piracy: the only door to good cinema

Thanks to UTV world movies / Lumiere etc, we now have legal access to movies like 400 blows, 13 tzameti, red, blue, white, the lives of others etc. Otherwise, the only way out was the illegal one, which, I'm against, on principle, but principles are means to set others’ right, to gain an upper hand over an adversary, to win an argument, not for implementing upon ourselves. But, seriously, the only way you can procure non-english/non-indian language movies is through the internet or from the gaudy, swarming shopping holes invariably called AC markets. They have everything laid out for air conditioning, closed areas, little ventilation, no windows, self-closing doors, everything except the air conditioner. So when you enter the place, you can get a whiff of each shopkeeper’s body odor, but you can’t make it out because there are so many of them, and fused with it is the physical 'exuberance' of so many shoppers. In this oppressive atmosphere, you have to jostle for space with five or six more maniacs like you, each eying with greed the cardboard boxes in which the Kieslowskis, Bergmanns, and kubricks are waiting to delight you. The experience of traveling to such a place and then finding a gem like ashes and diamonds which you’d been looking for quite some time, is so exhilarating, it gives you goose flesh all over.

I was initiated into this milieu and subsequently into the world of 'sub-titled' cinema by a close friend, who’d led me to a similar place, except that due to a crackdown on piracy, it appeared much shadier and scarier back then. In Mumbai, constructions appear small externally, when they are viewed against the backdrop of the massive behemoth of the city itself. Once you get in, they seem to expand, and I used to be amazed at the sheer multitude of entities these apparently insignificant little buildings contained within themselves. Little galleries, which seem to be closing in on you, in which you’d have to turn sideways to let someone pass., small offices and shops, barely enough to allow two to sit, no windows and no way in for the sun. The darkness used to be spooky and morbid, be it morning, noon, or night, it was impossible to tell if the weather was cloudy or the sun was shining.

Anyway, I was led into such a setting and presented with some DVDs suggested by my friend and I realized that there's a plethora of great cinema beyond the english/hindi language stuff waiting to be explored. Initially, I was slightly circumspect about buying the DVDs, arguing about how piracy could destroy the film industry and so on and so forth. But once I caught the fever, I realized that someone who loves cinema and is not considerably rich cannot help but buy pirated movies. If I were looking for a legal DVD of say, a La Strada, or a fairly well-known 81/2, or even relatively unknown English movies like barry lyndon, would I get it? As far as I’m aware, I won’t be able to find it in any store in India. If I do choose to buy it online, it’d cost me half a grand at the very least. Around two years back, Palador and Moser Baer introduced a collection for World Movies; I thought this would be the end of all our problems. But I turned out to be wrong; each DVD was priced at 499, and later reduced to 399. Now, for a movie addict, the expenditure would turn out to be somewhere in the range of 3000-4000 per month. And if you opt for pirated cinema you'd get 10 DVDs at the price of one legal copy.

Now you can even avoid paying the 400 by downloading anything you want from the www. The only hitch is that if you want to watch movies in languages you dont understand, you might find it difficult to get sub-titled versions.

I fail to understand the rationale behind selling a DVD for 400-500. Even if you dont consider the economies of scale, a single DVD wouldn't cost Moser Baer not more than Rs. 15. Of course, they have to pay for the content and the rights, but even then, how much would be the net cost of a DVD, certainly won't be so high so as to justify the pricing. So what sort of returns are they expecting? And when they don’t sell, it will be conveniently concluded that India does not have a market for ‘intelligent cinema’. I don’t think the market dynamics justify the kind of pricing that we see in DVDs. As far as supply is concerned, as long as the prices are so high, the sales will remain low from the legal channel, so the perceived demand will remain less, and obviously the supply will not increase, a proverbial chicken and egg story.

Sadly, the biggest losers here are the film makers and their crews. If there are legal avenues to procure content at logical prices, I’m sure most viewers would prefer to use it. But if the price differential remains so high, this trend is likely to continue and flourish. I, at least, owe my ardor for cinema almost entirely to the illegal business of piracy.