View: You thought you know the film? Well, you don't
film-related discourse on social media, you're probably fed up with the endless echo-chamber discussions around Sandeep Reddy Vanga's Animal. Without watching the film, I feel like I have had it assessed for me through every available lens — along a continuum from virtue-signalling to vice-celebrating.
So, I'll spare you my thoughts about the agonising and the exulting, except to say that it's strange when people unshakably make up their minds about a film they haven't watched yet, and even dissuade others from watching it.
Or when they are convinced that a film can only be one thing — and that anyone who engages with it on another level is morally compromised.
A radical point that comes up in my conversations with students is that one should ideally experience a work — read a novel beginning to end, watch a whole film, not just its trailer — before venturing an opinion. (In a recent class, we spoke about cases — common in the OTT age — of viewers, including professional critics, forming judgements about a series after watching an episode or two, without taking the time to discover a character's arc.)
This also involves engaging with many different things — including what you fear may discomfit you — and can result in a special joy: being surprised by your own response to a work, even finding a dimension in yourself that you hadn't fully tapped into.
Now, a confession: despite this preaching, there are some films, including iconic ones, that I haven't watched but still have a version of in my head.
As an adolescent developing an interest in old cinema, one of my prized books was Roger Manvell's 1946 Film, and through its pages, I first formed impressions of what certain films looked like.
