The Lak Meuang Theater - Kalasin, Thailand

On a quiet street in the heart of Kalasin stands one of the best preserved examples of mid-20th century Thai theater architecture around. In the 1950's and 60's, little bells like the Lak Meuang Theater found economy throughout Thailand; colorful neighborhood-oriented leisure venues which blend snappily in to the surrounding built environment. Today only a small handful survive.

The flowery metal grill over the facade was made for fastening hand painted movie billboards to. Most theater architects of the day were content with a plain metal frame, but the designer of the Lak Meuang transcended functionality, making the grill the most important aesthetic feature of the building's facade.

The majority of theaters with this type of feature exist only in old photographs.

The name of this classic theater speaks volumes to the important role they once played: Lak Meuang means City Pillar.

In a more subdued light

Classic folding wooden doors.

Signage

Locals claimed the Lak Meuang closed down about 10 years ago. Nobody could determine a precise year that it opened, but the going estimation was between 40 and 50 years ago.

BBC's Cool Theater List

If the criteria is strictly cool, then yes, I suppose there are some winners here.

Jaipur, India's Raj Mandir Cinema tops the short list of the BBC's World's Coolest Movie Theaters.




Photo courtesy of BBC

The Somdet Theater - Somdet district, Kalasin province, Thailand

The Somdet Theater looks fairly good for a building abandoned more than 20 years ago. With crowning letters fully intact and a facade vibrant in color - free of mold and other tropical outgrowths - to the uninformed passerby, it might even be mistaken for operational.

A closer inspection, of course, will reveal its true state of being as a leisure-time relic in the sticks of Isan.

Somdet - the town/district after which the theater is named - seems an odd location for a theater of such mass, pastoral as the region is. But in the theater's inaugural year of 1981, Somdet and the surrounding villages remained to be linked to the electricity grid. Powered by means of diesel generator, the Somdet Theater was the premiere destination for nearby agriculturists and townsfolk alike. Being the only such venue between Kalasin City and Mukdahan, it had to account for the entertainment of lots of people, thus warranting its cavernous gauge and title as the province's largest ever theater.

By the mid-1980's, rural electrification had been duly applied to Somdet. Movie-goers normally dependent on the cinema for their entertainment needs began to opt for domesticized television and its accoutrements instead.

Profits dwindled as attendance shrank, and just 10 years after its inception, the Somdet Theater was out of business.

A leafy frame for a concrete dream.

Signage

Today this massive structures sits idly off of route 12, surrounded by empty fields of grass.

In a nearby electronics shop, the dual two-reel projectors once at the Somdet Theater are prominently displayed.

A few minutes walk from the theater stands an electronics shop crammed full of household and industrial appliances. The shop belongs to a man named Jatuchok, who in his younger years ran the Somdet Theater in partnership with his father, the builder. Since closing it down in 1991, Jatuchok has done virtually nothing to it, aside from removing its seats, sound and projection systems.

Seemingly annoyed by my probing questions and general presence, he adroitly turned the tables to conduct the interview on me. "What ideas do you have for my theater?" he spat. "Do you think there's a way to make it appealing again?"

I rambled on in broken Thai about a mythical 'new generation' of Thai youth, harboring pent-up yearnings for a more personalized urbanity than the one now smothered in today's sluttish consumerism. 20-somethings, I charged, with a nostalgia for a past they never knew, but have seen in old photographs. A new breed of thinkers, nourished by social media and a desire to 'make a difference,' challenging themselves to exist outside the box. These eager youngsters will fill your theater with an audience the likes of which you couldn't conjure in your wildest dreams, if only you'd welcome them.

Humored by the tirade, Jatuchok patted his stubbly chin hair and cracked a slight grin.

"I've often thought that I could get groups of kids to come in and perform their own dubbing" he said, referencing the once-popular practice of having voice actors dub movies live. "They could rent it out by the hour, like a karaoke hall, and take turns making their own dialog to a film projected onto the big screen. "

He ended coyly on hopeful note before excusing himself to attend to business, denying my request to photograph his theater's interior.

The Sapmukda Rama - Mukdahan, Thailand

In the furthest depths of Mukdahan's bus station, past the spew of exhaust smoke and the baritone rumble of idling diesel engines, lies a narrow passage between two anonymous shop-houses.

This passage opens on to a back alley; as nondescript and choked as you might find in any Thai city.

The narrow passage between two shop houses.

An alley view.

The Sapmukda Rama in all its ordinariness.

One of the many featureless structures comprising this sliver of city is the Sapmukda Rama: functioning proof that the art of movie theater design isn't what it used to be, and a further reminder of the decline of the architect's role in Thai public life.

But an uninspired design does not detract from the social value of the Sapmukda Rama, nor the viewing quality, which was at least as good as anything the shopping malls can offer up (at a third of the price).

What's more, the Sapmukda Rama is attached to the Sapmukda Hotel, a coupling once fairly common in the provinces, where there tends to be one, maybe two big families that own all the important commercial and social infrastructure in each town.

The Sapmukda Rama Movie Theater can be accessed from the 2nd floor hallway of the Sapmukda Hotel.

From foyer to auditorium entrance.

Ticket booth

Exchange at the concession stand.

Enter the theater.

Two groups of high schoolers made up the bulk of the audience on that Friday afternoon, one group all girls, the other all boys. The film - a Thai-dubbed version of Shark Night 3D - reached its target market with great precision, attested to by the young crowd through their synchronized screams and ribald enthusiasm.

