A nine-year-journey...

Sometime in 2004, when I was nineteen and a half, under-confident, lonely and impressionable, I chanced upon Roger Ebert's Great Movies in a Punjabi friend's room (so much for stereotypes). Back then, I read a lot of books, yes, but nowhere near what many of my peers did. My tastes were limited. Narayan was my comfort reading (although his stories left me sad). I loved Wodehouse to bits. I read Harry Potter like my life depended on it. I knew all sorts of things about Tintin. But anything heavier made me drowsy. My music-listening was limited to Bollywood, Rahman and Carnatic, in that order. I listened to pop when my roommate played it on his computer. But that was it. Crucially, my movie-watching was limited to extensive David Dhawan, some Mani Ratnam and some Ram Gopal Varma. 

I started reading Great Movies with looking for movies I had watched and then reading about them. One of the early essays I read was about The Godfather. When I read the essay, I realised I hadn't really seen the movie at all. I was taken aback by the subtext. From sources in the hostel (it was the sort of place where you could source almost anything), I got a Divx of The Godfather and watched it repeatedly for a few days. Then, I re-watched the Hitchcocks -- Psycho, Vertigo, Rear Window, Dial M for Murder, The Birds… Then came the Chaplins -- Modern Times, City Lights, The Great Dictator -- Ebert's analysis transformed what were, in my head, slapstick comedies into biting satire and art of the highest form. 

Then, I began to look for the other movies he wrote about, partly because I wanted to watch them, and partly because I wanted to read what Ebert said about them. He wrote with such tenderness, such love, that Ebert opened a door in my head. I discovered, in a frenzied six months, Welles, Hawks, Reed, Keaton, Leone, Ford, Wilder, Scorsese, Kubrick and most importantly, Woody Allen. And if Ebert's book had a couple of movies of a director I liked, I sought the others. Imdb's Top 250 list was a spectacular companion, and torrents were integral parts of our lives. 

Gingerly, I stepped into the rather chilling waters of "foreign" films -- foreign to the Americans, of course, given Ebert was my frame of reference. I used Ebert to grapple with Fellini and Bergman, the former's images came in my dreams and the latter's in my nightmares. While I made a visceral connect to their films, the historical significance of Godard and Truffaut would have been lost on me if not for Ebert's essays. Kurosawa would have sounded like an incantation karate people did in the movies before launching into a bloody attack if I hadn't read Ebert on Seven Samurai. 

It was Seven Samurai that got me deep into cinema. Being known as one of the "movie buffs" (although I had only been buffing for a few months then) in the hostel, I was put in charge of organising film screenings during "University Week". This loose sub-committee had myself, a Bengali brother and cultured Chandigarhi. It was as inclusive as loose sub-committees came.

 On the first night, we screened Seven Samurai. We printed posters and pasted them all over campus. "One of the four of five greatest action movies of all time," the posters read (Yes, that was my analysis.). By 9 pm, a huge crowd gathered at the quadrangle. The sub-committee was mighty pleased. The screening began. In fifteen minutes, there were murmurs, "Boss, I can't read so many subtitles!" "Where's the action, dude?" A couple of people left. Some people who walked in late didn't even bother sitting down. They walked away indifferently. Soon, someone commented that the people in the movie run funnily. A section in the audience was sniggering at that observation. We could feel the restlessness. The committee that made us the sub-committee glared at us like we repent for our sin by committing seppuku. 

Needless to say, the sub-committee was disbanded, and more populist voices took over the screenings. Over cigarettes outside the main gate, the sub-committee -- the Bengali, the Punjabi and me -- decided we would start a film club. We would show movies we liked. We would talk about them, we would tell people what to look for, we would watch movies we wanted to watch in the process. In other words, we would be to the world what Ebert had been to us. Of course, this was born out of a superiority-complex, but I must insist that trying to get people to see what we saw was a crucial cog in the wheel. 

The NLS Film Club -- pompous in name, pompous in functioning -- was a moderate success. When we screened movies people wanted to watch, we had audiences. When we screened movies they didn't want to watch, it was just me, the Bengali and the Punjabi in the hall. We got ourselves a membership to Habitat on Church Street, a delightful shop that rents foreign movies and sold jazz CDs. We poured a lot of funding into renting DVDs, and made sure we ripped them into Divx-es to get our money's worth. These were still times when a 2GB pen drive was a novelty, and my desktop, with a 128GB hard drive was considered "huge". So, we wrote these Divx-es on to DVDs and backed them up on other DVDs in case these conked. 

I preferred making 700MB rips that I could copy on to regular CDs, and displaying them like a CD collection in one of those 50 CD pouches. I lost my dearest pouch with my dearest movies. The hostel could be cruel like that. 

By this time, Ebert was only one of the many people I read on the internet. I watched genres and directors he rarely mentioned, if ever. I found myself drowned in bizarre cinematic experiments that he didn't really explore in his writing. But then, as I said earlier, Ebert had opened the door. He was still my first stop when I encountered a "great" movie and didn't get what the fuss was about. He had this way of making the obscure accessible -- although I found many people criticising him for doing just that. Ebert had not just opened the door, he was always around to guide me through the labyrinth of cinema. 

He pointed me to The Terrorist, an Indian movie he rated so very highly. He even pointed me to The Apu Trilogy. That led me to spend days and years coming to grips with Ray's subtle art. From Ray, I moved to study India's parallel cinema movement, and then, slowly, discover the masters of the Indian mainstream world. Ebert had, in a strange way, taken me on a ride all over the world, and brought me back home to Guru Dutt, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Vidhu Vinod Chopra, K. Balachander and Bharatiraaja. More interestingly, he led me to people (like Scorsese and Tarantino) who made me understand that I could be a film buff and still watch Kyunki Main Jhoot Nahin Bolta for the umpteenth time on a Sunday afternoon.    

He taught me to be more patient with cinema. He taught me that the notion that cinema is only a source of entertainment is naive. He taught me, at the same time, that great cinema needn't be boring or inaccessible. He first made me a snob, and then peeled the layers off to strip me off my snobbery. I don't agree with all his views on cinema -- hey, Midnight Cowboy is a great movie and Slumdog Millionaire isn't, ok? -- but if it weren't for his writing, I wouldn't even be confident of disagreeing with anybody. 

He died yesterday, after a decade-long fight against cancer. He wrote about his fight on his blog very openly, but he never asked for sympathy. He wrote to share his story with the world, just like he wrote about the films he loved and hated. Did this constant swimming in his favourite medium of art bring him that strength? Last year, he wrote more than 300 reviews -- he had never done so many in a year before, and I doubt if any movie critic has. It wasn't a stunt, he wasn't trying to get himself in the Guinness Book. He was doing it because that's what he loved doing. It is this mad passion for cinema that made me such a fan of his, irrespective of what I thought of his opinions on this movie or that.

He ends his last blog post with, "So on this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I'll see you at the movies." 

You showed me how to "see" movies, Mr. Ebert, I will see you at every one of them.