Photograph © Amit Madheshiya
Photograph © Amit Madheshiya
Photograph © Amit Madheshiya
Photograph © Amit Madheshiya
Photograph © Amit Madheshiya
Photograph © Amit Madheshiya
Photograph © Amit Madheshiya
Many single screen theatres, where we watched films during college in Delhi, began to close down around the year 2008. Urged by this change, watching these temples of cinema razed to the ground giving way to malls and multiplexes, my collaborator Shirley Abraham and I began to travel the breadth of the country. We did not know what we were seeking. But we found solace bunched up with excited children under a neem tree, where an old man was showing scraps of film on a hand-cranked projector. Then, like a distant mirage, appeared huge tents hitched to the back of gigantic trucks. In the belly of the trucks, age-old cinema projectors whirred away. Outside, thousands sat crouched by the beam, drinking in the magic. We stood there gasping, as if transported back in time. Traveling cinemas are believed to have become a part of the mythology of cinema and we took in this sight with a mix of disbelief and wonder. Our discovery became an instructive experience, about the unchanged wonder of the movies, and the mutable modes and technologies through which audiences experience it.
An empirical curiosity took hold of us. We soon realized this was a largely untold story. For about seven decades now, traveling cinemas have brought the magic of the movies to audiences living far from permanent theaters in rural Maharashtra. Traveling as part of old religious fairs, they bring the big screen magic to millions, as an exclusive annual treat. An enchanting world of fairgrounds, bulbous tents, stately projectors and film cans, the cinemas are now trying hard to lure patrons who have moved to slicker and individualized modes of watching movies - DVDs and mobile phones. One of the last stops of traveling cinemas in the world, this ancient yet unique cinema culture stands to be lost to history.
Our engagement began with field research, and I also began photographing the cinemas. By 2010, we began presenting our research findings in conferences and seminars at universities around the world. Photographs made during these years won me the World Press Photo and World Photography Awards. Around 2011, we could sense that this world was at a precipice of change. A world that had existed for more than seven decades, seemingly untouched, would be irrevocably changed. Therein came the instinct to make a film, which took the shape of The Cinema Travellers. The film premiered at Cannes Film Festival in 2016 to a standing ovation and won the Special Jury Prize for L’Oeil d’or: Le Prix du documentaire. Graham Fuller of Screen Daily declared, "Whatever masterpieces, if any, bow at this year's Cannes Film Festival, it is likely none will communicate the excitement engendered by movies more headily than The Cinema Travellers." E. Nina Rothe of The Huffington Post called it a "masterpiece." Nick Schager of Variety wrote, "Recalling Giuseppe Tornatore's 1988 Oscar winner Cinema Paradiso in its effusive love of 20th-century celluloid splendor, this five-years-in-the-making film should entice theatrical-loving cinephiles." LA Times included the film in its wrap-up report from Cannes calling it "one of the most involving films on film history."
Through these years I have come to believe that cinema is the most profound form of human expression, and the immersion it commands, unites us across language and borders. I believe these portraits of audiences, immersed in their movies, will bind readers across the world in a magical experience that only cinema can create.
20 November
