Goodbye parda, projection booth, and even PDA in the dark. With a Delhi multiplex switching to an LED screen, it may be the end of another era
Sonam Joshi (THE TIMES OF INDIA; September 2, 2018)

Tikeshwar Nath still remembers the day he started working as a projectionist at Delhi’s Delite Cinema. It was 1994, and celluloid ruled the roost. Hum Aapke Hain Koun was playing in theatres, and was to continue its hit run for another 52-odd weeks. For every show, he would head up to his little booth, power up the “carbon stick projector” and pour out the stuff of dreams — a svelte Madhuri Dixit in flamboyant purple and a charming young Salman Khan.

“When film reels arrived, we had to assemble them from different cans, splice them together with tape, then reverse them after every show. It was hard work,” says Nath, 48, the senior-most projectionist at the 64-year-old theatre, who’s seen the transition from analogue to digital. The screening of a film now means transfer of data from a hard disk to a server, activating it with a code, and letting the projector roll. Those bulky reel canisters have been consigned to the mechanical past, along with the whir of the projectors, the sound of the sprockets locking into their holes, and the beam of golden light overhead.

If the transition from celluloid to digital marked a big shift in how films were screened, winds of change are blowing again. This week, multiplex chain PVR introduced the country’s first LED cinema screen in partnership with Samsung in Delhi. It replaces projectors, which have been central to the movie-watching experience since the birth of cinema over 120 years ago. This LED screen is essentially a giant television screen, which Samsung says has “unmatched visual quality, technical performance and reliability over traditional projectors”. “Content becomes far more enriched and enhanced, which we think will excite the audience,” says Puneet Sethi, vice-president, enterprise business at Samsung India.

Launched in Korea in 2017, this is the 12th Onyx screen in the world. Samsung plans to roll out five more LED screens in India by the end of the year. The LED screen is unaffected by ambient lighting, which means you can now eat your buttered popcorn and nachos in non-darkened theatres.

It’s also curtains for the parda. “A lot has happened as far as sound and projection are concerned, but the humble parda or vinyl screen stayed till this LED came along,” says Sanjeev Kumar Bijli, joint managing director of PVR. He says the new screen has another advantage: Saving prime real estate occupied by the projection booth. But this new tech doesn’t come cheap — PVR said upgrading to an LED screen costs nearly Rs 7 crore.

As online streaming threatens to overtake traditional theatres, can newer technology woo audiences? “Over the decades, the industry has faced competition from cassettes, piracy, and now streaming services, but there is a social need to go out and watch movies,” Bijli says.

While filmmakers have experimented with formats since the Lumière brothers first showed their films in the 1890s, the evolution of projection technology has been comparatively slower. Movies were shot on 35mm film and projectors cast them on white screens in darkened theatres. The shift to digital took place towards the end of the 20th century.

Film theorist and historian Amrit Gangar says that in the last 20 years, projection technology has changed faster than in the century before. “Around 1999, digital projectors began to be installed, first in cities,” he says. A decade ago, 4K digital projectors were launched which had a higher resolution than existing 2K projectors and showed brighter, sharper images. Not everyone is a fan though. For Gangar, the analogue 35mm projector was “more immersive” than digital projection that may be “faultless, but it looks synthetic and, to an extent, false”.

“To sell a new technology, they’ll always claim it’s better and brighter but brightness is not the determining factor,” says Bollywood cinematographer K U Mohanan. “The scientific way to see a film is through a projector. Since the projected image is a reflected image with mixed light, it’s more soothing for the eyes. LED backlit screens will exhaust the eyes,” he adds.

Gangar feels the new viewing technology will also be far less sensual.

If the multiplexes do decide to keep the lights on, it will be far less sensual in other ways as well. After all, a movie theatre has been the favourite place for couples to make out or at least hold hands.

With inputs from Mohua Das


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Pop-up plexes bring theatres back to the small town

Sonam Joshi (THE TIMES OF INDIA; September 2, 2018)

The movie-watching experience is changing beyond the big cities. A few years ago, Sushil Chaudhary realised that most villages had no halls as most single screens had wound up. Chaudhary, an engineer, designed his own travelling, inflatable multiplex, the digiplex. “I was inspired by touring tent or tambu talkies in old Indian trucks in Maharashtra that would do open-air screenings,” Chaudhary says.

Unlike the tambu talkie, a digiplex is fully air-conditioned, equipped with a 18ftx7ft screen and surround sound, and seats 120 people on chairs. Prices are kept low: tickets cost between Rs 30 and Rs 70, with a bag of popcorn for Rs 8 to Rs 15. These inflatable air-conditioned digiplexes can be packed into trucks and assembled in just 2.5 hours. Chaudhary’s company, PictureTime, runs 37 such trucks with plans to expand to over 100 by next March. His focus is on entertainment dark spots — villages and Tier-3 towns with populations of 50,000 to a lakh. “I want families to come back to theatres.”

Caravan Talkies, started by distribution company UFO Moviez in 2015, works on a similar concept, but in even smaller villages. Its fleet of 114 vans travels to villages with a population of less than 10,000, and it is experimenting with LED screens. “We take content to the audience without investing in brick and mortar cinema screens,” says Siddharth Bharwaj, national sales head, enterprise business, UFO Moviez. “Just like the bioscopewala took cinema to the villages earlier, we thought why can’t we take cinema on wheels to an audience that has never seen a movie on a big screen?”