Alex Sudheim
`Make sharp, the picture is on!” yells the usher to the throng of patrons still jostling for popcorn and cooldrinks around the kiosk. Behind him, the 400-seater cinema is packed to capacity as the enormous screen flickers into vivid life.
Its a cold, rainy Sunday afternoon in a deserted and windswept Durban city centre, yet the Isfahan Cinema is in chaos as hordes of excited fans stream in to see the just-released, hotly- anticipated new Bollywood epic, Dil Se.
An elegant Indian woman leaps from a gleaming Mercedes and rushes to the ticket booth, only to be told the show is sold out. “But I’m dying to see this movie!” she wails in bitter disappointment. The scene is a sign of a new era for Indian cinema in Durban. Despite having the largest population of Indians outside of India, the city has in the last 20 years or so experienced a steady decline in demand for original- language, big-screen Indian flicks. Faziel Sahib, second-generation proprietor of the Isfahan, remembers a time when Durban’s “secondary CBD” – one of those gifted apartheid euphemisms – had Indian film theatres on just about
every street corner. Now, the Isfahan is Durban’s sole remaining cinema showing the real thing.
This decline occurred partly due to the Indian government’s cultural boycott against South Africa, which prevented local distributors directly obtaining prints of the latest films before pirate video copies reached these shores.
Yet it was primarily the advent of video in the Seventies which began the devastation of the Durban Indian cinema industry, causing theatre after theatre to shut up shop until the Isfahan stood alone. But Nazir Sahib, who took over the cinema in 1983, refused to relent to these pressures and, with stubborn resolve, kept the place going by obtaining films “via via” and surviving the struggle to just stay afloat by the skin of his teeth.
Yet, as today’s scenes at the Isfahan show, his faith has paid off. Dil Se is a red-hot Bollywood film, with India’s most mythical screen superstars Shah Rukh Khan and Madhuri Dixit in the lead roles. It seems to have every Bollywood fan on the planet in a frenzy of anticipation, and today’s showing is one of the film’s hundreds of world premieres taking place simultaneously around the globe.
“People are tired of sitting at home,” says Nazir. “They say the TV is too small-screen. They prefer the giant screen.” “Giant” is really the only word to describe the Isfahan’s vast screen acreage. Together with the cinema’s recently-updated digital sound system, the experience of being inside the theatre is a truly awesome one – one that I had forgotten cinema could achieve, given the downsized screens that have become the modern norm. When Dil Se breaks into a breathtaking song-and-dance scene filmed atop a train hurtling through the desert, it is impossible not to feel a tremor of rapture, as if the people on the screen aren’t just larger than life, but as big as gods.
One of the remarkable features of today’s audience is its even spread of ages. While a Hollywood-ised reality constantly threatens to seduce youth the world over, there remains a potent obsession among locals with Bollywood and its stars. To many, the gossip and scandal surrounding current Indian screen legends is of far greater interest than whatever salacious rumours attend their Hollywood counterparts.
While one young man claims to favour American action movies like Independence Day and states “its the older people in our families that enjoy watching Indian movies”, he readily admits to having become “too Westernised”. Two young female fans, on the other hand, say they prefer Indian films “because of the songs and the dance and the dressing up”. Then one coyly adds: “And I like the romantic part – the grabbing part and the kissing part,” before disolving into giggles and blushes.
When asked if mainstream American films aren’t a threat to the youthful audience of Indian cinema, Nazir Sahib simply says: “As God has created our five fingers to be not the same, so the fans of film are not the same.” But, if today’s screening of Dil Se, is anything to go by, its hard not to agree with Faziel Sahib’s succinct assessment that “the big screen is coming back in a big way”. A tradition threatened with extinction seems to breathe with new life, and the glory days of Indian cinema in Durban may at last be regaining some of their lustre.