India's Vanishing Picture Palaces: An Artist's Ode To Single-Screen Theatres

Picture this: you are standing in a queue at a ticket counter, at the end of the line you reach a tiny opening in the wall and from the other side a person hands out a small piece of paper, a physical ticket stub to enter the movie theatre. Like this obsolete ticket, now memorialised as a tiny pink emoji on our smartphone screens, there are few remaining features of tangible heritage from the pre-digital era of entertainment - the single screen cinema theatre is one of them.

Cinematographer turned photographer Hemant Chaturvedi set out to document endangered single-screen cinemas in India, or “picture palaces” as he refers to them in the title of the exhibition. With mainstream Bollywood movies like Company (2002), Makdee (2002), Maqbool (2003), Ishaqzaade (2012) and Brothers (2015) to his credit he turned to still photography full-time in 2015. This leg of “India’s Vanishing Picture Palaces” showcased a selection of 67 single screen cinemas of the nearly 1,300 he photographed. He travelled alone for more than 60,000 kilometers, through 21 states of India, over a period of 7 years starting in 2019. Some of these endeavours took place during the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, armed with a sanitiser and mask along with his usual apparatus. This monumental undertaking is as much an homage to the relationships that helped build and sustain the ecosystem of the entertainment industry in a pre-digital era, as much as it is a nostalgia project to document remaining single-screen cinemas, or in some instances, their traces.

“You can’t do these journeys twice”, said Chaturvedi when asked what format these photos were made on. “Who knows, maybe by the next visit, the structure would have been demolished or revamped into something unrecognisable.” He asserted that documentation itself was far more important than the medium, and added that his choice was a micro fourth-thirds digital camera with a strict lensing discipline. No matter what the lighting conditions, he was particular about the photographic parameters. He set his camera to 200 ISO on a tripod and adjusted the exposure time to achieve the desired image. This labour of love was carried out with just as much care and attention if not more than what is required to shoot a feature length film on celluloid to fruition.

The photographs are a typological study of what survived an era gone by. The grandeur of the once vibrant, larger-than-life halls is now forlorn with seats exposed to the elements, derelict and gathering dust. There is a meditative, almost philosophical quality to the series – the longer you peer into a single frame, more details emerge as tunes of classic Hindi songs by Mukesh such as Kisi Ki Muskurahaton Pe and Jeena Isi Ka Naam Hai play in the background. You see peeling posters, worn off paint and amidst these textures of decay are glimpses of superstars. Stuck to a tattered wall is half of Amitabh Bachchan’s face on a section of a poster, in another frame a pensive Naseeruddin Shah looks on and in another frame hand painted Shammi Kapoor and Saira Banu. This anthropological inquiry into the world of single-screen cinemas is a counter narrative, a “visual conservation”, or a “future proofing of the past” as Chaturvedi refers to it.

“For the first several centuries of entertainment, the entertainment controlled you but now you control it.” Earlier you dressed up and physically travelled to the theatre, whether to watch a play or a movie. Now, if you get bored ten minutes into the film, you hit the pause button and switch to another streaming platform. Going to the cinema used to be a collective experience - in the larger theatres the acoustics in the auditorium were different. With tiered seating holding over a thousand people, the cinema was bigger than the individual, and not the other way around. Earlier, you could have a warm bucket of popcorn between your knees to keep you warm in a cold theatre and it was enough. The stiff wooden seats made sure you didn’t get too comfortable and paid attention to the movie projection. Since the rise of multiplexes and more expensive tickets, an entire social class has been removed from the cinema going collective consciousness.

During the heyday of the single screen cinema, each theatre had its own personality. Each “talkies” and “palace” came with a quirky name, architectural style and regional details, unlike the cookie cutter mould LED-lit commercial multiplexes of today. The photos highlight the afterlife of these abandoned cinemas. Barely illuminated, a spool of discarded film coated in dust rests between cobwebs and debris in Lakadganj’s Krishna Sudama talkies. In Mysuru’s Krishna talkies, the original hand painted exit sign on the tainted glass door and rotating fans are still intact but instead of seats, there is a heap of discarded wood. Under the poster board outside Srinagar’s Neelam Cinema hang ironed clothes and a towel. Colour theory is at play in Najibabad’s Bharat talkies, the blue from the ceiling and red from the walls mix to produce a purple hue on the floor. In Amaravati’s Jai Hind talkies, light seeps in from the gap in the aluminium roofing, illuminating tricycles for the physically disabled - it is now a storehouse. The exhibition, recently held at, India Habitat Centre, also showcased a series of portraits dedicated solely to the projectionists, whose important work often went unseen as they maneuvered the carbon arc lamps from the projection room.

When asked if any of the theatre owners turned down his wish to photograph the space, he said “if everyone had said yes, maybe I would have covered 20 more theatres”. In most instances he just landed there and requested the owners or those who looked after the space (if at all) to let him photograph. There was no prior permission seeking or informing, for these journeys he was a photographer on a mission in his rugged jeep and not a renowned erstwhile cinematographer. From requesting the owners of theatres in small towns, in a manner that is “innocent but not rehearsed” to jumping off compound walls and avoiding the police, he went great lengths to get to these sites. His only regret, perhaps, was not making a photographic record of the 400 hotel rooms he stayed in during these trips.