My Mirror column:
Watching films in the theatre used to be a sensory experience that extended beyond the screen, tied to rituals of urban life. Now the screen floats free, and so do we.
I made my acquaintance with Trivandrum’s single screen theatres during my first visit to the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) in 2011. In Godard’s Own Country (2012), a longform Caravan essay on the IFFK and Kerala’s love of world cinema, I described some of them: “There is Ajanta, dense with the smell of rose petals, and with a pedestal fan that whirrs incessantly; Sreekumar, with a treacherous set of stairs in its balcony; the twinned Dhanya (big) and Remya (small); and Sree Padmanabha, for whom becoming an IFFK venue has been crucial in regaining the respectability it had lost as a softporn theatre in the ’90s. (Sree Padmanabha went all out in 2011, creating a two-minute laser display that played before each festival screening. The effort won it the ‘Best Theatre’ award.).”
I didn’t mention in the 2012 essay why I gravitated to Sree Padmanabha: in the dense warren of streets behind it was the finest, most well-priced Malayali lunch joint in the city, the inimitable Mubarak, serving up unlimited mounds of piping hot rice, veggies and moru curry — to which, with the merest incline of the head, one could add a steady chain of seafood accompaniments: perfectly crisp matthi, spicy squid fry, or the most delectable mussels. By not being held in a private enclosed space like INOX in Panjim, or a government-created auditorium complex like Siri Fort in Delhi, IFFK allowed visiting viewers, like myself, to explore the city through its cinemas, discovering not just their characterful architecture but also eateries near them, just by following my nose — and the crowd.
I also didn’t mention how I first learnt about Sree Padmanabha’s pornographic past. A few days after IFFK, chatting with my Kollam homestay host, I discovered he had actually worked as its manager for several years, helping end its seedy phase! His father’s connection with it was older — he had watched films there his entire childhood, and even now no expedition to Trivandrum was complete without a solo visit to Sree Padmanabha, including a snack and a soft drink.
I haven’t been back to Sree Padmanabha since 2013, but think of it fondly. So I was delighted, on opening Yesterday’s Films for Tomorrow, a newly released book by the late film archivist PK Nair, to discover its prehistory. “It was in the early 1940s, the height of the War period. I must have been hardly eight years old,” writes Nair. “The venue: a tent cinema in Trivandrum’s Putharikandam Maidan, almost the same location as the present Sree Padmanabha theatre. Nearly half the hall was filled with immaculate shining white sand, probably got from the local beach. This was the lowest priced seating, classified as ‘floor’. Just behind was the ‘bench’ class packed with wooden benches, and further behind was the highest class with folding wooden chairs.”
Nair’s nostalgia is jocular and precise, listing the “half-wall” against which floor-sitters vied to rest their backs, the “women's barricades” for “your wife and kids” (the assumed viewer and reader is a man, of course), and the “hawker boys” who roamed freely through the hall, “canvassing aggressively” to sell their beedis and cigarettes, soda or peanuts during the many short intervals (A single projector necessitated five or six breaks between reels).
Given his father’s certified disapproval of cinema (typical of that generation of educated nationalists), Nair took to sneaking out when the family was asleep, begging the doorman at Sree Padmanabha or Chitra to let him in to the last hour of the late night show. “[L]ater I would catch up with what I had missed at a matinee show on the weekend.” “Perhaps such lopsided viewings in repetition enabled me to look at films more objectively and sharpened my critical faculties even as a school kid,” he muses.
Nair’s spare reminiscences reminded me of a more extravagant account of childhood film viewing: the late theatre doyen Habib Tanvir on Raipur’s Big Top theatre. Tanvir, like Nair, watched many films for free; he and his friends would slash the tent with a razor blade and sneak into shows where half the audience’s enjoyment came from the vulgar, funny running commentary provided by the co-owner, Chunnilal: “Oye, what are you standing around for, motherfucker, the villain will kill your heroine. Bastard, make the horse go faster, faster, you idiot!”
Nair and Tanvir’s memoirs reveal how inexorably film-watching was once tied to places and people — the physical experience of the theatre, the particular doorman or commentator, the food you ate after. Now a film can play anytime we want it to, often opening up on a screen that we carry around with us. Watching a film this way no longer leads us into the city; just back into ourselves.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 25 June 2017.
