Things I never said in Film School

After my graduation, it was that time when everything was falling apart. The big two questions in my mind were: what to do and what not to do. Meanwhile, my love for films, and my desire to know more about them was growing inside me. At that time, I thought applying to Film Studies at Jadavpur University seemed logical. One of my teachers encouraged me to apply, so I did and sat for the entrance examination. Somehow, I got selected. Coincidentally, my girlfriend, who is also addicted to watching films like me, got selected too. So, we both happily joined and thought that our last dream of studying films, was finally coming true.

But as life often has other plans, after a while we started hating films. We stopped watching them, stopped talking about them, and even stopped engaging with any art medium or reading books. Whatever it was, we accepted our fate and went with the flow. As the saying goes, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”

When the projector was humming in class, I used to pretend I was taking notes, but instead, I was watching the dust dance in the beam of light. The last two pages of my notebook were filled with abstract sketches and drawings that had no meaning, I just made them without any reason (because I’m not even a good artist). Now, I try to identify and understand the things I had written or drawn in those chaotic pages during those two long years.

The unnecessary rules that dictate calling a specific length of footage, engraved with narrative or otherwise, meant for screening—a ‘film’ rather than ‘cinema’ or ‘movie’ stayed with me. (Because in our department, faculties advised us to use the word film only, as it was considered academically correct. They would frown upon us if we used any other synonymous word.)
I will call it a MOVIE! CINEMA! PICTURE! Whatever it feels like to me.

They taught us how to read a film. I just wanted to feel them. I never admitted that I found more meaning in a single frame of Pyaasa or Close-Up than in an entire semester of postmodern theory.

My girlfriend and I both felt that we were drifting away from the 24 frames and getting trapped in the four-semester curriculum designed to institutionalize us. I wanted to write about heartbreak, but I had to write about mise-en-scène. I admired people who could watch films without needing to understand them. I admired those who could feel so deeply that a film moved them to hours of tears.

I know narrative, mise-en-scène, feminist film theory, auteur theory, montage, the fourth wall, norms, and so on, but I want to forget all those things when I watch films. I thought of films as a burden, just a way to earn marks. I never said out loud that I don’t want to be a critic.
I want to be a decoder, a mourner, a midwife for forgotten feelings caught in 24 frames per second.

I wanted to write this blog not to give you information about films, art, or books, and I’m not saying that information is unimportant either. But I believe the first rule of studying films is to watch them without boundaries, and only later map them with theory and structure.

Films, to me, are emotion, expression, suppressed feelings, escape, and above all – love. This blog is the blooper reel of my mind, the takes where I forgot I was being watched.

I never told anyone that I wanted to stop watching films for a while. Because it hurts too much when you’re watching not to feel, but to find something. And I’m not saying those two years were a total waste of time. Like every coin, it had two sides. As depressing as it was, it taught me things I may not have learned otherwise. It introduced me to filmmakers like Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Wim Wenders, Luis Buñuel, Yasujiro Ozu, and more.

You know what I imagine? I imagine a scene that never existed but should have, the professor pausing the lecture to ask, “What does cinema mean to you?” A class that taught grief instead of genre.

During those two years, I wrote a lot, for class tests, semester exams, projects, activities, and the dissertation. Eventually, I started hating writing too.
But here I am. Writing.

Because someone out there needs to know that cinema isn’t just about entertainment—it’s a haunting. And if you feel haunted too, this is your place.

This isn’t just about cinema or art. This is about everything cinema saved me from. Everything it made me cry for, fall silent over for hours, and think about not once or twice, but for the hundredth time.

There’s more to it. But I won’t say it. Not yet.
Not until the right frame, the right silence.

And we’ll talk about everything, whether it’s frames, costumes, acting, staring, lighting, crying, sound, or silence.

These blogs won’t be about what I learned in class. They’ll be about what I learned when I paused the film and stared into the silence.

Welcome to that silence.
Maybe this isn’t a post.
Maybe it’s a footnote in a bigger script.
If you’ve read this far, you’re already in the next scene.