One of the best things about the American liberal arts education is that you can study a wide variety of subjects along with your major. Apart from economics and corporate finance, I thought I should take a fun course and decided to take History of American Film. Between deciphering the jargon of my verbose American professors, hefty reading lists and constant references to the infinite repertoire of American classics, which I had never seen, it turned out to be the toughest course I had ever taken.
However, the college library provided access to, perhaps, all the major classics, and the campus showed international films twice a week apart from the course screenings. So in just one year I was converted to being a true film buff.
By the time I moved to London some two years later, I had a decent understanding of cinema and a skeletal framework of its history starting from DW Griffiths' 1914 classic Birth Of A Nation to the late 80s' controversial film Do The Right Thing by Spike Lee.
London was the perfect place to relish a wide variety of major film festival movies that found distribution rather quickly. As luck would have it, I met Shekhar Kapur who was sort of forgotten by the film industry at that point. He was making Bandit Queen and he happened to be a tenant at my uncle's London flat close to the BBC office.
I met him as I would go to collect the weekly rent. Soon we began discussing the latest films playing in the theatres and before we knew it, we were watching movies together.
After a month or so, we were seeing a film a day, spending long after-hours dissecting and tearing them apart. Shekhar, with his practical experience in acting and filmmaking, and I, with my academic theories and references, made good movie buddies.
I soon lost Shekhar to fame, fortune and Hollywood. Meanwhile, I also moved back to India only to discover how tough it is for a movie buff to survive without non-Hollywood films. For a normal Indian working in Gurgaon, it is impossible to make it to the 6 pm screenings at embassies.
Besides, even the film festivals in India tell you about the films to be shown only on the day of their screening. There are no advance reviews either so you don't know anything about the film apart from its country of origin.
After many years of running from one film to the next, clutching a copy of Time Out in London on my increasingly shorter trips abroad, I recently discovered the power of the Internet. Amazon.com offers a great film selection as does the British distributor Artificial Eye.
A few of us have now got together and made a film pool. We regularly order films on the Net and watch them. Recently, I lent my Cinema Paradiso in exchange for The Last Metro and have just ordered Europa, Europa and Shanghai Triad. Although I do miss going to the big screen but this is the best one can get right now. And Shekhar comes over some time and we watch Blade Runner together.
