Cinema Everywhere

Cinema Everywhere
By David Parkinson

There was more than one reason why the first films were called `moving pictures'. The vast majority of early screenings were given by itinerant projectionists who operated at fairgrounds, village halls and civic centres. Indeed, it wasn't until Harry Davis and John P. Harris opened the first nickelodeon in a disused store in Pittsburgh in 1905 that the concept of permanent picture houses began to catch on in the United States.

In these days of downtown dream palaces and mall megaplexes, it's hard to imagine that, in certain parts of the world, things haven't changed that much since the turn of the last century and that vast numbers of people see their movies in places a million miles from the average American auditorium. Yet travelling cinema continues to thrive — and in some pretty unexpected places, too — as do open-air theatres and state-sponsored venues detailed to provide the workers with uplifting propaganda at the end of a day's toil.

In Comrades, his 1986 study of the Tolpuddle Martyrs who tried to found a prototype trade union in 1830s Dorset, Bill Douglas showed rural audiences thrilling to the simple, colour images presented by a magic lanternist. Getting on for 200 years later, the arrival of a travelling cinema still generates the same kind of excitment in isolated settlements across Asia and Africa. It doesn't really matter what's playing, as a cinema show is a special occasion. Entire families make a night of it, enjoying picnics as dusk falls over the makeshift screen that's been erected on the largest available patch of open land.

Trucks were first used to bring cinema to outlaying populations by the Bolsheviks, who also fitted out trains and riverboats to convert illiterate viewers to the revolutionary cause through the agit-prop documentaries of Dziga-Vertov and the montage features of Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Dovzhenko. Castro followed suit in the early 1960s, although, as Juan Carlos Tabio demonstrated in The Elephant and the Bicycle (1995), uneducated audiences could sometimes misunderstand a movie's message, in this instance the peasants on a remote island are inspired to rise up against their oppressive landlord by a silent version of Robin Hood.

The impact that films can have on those who see so few that they take on much greater significance than an occasional entertainment has been seen in features as different as F.W. Murnau's Tartuffe (1925), in which the adaptation of Molière's play was bookended by scenes of a young man posing as an itinerant projectionist to convince his uncle that he is being swindled by his housekeeper, and Victor Erice's Spirit of the Beehive (1973), in which a seven year-old (Ana Torrent) Spanish girl is so struck by James Whale's Frankenstein that she mistakes a Falangist soldier hiding in a nearby barn for the Monster.

However, nowhere has travelling cinema been so romanticised as in India.

Just as British pioneers sent touring cinemas to Australia and Canada in the 1930s, some 500 outfits were criss-crossing the subcontinent by the end of the decade and today more than 2000 endure interminable journeys across inhospitable terrain to ply their trade. In some cases, the trucks and projectors have been handed down the generations and it's a wonder that so many showman manage to stay in business, as their equipment is so antiquated and they can rarely charge their impoverished patrons more than a pittance for a ticket. What would they give for one of the cinemobiles currently servicing the Borders, Highlands and Islands of Scotland and the further flung communities of Ireland, with their state-of-the-art digital apparatus and comfortable in-lorry seating for 100?

Yet mobile bioscopes still attract such large and enthusiastic crowds that not only do their owners make a worthwhile living, but they have also become a favourite subject for writers and film-makers. In Filming, novelist Tabish Khair uses a travelling show to chronicle the last days of the Raj, while Desi director Arun Kumar went to the Maharashtra village of Pusi Savar with real-life cine-trucker Sharad Deshpande for Truck of Dreams (2006), which features Peeya Rai Chowdhary as an impressionable waif who runs away to Bollywood to become a star after being overwhelmed by the sight of Shah Rukh Khan in Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge.

A number of documentaries have also been made on the subject, including Andrzej Fidyk's Battu's Bioscope (1998), Tim Sternberg's Salim Baba (2007) and Megha B. Lakhani's short, Prakash Travelling Cinema (2006), which follows two friends through the streets of Ahmedabad in Gujurat, as they handcrank their 1910-vintage Pathé projector to show clips that are watched eagerly through peepholes in the side of their light-proofed handcart by expectant children. This humbling film — which finds echo in Afghan director Mirveis Rekab's enchanting short, Kabul Cinema (2002) — can be seen online.

However, the most compelling study of life on the road with an Indian entrepreneur is contained within Uli Gaulke's Comrades in Dreams (2006). The sheer effort that goes into pitching a tent show — from calculating projection distances and manning the box office to entertaining local dignitaries and screening the picture — is laid bare in the sections devoted to Anup Jagdale, whose hopes of making a killing with James Cameron's Titanic are dashed when the punters in this land-locked backwater stare in bored bemusement at a story that never once connects with their own experiences of life and lacks the magic to transport them into the fantasy realms of their own beloved masala musicals.

This cultural contrast is reinforced by Gaulke's inclusion of the tiny community cinema in Big Piney, Wyoming, where the choice of snacks and titbits of gossip matters more than the content of the movies. Despite the zeal and hospitality of manager Penny Tefertiller, regulars return with more of a sense of obligation than curiosity. There's certainly none of the fervour demonstrated by Anup's audiences, as they queue for admission and then cram together on the scrub to sit through the three hours of an average Bollywood extravaganza. Forget plush seats with cupholders, unrestricted views and Dolby surround sound. Think heat, dust, flies, numbed body parts, tinny speakers and talkative neighbours, who may even sing and dance along with the musical numbers!

