widescreen tent cinemas
As the lunar calendar heralds the full moon after the crop-gathering season, pilgrims in remote hamlets in Maharashtra (western India) begin preparing to participate in the annual religious fairs that are hosted by nodal villages. Simultaneously, another set of devotees start getting ready for their annual pilgrimage: the owners of the touring ‘tent cinemas’ begin piling on their reels, projectors, posters and tickets to accompany the fairs – a well-worn tradition in these parts. The season of the ‘tent talkies’ is the only time in the year when patrons in hundreds of villages stand enraptured by the silver screen, which fuels dormant dreams and spins a world of fantasy. Thousands travel from neighbouring villages to the fairs, where the tent talkies (a rare annual experience) must compete with acrobats, trick shows, traditional folk theatres, and daredevil stuntmen. Tell us a little about the Tent Cinemas project: who was involved, what backing did you receive and what was the purpose of the project? Amit and I started working on the project in January 2008 with support from the India Foundation for the Arts under their arts research and documentation programme. We conducted the first field trip to Pusegaon village about 200 miles away from Mumbai and were fascinated to witness such an antiquated yet organized form of exhibition. We were also intrigued by the sheer ingenuity of the community, who have sustained these cinemas for all this time and preserved the experience of collective cinema viewing for more than six decades. We then began looking for references to the tent cinemas in popular accounts of cinema’s evolution in India – but they were hardly mentioned at all.
26 www.thebigpicturemagazine.com
With around five to seven cinemas pitching for attention, the setting demands large and striking film banners. These are ingeniously designed by refurbishing the publicity material generated from the distribution center in the city. Often such collages employ poses of actors from various films, and not just from the film currently showing in the tent cinema. Seen in this image, a postercollage of Murder (2004, Hindi).
This became the impetus to undertake an extensive project of research and documentation to find out why their story hasn’t been told. We began excavating historical developments in this timeline, and started to develop an exhaustive project exploring numerous strands in this captivating yet untold story. Why is it that the tent cinemas lack any real documentation? There is an economic function that has been associated with these cinemas, and hence they have been perceived and represented as a window of exhibition. This means they have only found a place in the distribution figures of regional Marathi cinema, while the other performing arts like the tamasha (regional theatre) – which have always accompanied the jatras – have been widely integrated into both popular and academic writing. continued on page 28 ➜
Old films still remain popular and run to packed tents in the fairs. Seen here is the film poster of Yevu Kaa Gharaat (1992, Marathi), a riotous comedy directed by Dada Kondke.
In a sense, the same patronage and devotion that was once the sole province of the religious fairs has now come to define the audiences’ relationship with the tent cinemas. may/june 2010
27