Watching films in the theatre used to be a sensory experience that extended beyond the screen, tied to rituals of urban life. Now the screen floats free, and so do we.
I made my acquaintance with Trivandrum’s single screen theatres during my first visit to the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) in 2011. In Godard’s Own Country (2012), a longform Caravan essay on the IFFK and Kerala’s love of world cinema, I described some of them: “There is Ajanta, dense with the smell of rose petals, and with a pedestal fan that whirrs incessantly; Sreekumar, with a treacherous set of stairs in its balcony; the twinned Dhanya (big) and Remya (small); and Sree Padmanabha, for whom becoming an IFFK venue has been crucial in regaining the respectability it had lost as a softporn theatre in the ’90s. (Sree Padmanabha went all out in 2011, creating a two-minute laser display that played before each festival screening. The effort won it the ‘Best Theatre’ award.).”
I didn’t mention in the 2012 essay why I gravitated to Sree Padmanabha: in the dense warren of streets behind it was the finest, most well-priced Malayali lunch joint in the city, the inimitable Mubarak, serving up unlimited mounds of piping hot rice, veggies and moru curry — to which, with the merest incline of the head, one could add a steady chain of seafood accompaniments: perfectly crisp matthi, spicy squid fry, or the most delectable mussels. By not being held in a private enclosed space like INOX in Panjim, or a government-created auditorium complex like Siri Fort in Delhi, IFFK allowed visiting viewers, like myself, to explore the city through its cinemas, discovering not just their characterful architecture but also eateries near them, just by following my nose — and the crowd.
I also didn’t mention how I first learnt about Sree Padmanabha’s pornographic past. A few days after IFFK, chatting with my Kollam homestay host, I discovered he had actually worked as its manager for several years, helping end its seedy phase! His father’s connection with it was older — he had watched films there his entire childhood, and even now no expedition to Trivandrum was complete without a solo visit to Sree Padmanabha, including a snack and a soft drink.
I haven’t been back to Sree Padmanabha since 2013, but think of it fondly. So I was delighted, on opening Yesterday’s Films for Tomorrow, a newly released book by the late film archivist PK Nair, to discover its prehistory. “It was in the early 1940s, the height of the War period. I must have been hardly eight years old,” writes Nair. “The venue: a tent cinema in Trivandrum’s Putharikandam Maidan, almost the same location as the present Sree Padmanabha theatre. Nearly half the hall was filled with immaculate shining white sand, probably got from the local beach. This was the lowest priced seating, classified as ‘floor’. Just behind was the ‘bench’ class packed with wooden benches, and further behind was the highest class with folding wooden chairs.”
Nair’s nostalgia is jocular and precise, listing the “half-wall” against which floor-sitters vied to rest their backs, the “women's barricades” for “your wife and kids” (the assumed viewer and reader is a man, of course), and the “hawker boys” who roamed freely through the hall, “canvassing aggressively” to sell their beedis and cigarettes, soda or peanuts during the many short intervals (A single projector necessitated five or six breaks between reels).
Given his father’s certified disapproval of cinema (typical of that generation of educated nationalists), Nair took to sneaking out when the family was asleep, begging the doorman at Sree Padmanabha or Chitra to let him in to the last hour of the late night show. “[L]ater I would catch up with what I had missed at a matinee show on the weekend.” “Perhaps such lopsided viewings in repetition enabled me to look at films more objectively and sharpened my critical faculties even as a school kid,” he muses.
Nair’s spare reminiscences reminded me of a more extravagant account of childhood film viewing: the late theatre doyen Habib Tanvir on Raipur’s Big Top theatre. Tanvir, like Nair, watched many films for free; he and his friends would slash the tent with a razor blade and sneak into shows where half the audience’s enjoyment came from the vulgar, funny running commentary provided by the co-owner, Chunnilal: “Oye, what are you standing around for, motherfucker, the villain will kill your heroine. Bastard, make the horse go faster, faster, you idiot!”
Nair and Tanvir’s memoirs reveal how inexorably film-watching was once tied to places and people — the physical experience of the theatre, the particular doorman or commentator, the food you ate after. Now a film can play anytime we want it to, often opening up on a screen that we carry around with us. Watching a film this way no longer leads us into the city; just back into ourselves.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 25 June 2017.
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