What better place than the town theater for the young to develop their capacity for emotional expression, among friends, anonymously?

Hand painted billboards, like this one at the entrance to the Mukdahan bus station, are still produced by the Sapmukda Rama - a newish stand-alone theater using an old form of advertising.

Signage

The Sapmukda Rama was built some 10 years ago, one of several newer stand-alone theaters erected in Thailand's vast Isan region.

"The Past that Never Left"

The front page of the leisure section in last Sunday's The Nation newspaper (Thailand) features a SEA Movie Theater Project story about Thailand's lowest priced cinema hall. You can read the on-line version here.

The said theater has yet to be posted on this site. Consider this a sneak preview.

The Seno Rama - Seno, Savannakhet province, Laos

An afternoon spent stalking the Seno Rama and its environs, I reckon, is about equal to an hour of being whipped by a Sahara sandstorm. That is to say, in the arid plains of Savannakhet during the dry season, beside a heavily trucked stretch of Highway No. 9, the dust is bad - adding a breathable realism to this Mad Maxian landscape.

It's hard to imagine that a place like Seno would have ever warranted the luxury of a cinema hall. A ramshackle built environment along a B-grade portion of road, doesn't exactly elucidate a picture of past prosperity. But then again, Laos is covered with surprises - some of which even explode when tread upon.

Seno, moreover, is the least unusual of the unusual Laotian places that once laid claim to a movie theater. Had this project commenced just a few years earlier there would be reportage from jungle settlements in remote Phongsali Province, where itinerant traders, rugged pioneers and speakers of tribal dialects once crammed into cinema halls for doses of propaganda-tinged entertainment - capitalist or communist depending on which side of 1975 is in question. But alas, arrived too late.

Exoticisms notwithstanding, diminutive Seno has an equally legitimate reason for being home to a movie theater: since the days of French colonialism, Seno has played host to a military base.

The Seno Rama abuts Highway 9 in the town it's named after.

When the Seno Rama opened in 1970, the nearby military base was home to battalions of the American-backed Royal Lao Army. Located just thirty-eight kilometers east of prospering Savannakhet made it an important bulwark against attacks on the city by Pathet Lao guerrillas, operating out of the jungles further east.

Salaried Royal Lao soldiers, in dire need of peril-relieving escapism - pre-TV and internet - represented a reliable clientele for a movie theater proprietor. And so, with built-in market in mind, the Seno Rama was erected at the height of the Laotian Civil War.

With a gaunt appearance long reconciled to time, the Seno Rama linger on.

A medley of architectural styles, the facade of the Seno Rama shares several characteristics with the Nang Lit Cinema in nearby Savannakhet. Both were built around the same time so it's likely they were products of the same architect.

A faint imprint of former "Seno Rama" signage is visible near the facade's crest.
Each of the four diamonds on both sides of the perforated wall were once filled with colored tiles of black, white, red and blue, respectively. The tile has since been smashed out.

Business was brisk at the Seno Rama throughout the early 1970's, reaping benefits from the run-off of a war-time economy. But when the regime changed in 1975, the theater's founder departed Laos for the United States - as did many of the country's business class. His theater thus became state property, screening films from ally countries like Vietnam, the USSR and India, with messages in line with Party rhetoric.

The Seno military base was also taken over by the new government, and manned by soldiers from the Lao People's Army. Then, in 1991, Laos lost its chief economic benefactor with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Funding cuts meant that non-essentials like movie theaters, under the supervision of the Ministry of Information, would be forced to close. By the early 1990's the Seno Rama had been decommissioned.

The tiles used in the lobby are similar to tiles used in Savannakhet buildings dating back to the 1920's.

The staircase behind the ticket booth led to balcony seats.

Ticket window dust and rust.

In spite of appearances, the Seno Rama is still held in high esteem by some locals. "In the future, we would like to make it into a site of cultural significance for Seno" its current tenant said. "It's one of the town's important old buildings."

The tenant's wife mentioned further that the theater was briefly revived in 2008 to screen Sabaidee Luang Prabang, the first movie produced in Laos since the collapse of the Royal government. "The place was totally full for that," she said proudly, as if a cinematic future might actually be feasible.

But in the mean time, making the most of a derelict space has taken precedence. The tenant, a teacher by trade, has erected a badminton net in front of the proscenium, and for a small fee allows people in to play.

Auditorium views

Whether efforts at renewing this classic little theater will ever come to a head is uncertain, but that lip service was payed to the idea is a positive sign. There are, after all, millions of dollars worth of industrial investments pouring into the nearby Savannakhet-Seno Special Economic Zone. Maybe some of that will find its way into the coffers of regeneration.

But for now the Seno Rama sits mostly vacant, a haunting reminder of different times in a town that time has forgotten.

Saving an Ugly Modernity

Who in their right mind would consider the modernist theaters portrayed on this web-site "ugly"? Only the most unimaginative would entertain such thoughts.

But whether you do or don't, have a read of Llewellyn Hinkes-Jones' article, recently published in the Atlantic Cities, about the Case for Saving Ugly Buildings. It's a compelling call for architectural preservation, as modernist buildings from the 60's and 70's increasingly become slated for demolition.

The Lao - Viet Cultural Hall of Friendship: a beast of social realism architecture?