Rewinding to the 70s: VIT Chennai’s Touring Talkies Gives Gen Z a Taste of Vintage Cinema

Tell My Story

A touring talkie set up on the campus of VIT Chennai gave Gen Z students an opportunity to experience watching films the good old way of the seventies – sitting on the sand, chairs and benches – all under a tent.

It recreated every possible vintage element of the “tent kottai,” as it was called then. Just as it was done for big releases in those days, a horse-drawn cart brought the film reels box amid music and drum beats for the screening of the old MGR blockbuster Aayirathil Oruvan. Students from the online and OTT era stood in queues to buy tickets through small, old-time counters, reliving a slice of cinematic history.

Aksther, a second-year Machine Learning student, told tellmystory.in that she felt happy to experience how her father grew up watching films. “I feel the modern-day multiplex is more rushed than the tent kottai. Here, I thought I was able to enjoy every aspect of the screening, not just the film,” she said.

Roshan Sabarish enjoyed tasting snacks popular in theatres in the seventies, including kadalai mittai and javvu mittai. Having fallen in love with the touring talkie, the Megatronics student made a special request: “Our generation has missed this. It would be really nice if the government revives this concept.”

For students accustomed to swanky multiplexes or OTT platforms accessed on personal devices, the experience was a rare opportunity to peep into the past. Dr G V Selvam, Vice President of VIT Chennai, said, “Present-generation students watch films online. Now they watch sitting on a sofa. They have no sense of how it was then — whether it was a bench or a chair. They have no idea of the difficulty. It is a rewind to see how life was. They enjoy it. It is creative and cultural.”

Students also got to watch old blockbusters from Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam cinema, including superhits of Rajinikanth and Kamal Haasan. Struck by this rustic film-watching experience, many now want the industry and the government to recreate, revive and preserve this old piece of cinema legacy.