by JINOY JOSE P.
Dear Reader,
Cinema was born oversized. Even before it learned to speak, it learned to tower. The medium never pretended to be modest. It arrived with the self-confidence of a deity descending to earth: light, shadow, and sound arranged on a wall capacious enough to dwarf the human body. Call it a show, spectacle, cathedral, or dreambox—the one thing it never was, in conception or intent, was small.
The Lumière brothers projected their first reels on walls, on sheets, in cafés where people gasped and clutched one another when a train pulled into a station. In India, cinema entered through tents and touring theatres wide enough to mimic the sky. André Bazin wrote that cinema’s primary instinct was “the myth of total cinema”, the desire to recreate life in full, and you feel that instinct in those early accounts: people screaming, children weeping, adults rubbing their eyes at the sorcery of life enlarged.
This is why we called them—from Brando to Dilip Kumar, from Madhubala to Mammootty, from Rajinikanth to Shah Rukh Khan—stars. Not because they were famous. Because we literally saw them above us. A giant face, magnified forty times, holds a power a phone screen cannot simulate.
Size was not merely about scale. It was about mechanics. Film, the physical thing, behaved like a living organism. If you have ever seen a 35mm or 70mm print spool through a projector—celluloid breathing like an animal—you know why Christopher Nolan still talks about film stock as though it were a moral choice. You know why Martin Scorsese fought for decades to preserve it. Susan Sontag, in her essay “The Decay of Cinema”, warned that cinema would lose its soul when it lost its rituals. She was mourning a future we now inhabit.
And then came television.
Television did not kill cinema. It shrank it.
The move from screen-as-sky to screen-as-appliance flattened the metaphysics of the medium. When a cowboy, a drifter, a dictator, a tragic lover, or a cosmic traveller sits in your living room, they are no longer mythic. They are simply visiting. A little dusty. A little too familiar. They are just people who look like they will get up and rummage in your fridge.
Something else happened. The suspension of disbelief dipped. When characters are tiny, we judge them faster. We forgive less. Spectacle becomes “content”. Heroism becomes a trope. Drama becomes a convenience. Jurassic Park becomes “that movie with the dinosaurs” instead of an encounter with something prehistoric and unknowable. Narasimham becomes a vibe rather than a phenomenon.
Cable television amplified the injury. The problem was not quantity. It was ubiquity. Earlier, a film had to sit in you. It had to settle, unclench, make meaning over hours or days. You talked about it with friends. You replayed scenes in your head. Now, it simply moves on to the next thing in the queue. When everything is special, nothing is.
Then came the truly existential threat—mobile phones.
A film made for a forty-foot screen suffers a kind of species extinction when forced into a six-inch rectangle. The horizon, as John Ford tells Spielberg’s avatar, the young Sammy, in The Fabelmans, is no longer north or south; it is the dead middle of a shot built for algorithmic consumption on a platform that does not care whether your film breathes or suffocates.
The pandemic finished what these technologies started. OTT mutated expectations. For three years, we lived in a world where cinema was piped into our homes like groceries. Home viewing should have been supplementary. It became primary. Theatres became optional, then ornamental, and the new gospel of “convenience” asked: Why bother with a hall?
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