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An Elegy to India’s Vanishing Cinemas
Movies fascinated Nandita Raman growing up in Varanasi, India, an interest fostered while hanging out in the movie theater owned by her mother’s family, the first in the city to show talkies. She visited often, watching films and exploring behind the scenes, captivated by the visual environment, from the movies themselves to watching her uncle select vivid posters for coming attractions.
“It felt like a miniature world within a world,” Ms. Raman recalled. “More than a dozen people were on staff. Because I came from the owner’s family, I had access. I really loved to go up into the projection room. I would hang out in the ticket booth.”
But when Ms. Raman visited the theater in 2006, she encountered the empty shell of what had once been a flourishing business, with the seats and projection room gone and dust covering everything. The sight inspired her to spend the next three years photographing India’s vanishing single-screen movie houses for the resulting series “Cinema Play House.” Now on view at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, N.Y., the photographs tell a story that is both deeply personal and acutely aware of greater culture issues.
Her search for movie houses in Varanasi, Delhi, Kolkata, and Chennai, led her to discover that some of these theaters, once packed with boisterous crowds, were shuttered or struggling to stay open. Built largely during the first half of the 20th century, their popularity began to wane as home video emerged in the 1990s and multiplexes became popular a decade later.
Ms. Raman’s photographs show spaces that are paradoxically majestic and intimate: Once luxurious interiors replete with towering screens, grand staircases and opulent lobbies were designed to make going to the movies both personal and fleeting.
“There was a grandness to the cinema making and going experience in India,” Ms. Raman said. “These theaters were huge. They had capacities of 600, even 1200 people. The screens were really big. But the nature of films and their subject matter invited you to escape into darkness, into a make believe world.” Immensely popular both at home and eventually globally, the Indian cinema supported a range of genres and subject matter, from romantic musicals and social realist explorations of urban working class life to period dramas and coming-of-age films.
“Cinema Play House” chronicles a slowly-dying culture known for its eccentricity and originality. The photographs underscore the grandeur, individuality and decline of these movie palaces: the huge screen and cavernous interior of a now crumbling building; the lush carpeting in an abandoned theater lobby; a mammoth film projector surrounded by detritus; tall stacks of film cans in a makeshift storage area; the shattered glass of a ticket booth; or the elaborate murals of a once palatial movie hall.
Ms. Raman’s elegiac pictures may be largely devoid of people, but they resonate with the evocative ghostlike traces of that once-vibrant community of passionate moviegoers entranced by these idiosyncratic buildings. While she photographed workers and a few audience members, she edited out of most of these images from the series, resulting in pictures that are stilled and silent but also pulsing with life and history. Ms. Raman sees these photographs as a window into the inner lives of theater owners, too, who often helped to design their own buildings, in contrast to today’s cookie-cutter corporate multiplexes.
“They didn’t follow a template and each cinema was unique,” she noted in an artist statement. “These theaters seemed to contain cues to the psyche of the people who built it and who occupy it.” Her images show those quirks: a row of mismatched seats; a huge circular window that mirrors the shape of the film reels in front of it; a portrait of Vladimir Lenin adjacent to a fire extinguisher; or the marble parquetry of a palatial lobby.
Ms. Raman’s photographs also speak to the central role that movies have played in the life of a nation that is home to the world’s most prolific film industry. The decline of single-screen theaters coincided with the passing of the era when film emerged as a dominant creative force in India, culminating in what is widely regarded as the golden age of popular cinema in the 1950s. During this time, filmmakers offered eager audiences a popular visual art that sometimes also addressed the social realities of a nation, from the caste system to the role of women.
In the end, the film industry inspired Indian society as much as it reflected it — from sparking trends in popular culture and fashion to influencing public attitudes about spirituality, relationships, social mores and politics. Commenting on its broad impact, then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru observed in 1955 that “the influence of the films in India is greater than the influence of newspapers and books combined.”
Ms. Raman, who now lives in New York, laments the fading of this vital and distinctive culture, acknowledging the global forces and corporate interests that have transformed the Indian film industry.
“When I went into the more modern multiplexes in these cities, I could not find anything to hold on to,” she said. “The single screen theaters were much more generous in telling their age and story to me.”
Race Stories is a continuing exploration of the relationship between race and photographic depictions of race by Maurice Berger. He is a research professor and chief curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
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