TALKING MOVIES

At St. Xavier's Godavari School, the biggest punishment one could possibly get was missing the next monthly movie. We were some of the very few who were privileged to watch Hollywood movies in the Kathmandu of the sixties, courtesy of our Jesuit fathers and their excellent relationship with the American missions in Nepal. Hindi movies reigned supreme in local cinemas and there was no market for English language films, except for a few mega hits once in a while, like Ben Hur, Lawrence of Arabia and The Ten Commandments. When a punishment was meted out for transgressions and we missed a Sunday movie, there was no consolation. One sat in an empty classroom reading, cast away like a leper, while rest of the student body was transfixed by the visual imagery dancing on a large white screen. Yes, I have been there just once but it felt at the time like a lifetime.

My first recollections of movies screened on to a white screen was at home. They were often times grainy, black and white, silent films shot in 16 mm from my father's hunting collections. There was a potpourri of these amateur films: Maharajah Juddha shooting wild buffaloes in Koshi Tappu, King Mahendra's hunts, my father shooting tigers when he was the Commander-in-Chief of the Nepalese Army, iconic images of my father posing with a tiger he shot with a Colt .45 pistol. The indelible impressions I carry of these early introduction to moving pictures must have helped make me a movie buff forever.

The movies from the fifties and early sixties were our monthly diet at Godavari. There were big films then with even bigger stars; Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird, Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca and Steve McQueen in The Sand Pebbles to name a few. Some of us became such ardent fans of movie stars to the extent that even our mannerisms noticeably changed. I remember our classmate late Lekh Rana transforming himself into Santee taking after the gun slinging hero of The Black Spurs an action-packed Western. Another friend Buddha Basnyat reinvented himself as Paul Newman, the luminous smile, the furrowed brows, et al, sans the blue eyes.

One looks back with bemusement watching romantic love scenes in a Jesuit school. The moral censorship consisted of a strategic palm on the cine projector lens just before a film sequence went "adult" rendering the screen blank to our protesting howls and hooting from the older students. We could only imagine in our mind's eye Elizabeth Taylor being kissed by the handsome hunk Rock Hudson, pretty innocuous stuff compared to what children are exposed to today. Of course, James Bond movies were beyond the pale. That is probably why Dipak Shah our own Ian Fleming serialized the exploits of Hari Babu in his insanely entertaining installments in our Class VIII Newsletter.

There were some horror movies that scared the pants off us kids. Village of the Damned comes to mind in particular. I remember my friend Mahendra Jib watching the scary scenes through gaps on his fingers held over his eyes. Oh, how we jumped when the villainous Alan Arkin character pounced on the blind housewife played by Audrey Hepburn in the climactic sequence of the terrifyingly great Wait Until Dark!

I particularly enjoyed the "post-mortem" of epic movies like Doctor Zhivago or Gone With the Wind. The Jesuits filled us in on the historical and social background of the films with great erudition and we transported ourselves back to the grim canvas of revolutionary Russia or to the near-death throe of a young American Union over the question of slavery. We learnt how to analyze the films and we were encouraged to interpret them with our own faculty. We let our imagination run rampant with "what if?" and "why not?".

That is probably the reason why I joined the Cine Club when it came to signing up for extracurricular activities in the 10th Grade. Orson Well's Citizen Kane was the trail blazer in cine techniques used even to this day. We also viewed art house movies of many of the world's best directors including those of Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa and Satyajit Ray. The potential of cinema was mind-boggling.

At school I meticulously kept a list of movies I saw in long hand, including the names of the stars and sometimes of the famous directors too. Perhaps I had a secret ambition to get into films behind the camera, I cannot say for sure now. Somewhere down the school years I misplaced the list. It was like losing a close intimate part of me. To this day I do not miss a good movie given half a chance; perhaps I am subconsciously making up for missing that movie once upon a time in Godavari School.