As a former projectionist who once renovated a cinema in his native Germany, Gaulke has a genuine empathy with the various exhibitors he encounters. He is particularly touched by Lassane, Luc and Zakaria, a trio from Burkina Faso in West Africa who have staked what little they have on a roofless cinema in the capital, Ouagadougou. Brimming with a passion for the movies that is only matched by their confidence that they are about to become rich, they zip from the film exchange by moped, carring the cans of an old Kim Basinger picture that they are sure will keep them afloat until the council reinstates the grant that the venue used to command in its 'glory' days.

However, trawling the dimly lit byways persuading revellers already wilting in the torridness of a stifling city night to spend 90 minutes in a shabby concrete box open to the elements and fitted with the most rudimentary seating and facilities watching some Hollywood pulp they've probably never heard of proves more difficult than Lassane had envisaged and one is left with the nagging feeling that his wife is right to fear that they may be paying for this foolhardy enterprise for years to come.

Outdoor cinema is a surefire moneyspinner in more salubrious locations, however. During the summer months, tourists flock to venues like the Cineporto near the Olympic Stadium in Rome, the Thisseion in the foothills of the Acropolis in Athens, the Kreuzberg in Berlin, Somerset House on the banks of the Thames in London, the Orange Cinema on the shores of Lake Zurich and the St George, which boasts views of both the Harbour Bridge and the Sydney Opera House.

Parisians have recently become accustomed to open air screenings in the Parc de la Villette. But, until 2004, the City of Light could also point to the epitome of underground cinema — a minema-cum-café in the catacombs beneath the Palais de Chaillot, which, fittingly, houses the majestic Cinemathèque Française. Accessed through a sewer beside the Trocadero, the venue possessed a full-sized screen, modern projection equipment and a selection of 1950s noir classics. However, the police closed the cataciné down, as it has been illegal since 1955 to venture into Paris's 170 miles of subterranean tunnels.

Despite numerous objections, film history insists that the Grand Café in the Salon Indien on the Boulevard des Capucines was the site of the first showing of projected images to a paying audience on 28 December 1895. Less disputed is the fact that the first ciné-clubs began to appear in Paris in the early 1920s, with Ricciotto Canuda's Club des Amis du Septième Art and Louis Delluc's Matinées de Cinéa playing a pivotal role in the motion picture being recognised as a legitimate artform.

These clubs also inspired the film societies that sprang up around this time in museums, colleges and workers' institutes around the globe. A direct descendent of these often politically committed organisations are the people's cinemas maintained on the agricultural collectives of North Korea.

Kim Jong-Il, who has ruled this hermetic nation since 1994, has a personal collection of between 15-20,000 films, the majority of which are reported to have emanated from Hollywood. However, Kim restricts his subjects to such home-produced fare as The Fate of a Self-Defence Corps Man, The Sea of Blood, The Nation and Destiny and The Sun of the Nation, all of which either bear traces of his personal input — he is supposed to have advised directors at the Korean Feature Film Studio in Pyongyang on 10,487 separate occasions between 1964-93 — or reflect the tenets he laid down for loyal film-making in his 1973 tome, Theory of Cinematic Art.

Such is Kim's obsession with cinema that he even kidnapped one of South Korea's biggest stars, Choe Eun-hee, and her director husband, Shin Sang-ok, and forced them to work on propagandist outings like Oh My Love (1984) and Salt (1985) before they finally escaped after nine years of virtual imprisonment while on a visit to Vienna in 1986.

Yet watching Han Jong-sil recalling her years of service to the state with such tearful pride in Comrades in Dreams, it's plain to see that the films which often arouse almost mocking contempt in the West mean a great deal to her. She genuinely believes Kim's pronouncement that "cinema has the task of contributing to the development of people to be true Communists and to the revolutionisation and working-classisation of the whole of society" and fervently hopes that the films she shows will improve the lives of her neighbours and inspire them to work even harder the next morning.

Judging by the remarks of the patrons leaving Han's well-appointed theatre, they concur with her opinion that cinema should galvanise and educate as much as entertain. Indeed, they seem to treat moviegoing as a tangible way of demonstrating loyalty to the Dear Leader and are more than content to watch and re-watch stories they consider to be fondly familiar favourites rather than calculated exercises in indoctrination.

Sitting in the darkness with polite attentiveness may not strike many of us as a great night out. But only a fool would be naive enough to believe that the conglommerates that bankroll, produce, distribute, publicise and exhibit the movies that we watch operate without some sort of socio-political agenda. It's just that their cinemas are usually more comfortable.

David Parkinson is a film critic and historian. Specializing in foreign-language films, he is a contributing editor at Empire and broadcasts regularly on BBC national and local radio. Among his books are A History of Film, The Young Oxford Book of Cinema and Mornings in the Dark: the Graham Greene Film Reader. His most recent book is The Rough Guide to Film Musicals.