Beyond the story of India’s Oscar entry ‘Chhello Show’

It reminds one how digital technology has cut cinema from the physical labour once intrinsic to it.

Chhello Show, India’s humble—if totally left of field—submission to the behemoth industrial acrobatics of the Oscars, is a highly provocative film. It follows with intense attention the journey of a 9-year-old child, Samay (Bhavin Rabari), who discovers his love for cinema as laboured magic, and if you look past the “nostalgia”, “ode”, “Cinema Paradiso-lite” criticism, you can hear a more seething and socialist rumble. By socialist, I simply mean what the late Mike Davis described as “the belief that the earth belongs to labour”.

‘Giant dream machine’

This socialist conviction locates the “magic” of cinema—I say magic because of the alchemical possibilities it lends to our humdrum existence, what the director Jean Cocteau called “this giant dream machine”—in its physicality. The movies we see, if we think about it, are around 24 frames captured and stitched into a second of textured motion, printed on chemicals or desiccated into pixels, transformed, transferred, to then become coloured light flung from a horizontal machine onto a vertical screen, all involving people.

And once we severed this physicality of cinema from cinema by becoming more digital, powdering reels into pixels, heavy, heaving, smoking machines that eat up tightly wound film negatives into slick laptops, we lost something intrinsic to cinema. That cinema and so much of that often purported magic of the medium, its possibilities, came from its labour. Debashree Mukherjee, author of Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City, which chronicled the cementing of Bombay Cinema through the 1930s and 1940s, began her book with an image of, perhaps, a light boy on the sets of Jawani Ki Hawa (1935) at the Bombay Talkies Studio, his back facing the camera. We do not know who he is, and we never will, and yet his contribution circulates.

Mukherjee insists on the term “cine-ecology”, in order to lasso into the idea of cinema the labour that produced it. That we must look at “cinema as production experience, [one that] invite[s] workers, then and now, to imagine new horizons for the self, marking the labour of filmmaking with a particular futurity”.

Mukherjee does to film production what Chhello Show does to film reception, taking our interest in the medium and swerving, funnelling our attention to the people who gird the magic with their sweat and stamina: that man behind the film camera, that man behind the film projector.

A film set being erected at Annapurna Studios in Hyderabad in April 2012. Debashree Mukherjee insists on the term “cine-ecology”, in order to lasso into the idea of cinema the labour that produced it. it. | Photo Credit: MOHAMMED YOUSUF

Chhello Show begins with the idea of cinema as a community-building exercise. The only film Samay’s father is willing to let them go watch is a mythological spectacle. This is a genre that has not received much attention from film lovers, considered entirely peripheral to the idealised cinema of our imagination, a sort of scraping of the bottom of the barrel. But so much of Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada cinema—industries dominating the discourse today—emerged from this genre, and despite Sholay and Deewaar being released in 1975, the most profitable film of that year was Jai Santoshi Maa, a low-budget mythological tale directed towards rural women, for which people removed their slippers before entering the theatre as though entering a temple and hurled coins, flowers, and rice at the screen as though partaking in a ritual—so, what of this film history?

The mass spectator

The screen is now the thread connecting the holy and the home-bound, not the individual spectator but the mass spectator and the spectacle. As social scientist M.S.S. Pandian notes in the article “Tamil Cultural Elites and Cinema”, when the talkies made a windfall in the 1930s, it was celebrated by the lower classes as a form of spectatorship, while seen with an anxious eye by the custodians of high culture. I remember sitting at the recent Amitabh Bachchan retrospective in PVR Cinemas—a multiplex chain that completely drove all the single screens out of business, the same single screens that were imperative and foundational to Bachchan’s success—when a friend turned to me and asked sincerely whether what we were partaking in, celebrating a single-screen communal idol in the regimented discipline of a multiplex, was appropriation.

Heart and heartbreak

Samay, through his friendship with a Muslim film projector who lets him watch films for free, learns both heart and heartbreak. Heart from the communal experience. Heartbreak for the labour. The conflict of the film is not so much about how his strict, anti-cinema parents react to his new-found love for cinema as about how the digital revolution eviscerated film, rendering projectionists unemployed, and how love for the medium, though challenged, is a stain that refuses to be washed clean.

The most gruelling, emotionally gutting moment in Chhello Show is seeing all the film equipment—the reels, the machines, the steel and plastic—being melted in a factory, flattened, and moulded into bangles, plates, spoons, and other things that populate our lives, as though reincarnated. Like Yashaswini Raghunandan’s That Cloud Never Left, which follows, with its magic-realist vision, villagers who repurpose film reels into toys sold thousands of miles away, this film, too, refuses to end with a sense of hopelessness.

Bhavin Rabari, the lead actor of Chhello Show, and Pan Nalin, the film’s director, pose for pictures at an event in Ahmedabad on October 14. | Photo Credit: SAM PANTHAKY/AFP

At the end of the film, Samay is on a train, journeying towards the city where he will “study light”. Like children holding their hands under a running tap trying to grasp what is fluid, Samay tries to grasp the light from a projector, an early lesson in how cinema is light, in how the word for cinematography in Tamil is olippathivu, or an impression of light. He is surrounded by these reincarnated remnants of the cinema he loved: the machines, the negatives melted into bangles that clink. That even as one world ends, another is opening up. That cinema, like air, is all around us, even as its shape shifts.

Prathyush Parasuraman is a writer and critic who writes across publications, both print and online. He also authors a newsletter on culture at prathyush.substack.com

The Crux

• The Gujarati film Chhello Show is India’s unexpected choice for the Oscars.
• It begins with the idea of cinema as a community-building exercise.
• A highly provocative film, it follows the journey of a 9-year-old child, Samay (Bhavin Rabari) as he discovers his love for cinema.
• Chhello Show takes makes viewers look at the medium and focusses their attention on the people behind the magic of the screen.