Long before streaming brought global cinema to our fingertips, Kerala’s village libraries were screening Eastern European, Soviet and French modernist films. More than a hundred film societies created a cultural revolution, bringing the magic of world cinema to local audiences and opening new avenues of cultural, even political, discourse. But how successful was this movement in familiarising Kerala’s viewers with regional films from the rest of India or from Asia more broadly?
The year is 1970. In a village in the state of Kerala, on India’s southwestern coast, around twenty men are huddled around a cloth screen in a village library during the dark hours of the night, avidly watching Sergei Eisenstein’s classic film, Battleship Potemkin. The same night, in another town in Kerala, a group of cinephiles eagerly awaits the imminent arrival of the film reels of Hungarian maestro Istvan Szabo’s iconoclastic film, Mephisto, and prepares to hear the language of the Magyars.
These two images from more than four decades ago are episodes of a defining cultural phenomenon that spread across the almost 600 kilometres of the coastal state of Kerala during the 1960s and continues to date. Many would recognise this as a story of the Film Society Movement (FSM hereafter) in Kerala, not only one of the founding regions of FSM from its very beginnings, but also a fertile ground for its growth and continued survival.