by JINOY JOSE P,
Dear reader,
I believe cinema must be watched in a cinema. Not on a laptop, not on a phone, not on a TV—however smart or flat its panel may be. With each shrinking of the screen, something vital is lost. The medium’s emotional charge, its visual grandeur, its immersive power—all diminish when its canvas contracts. That may sound purist, even a little curmudgeonly, in this era of OTT abundance and algorithm-driven viewing. But I’ll say it anyway: when it comes to movies, the bigger the screen and the darker the hall, the more potent the magic.
Don’t believe me? Watch three films: To Each His Own Cinema, an exquisite anthology of 34 shorts by directors from 25 countries, all meditating on the act of watching; Cinema Paradiso, Giuseppe Tornatore’s love letter to the vanished small-town theatre; and Abbas Kiarostami’s Shirin, which flips the lens to film women watching a film, their faces lit only by flickers of light and feeling.
Each of these films captures the same elemental truth: there is a peculiar alchemy in the darkened theatre. Strangers, briefly released from the burdens of their own lives, become co-conspirators in collective dreaming. Walter Benjamin wrote that cinema doesn’t merely entertain, but it creates a shared space for experience. When the lights go down and the images begin their hypnotic dance, we see democracy in its most radical form. Not at the ballot box or on the streets, but in the quiet surrender to someone else’s vision of what it means to be human (or not; such a disclaimer is needed in this AI era).
I agree that this ritual has taken on new urgency in our age of digital fragmentation. Political tribes retreat into algorithmic echo chambers, cultural dialogue is filtered through outrage cycles, and shared references grow scarce. Yet, against the odds, humanity still gathers in darkened halls to lose themselves in story. For those luminous hours, we become porous to each other again. Vulnerable. Hopeful. Human. It is indeed not an exaggeration to say cinema is our last universal language. A visual Esperanto of the soul.
The impact is visible in the numbers. The global film and video industry generated more than $300 billion in revenue in 2024, surpassing the GDP of more than 170 countries (about 85-90 per cent of all recognised nations). But these figures only skim the surface. In the 1960s, James Bond films boosted tourism to featured destinations. Bollywood’s soft power runs so deep across West Asia and South-East Asia that Hindi filmi phrases have entered everyday speech in countries where few have ever met an Indian. But cinema’s influence is much more than merely commercial; it’s mythopoeic. It functions as a collective unconscious, showing not just how societies look at themselves, but how they wish to be seen.
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