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?”

Roshmilla Bhattacharya (MUMBAI MIRROR; February 18, 2014)

The paint is fresh but the Victorian style Gothic bungalow with its antique tiles, sparkling chandelier and stained glass windows dates back to the 19th century. After years of being shut, Peerbhoy Khalakdina’s home will open its doors to visitors from this weekend. On February 22, Information & Broadcasting Minister, Manish Tewari, will inaugurate the country's first National Museum for Indian Cinema.

The museum’s curator, film scholar and historian Amrit Gangar, can talk endlessly not only about the memorabilia spread across the nine rooms of Gulshal Mahal, but also the bungalow itself. “It was originally called Gulshan Abad and its main entrance offered a spectacular view of the sea,” he says.

The estate passed down from to the merchant son Jairazbhoy Peerbhoy and then his elder grandson, Noormohamad Jairazbhoy. When he died early without heirs, it came into the possession of his younger brother Cassamally Jairazbhoy.

Cassamally’s third wife, Khurshid Rajabally, landscaped the five aces of woods into Chinese and Japanese gardens where mehfils were hosted. “Their musicologist son, Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy, made documentaries on Indian music. His mother filmed the Haj pilgrimage which is one of the earliest documentaries made by an Indian woman. So it was apt that after serving briefly as a hospital for soldiers of the Second War War and the Jai Hind College, Gulshan Mahal, post Independence, housed the office of the Documentary Films of India and later the Films Division,” says Gangar.

In 1976, when Films Division shifted to a modern building within the premises, the heritage bungalow only opened to the occasional film shoots, like Munnabhai MBBS till a Museum Advisory Committee, lead by filmmaker Shyam Benegal, decided it was the perfect place a museum tracing the evolution of Indian cinema from the silent era to the talkies, from the studio system to star system.

“The museum is not Bollywood-centric, there is equal emphasis on the pioneers and stalwarts of every regional film zone, from Bengal to down South, through the North to the North-East,” says coordinator Anil Kumar, asserting the idea is to recreate and relive our cinema through a collection of equipment, photographs, hand-written shooting scripts, lobby cards, interactive computer-aided displays, CDs and DVDs and much more.

The design and display is the handiwork of Kolkata’s National Council of Science Museum. The Bengal touch is evident in a scroll or ‘pata chitra’ that has pride of place in the central hall, introducing visitors to the “notion of motion”. “The word ‘chitrapat’ comes from ‘pata chitra’,” informs Gangar.
 
He points to a a replica of the Shambarik Kharolika or ‘magic lantern’, one of the earliest projector known. “There’s also the Thaumatrope, Praxinoscope, Zeotrope and Phenakistoscope, early animation toys which used the persistence of vision principle to create an illusion of motion. Children can play with them and understand the basic principle of motion pictures,” he reasons. 

Other landmarks of our cinematic history, like the Delhi Durbar of 1911, is represented through a panel, while a three-dimensional tabulaeu of French cinematographers, Auguste and Lous Lumiere recreates “the miracle of the century”-- a screening of six of their films, including Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat, at Mumbai’s Watson Hotel on July 7, 1986.

“Unfortunately, many of our earlier films, including first talkie Alam Ara, and Indrasabha which had 69 songs, are lost, but we have a recording from Nitin Bose’s Dhoop Chhaon, the Hindi remake of the Bengali Bhagya Chakra, the first Hindi film to use playback. There are also gramophone disc recordings of KL Saigal and other greats,” promises Gangar.

Anil Kumar adds that while there is plenty of equipment on show, and lots of literature and photographs, they need to acquire more costumes, jewellery and film props. “May be once they see the museum, families of filmmakers will donate from their private collection,” he says.

A three-storey building that'll come up next to Gulshan Mahal in two years will house a second museum with more gallery space, a curio shop and a food court. “Till then there's this one and an old Films Division studio which has been renovated into a multi-purpose hall for seminars, workshops and exhibitions. Films and documenatries can also screened in a 250-seater auditorium.”

Gangar rues that many young cinegoers haven't heard of Raja Harishchandra : “We have a 3-D replica of a set from India's first full-length feature screened for the public on May 3, 1913, at Girgoan’s Coronation Cinema. We had planned to open the museum exactly 100 years later, on May 3, 2013. We’re late by nine months but the finally India will have its first National museum on Indian cinema.”