Lights, Camera, Conversation… “Indiana Shining”

What better way to celebrate the anniversary of cinema’s most adventurous archaeologist than by excavating memories from long, long ago.

Raiders of the Lost Ark will soon turn thirty, and this realisation brings with it a smile and a shiver, the former spawned by amber-preserved memories, the latter owing to the alarm that three decades have melted into the mist since I first queued up for an Indiana Jones adventure, serenely unaware that there was such a thing as “an Indiana Jones adventure” and therefore entering the theatre with nothing but crossed fingers and the hope of an entertaining evening. We hoped a lot, those days, because entertainment news was not the lightning fork it is today, arcing instantaneously across continents accompanied by thunderous publicity machinery. There was just a pop-culture tabloid called Sun around which we kids patiently orbited, salivating for scraps of news about American movies along with a centrefold that opened out to reveal exotic pop stars in spandex leotards (and sometimes less) and headbands holding in really big hair. I don’t recall reading anything about a bullwhip-cracking archaeologist who framed his face with a fedora.

We, today, are so accustomed to the simultaneous worldwide release, we take it so much for granted, like the heat in May and front-page news about terrorist strikes in some Islamic corner of the world, that it’s probably impossible, unless you’ve lived through the era, to imagine a Chennai that was called Madras and whose theatres would screen whatever they could scrounge up. So it was not uncommon in the summer of 1981, the summer of Raiders in North America, to open the Friday edition of The Hindu and catch sight of an advertisement for Mackenna’s Gold, which was released in 1969 and a print of which, I suspect, still lies in some theatre owner’s vault. Like a hit single on the radio, it kept playing all the time, along with other hits like The Sound of Music and The Guns of Navarone, and since we did not have IMDb and Entertainment Tonight, we never looked at these movies as old movies – they were just movies to be seen that weekend.

So when Raiders of the Lost Ark finally arrived, in a print that glimmered with spectral scratches and juddered with jumping frames and belched out soundtrack burps, it could have been made that year or the year before or a few years ago, sometime in the late 1970s, when we first knew there was someone named Harrison Ford because he played that cocky pilot in Star Wars, which we watched, fists clenched and jaws dropped, over and over in theatres because there were no DVD players or VCRs and the television sets at home had a brief window of broadcasting that included programmes for housewives and farmers but nothing about Hollywood. These are the memories dredged up when I read about Raiders turning thirty – not the film itself, or its sequels, the first of which was banned in India because Indians were shown eating monkey brains for dessert, but the blank slate I carried into the screening along with popcorn that didn’t spill over from a machine but was sold pre-sealed in a polythene packet. Cinema, then, still possessed the capacity to surprise.

As for the film itself, it evokes, today, a different kind of nostalgia, for a time movies aroused in us a near-religious rapture of having seen what we didn’t know could be seen on screen. Sunlight piercing the eye of an upright staff and pointing to the location of a lost treasure. A Nazi vehicle that careened off a cliff and kept falling and falling and falling. A sacred artifact that, when unwisely opened, spewed forth sky-high plumes of all-annihilating fire. A spectacled villain who wouldn’t stop screaming as his face melted in rivulets of flesh and blood. We knew about special effects because Star Wars had already made its way to local screens and because the Red Sea had been parted each time we saw The Ten Commandments, another of those ageless films that romped into theatres with regularity. But we didn’t know, then, that computers would be able to do anything, everything, and we still reacted to movies with amazement and wonder, the way we do not, cannot, today because we know it’s all fake and that there are millions of minions hunched over machines whose innermost workings are revealed to us through web sites and preening making-of featurettes. That’s what, thirty years on, Raiders of the Lost Ark brings to mind. Walking into the theatre was like stepping into Oz and the curtain hadn’t yet come off and it felt like real magic was unfolding before our wide, wide eyes.

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here.

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