaters began to sprout everywhere, forcing our primitive movie-house out of business. In the last days of Thidanad Saji theater, I did manage to see an occasional movie in the company of my brother. The place was mostly empty, and the drummer stopped making his rounds. It was on one of those days that the projectionist beckoneed me. "Come up the ladder. I'll show you the machine!"


I still cherish the memory of standing near the wimpering, whirring movie projector, feeling cozy and intimate, and fulfilled. That day I also got to gaze out the viewport at the famed silver screen. The projectionist let me watch as he glued together two reels and threaded the crisp celluloid in the machine. Right before the matinee started, he pressed a button, a bell rang, a prologned magesterial ring summoned the last of the patrons, and he hit another button, the carbon rod ignited, and there was light, white light. I stood there enchanted by the rays of light shooting out of the lens gate, spreading wider and wider as they traversed through darkness and hit the flat screen, turning into a deep universe, a robust universe in which everything made sense.


Now everytime I enter an American multiplex, the first thing I do is turn back and look toward the projection room.


(still in progress)