Dear reader,
I believe cinema must be watched in a cinema. Not on a laptop, not on a phone, not on a TV—however smart or flat its panel may be. With each shrinking of the screen, something vital is lost. The medium’s emotional charge, its visual grandeur, its immersive power—all diminish when its canvas contracts. That may sound purist, even a little curmudgeonly, in this era of OTT abundance and algorithm-driven viewing. But I’ll say it anyway: when it comes to movies, the bigger the screen and the darker the hall, the more potent the magic.
Don’t believe me? Watch three films: To Each His Own Cinema, an exquisite anthology of 34 shorts by directors from 25 countries, all meditating on the act of watching; Cinema Paradiso, Giuseppe Tornatore’s love letter to the vanished small-town theatre; and Abbas Kiarostami’s Shirin, which flips the lens to film women watching a film, their faces lit only by flickers of light and feeling.
Each of these films captures the same elemental truth: there is a peculiar alchemy in the darkened theatre. Strangers, briefly released from the burdens of their own lives, become co-conspirators in collective dreaming. Walter Benjamin wrote that cinema doesn’t merely entertain, but it creates a shared space for experience. When the lights go down and the images begin their hypnotic dance, we see democracy in its most radical form. Not at the ballot box or on the streets, but in the quiet surrender to someone else’s vision of what it means to be human (or not; such a disclaimer is needed in this AI era).
I agree that this ritual has taken on new urgency in our age of digital fragmentation. Political tribes retreat into algorithmic echo chambers, cultural dialogue is filtered through outrage cycles, and shared references grow scarce. Yet, against the odds, humanity still gathers in darkened halls to lose themselves in story. For those luminous hours, we become porous to each other again. Vulnerable. Hopeful. Human. It is indeed not an exaggeration to say cinema is our last universal language. A visual Esperanto of the soul.
The impact is visible in the numbers. The global film and video industry generated more than $300 billion in revenue in 2024, surpassing the GDP of more than 170 countries (about 85-90 per cent of all recognised nations). But these figures only skim the surface. In the 1960s, James Bond films boosted tourism to featured destinations. Bollywood’s soft power runs so deep across West Asia and South-East Asia that Hindi filmi phrases have entered everyday speech in countries where few have ever met an Indian. But cinema’s influence is much more than merely commercial; it’s mythopoeic. It functions as a collective unconscious, showing not just how societies look at themselves, but how they wish to be seen.
In this process, some performers, by sheer charisma or timing, become emissaries of something larger than themselves. Bruce Lee turned martial arts choreography into philosophy. Marilyn Monroe arguably became America’s most recognisable export after Coca-Cola, her image more familiar globally than any head of state. France had Jean-Paul Belmondo—intellectual cool in proletarian clothes. Mexico had Pedro Infante, whose death drew three days of national mourning, usually reserved for Presidents. These men and women, in many ways, became the brand ambassadors of their countries. They were more than mere entertainers; they were metaphors in motion; they embodied their nations’ contradictions, dreams, and delusions (especially true for Hollywood).
Egypt’s Omar Sharif negotiated this terrain with rare poise—the Arab world’s first global screen icon, equally at home in Cairo cafés and Cannes galas. His role in Lawrence of Arabia turned him into a vessel of Arab representation to the West—lauded by some, resented by others. He was, in effect, a soft diplomat—a man caught between admiration and accusation, proof that cinema can alter how entire cultures are imagined.
Nowhere has cinematic soft power flourished quite like India’s. Just a decade after Independence, India was exporting dreams to corners of the world it barely traded with: from Peru to the Soviet Union, Afghanistan to Ghana. This was a kind of cinematic insurgency, offering stories with unmistakably local flavour and universally felt stakes.
Indian cinema’s success came not from Hollywood-style polish or European arthouse restraint, but from a narrative form that honoured its own logic: long runtimes, lavish music, moral clarity, and plots that wore emotion on their sleeves. For many in postcolonial nations, these films felt truer than the West’s stories; they were aspirational without being alien, grand without being cold.
The results were noteworthy. By the 1970s, Indian films were screened in over 100 countries, according to one estimate. In the Soviet Union, some outperformed domestic productions. Nigeria absorbed Bollywood so deeply that Nollywood has a decent population of Indian crossover films. Today, Indian cinema reaches nearly three billion people—almost half the planet.
This anecdote from the 1980s captures the genre’s diplomatic potency. India and the Soviet Union were locked in trade negotiations. The breakthrough did not come from envoys or economists, but a Soviet official who, upon meeting Indian delegates at a Moscow film festival, began humming songs from Awara, a film that had comforted his father during his illness. That nostalgic thread opened the door to political compromise. True or not, the story is a nice reminder that emotional resonance can succeed where protocol stalls.
Benedict Anderson’s notion of “imagined communities” helps explain this. Nations, he argued, are built from shared symbols and stories. Cinema extends this principle across borders and creates global imaginaries that allow someone in São Paulo to feel emotionally connected to Chennai, or someone in Nairobi to grieve a character in Tehran.
What cinema does best is render the unfamiliar familiar. A family in Mumbai may never set foot in the Dust Bowl, but through cinema, they can experience the anxieties of a farmer in Oklahoma of the Depression era (think of The Grapes of Wrath movie). And the reverse is equally powerful: Iran’s global image today owes as much to Abbas Kiarostami’s gentle poetics or films by the likes of Majid Majidi or Mohsen Makhmalbaf and, on the other end, Jafar Panahi, as to any press coverage. Romania’s black comedies told the world more about its resilience than a thousand news reports could.
The most powerful, lasting cinematic ambassadors evolve with their publics. They carry with them not just charisma but the conscience of their people, reminding them of who they are and what they could still become.
The new issue of Frontline follows one such figure—an artist who did not just entertain his nation but helped it understand itself, whose life and work traced the contours of India’s postcolonial transformation. Raj Kapoor—the man who, among others, created Awara, which the Russians loved. His works told us that perhaps cinema’s most radical offering is its stubborn faith in the universality of human feeling—that grief, desire, loneliness, joy can cross oceans, breach firewalls, outlast governments. That stories, when told with care, can remake the world.
In tracing his legacy, we look at the mysterious way a single dreamer can become the mouthpiece of a million aspirations. We have a great cast for this show: Aditya Shrikrishna, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Ashutosh Sharma, C.S. Venkiteswaran, Jai Arjun Singh, Juhi Saklani, Lawrence Liang, M.K. Raghavendra, Prathyush Parasuraman, Trisha Gupta, and Varrun Sukhraj (in a great interview with the film historian Nasreen Munni Kabir).
Grab the issue—this one’s a keeper. Or head to our website. And do write in: what’s your first or favourite Raj Kapoor memory? Full disclosure: my first encounter with the RK phenomenon is through the song “Pyar Hua Ikrar Hua”—immortalised not just by Shree 420, but by a Doordarshan public service ad for Nirodh condoms in the 1990s. Proof, if any was needed, that the soft power of a rain-drenched romance could carry even the hard message of family planning!
Wishing you a lovely week ahead,
Jinoy Jose P.
Digital Editor, Frontline
We hope you’ve been enjoying our newsletters featuring a selection of articles that we believe will be of interest to a cross-section of our readers. Tell us if you like what you read. And also, what you don’t like! Mail us at frontline@thehindu.co.in
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