The Chumphae Theater - Chumphae, Khon Kaen Province, Thailand

Roaming Chumphae inevitably brought me to its other, much older, decommissioned cinema in the heart of the town's traditional commercial core. Long departed as a house of entertainment, the former Chumphae Theater nonetheless has been smartly repurposed to serve a current need. The building's walls were removed, leaving only structural support columns, its facade and roof, as the former auditorium was turned into a fresh market. In place of its rows of seats, dozens of vendors, hawking everything from raw meats to cheap electronics, have set up shop. Locals refer to is as the old Chumphae Theater Market.

Facade of the former Chumphae Theater. The outline of the marquee is still visible just above the tin awning.

Market interior, looking towards what was once the rear of the theater, and balcony-level seating.

Reintegrating out-moded structures, be they old movie theaters or otherwise, when appropriate, is a cornerstone of urban renovation and renewal. It not only saves on costs of demolition and reconstruction, but it draws a link between the past and present, imbues a sense of historical identity.

Ryszrard Kapuscinski perhaps put it best regarding the tendency to destroy old neighborhoods in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku to build anew:

"Today expansion is difficult and risky. As a rule, broadening ends in narrowing, and that is why nations must satisfy the instinct for breadth with a feeling of depth, which means reaching into the depths of history to demonstrate their strength and significance."

(Kapuscinski, Ryszard. 1993 - Imperium. Vintage Press)

The Chumphae Cineplex - Chumphae, Khon Kaen Province, Thailand

Now where was I? Burma, right? Somewhere in Bago Division, if I recall. That was way back in January. Resumption of the project begins again in Thailand's mostly-bucolic northeast: the vast Lao-speaking domains of Isan. Of the all the Thai regions I've covered, only Isan has a significant collection of operating stand-alones. It's been a goal to shoot them all while they're still around, before chain-store homogeneity overtakes and undermines them, sucking their clientele into a vortex of prefabricated chintz.

The journey begins in Chumphae, a westerly district of Khon Kaen Province and frontier for lowland wet-rice agriculture. Any further west and the mountains of Petchabun come into play. The approach to Chumphae along highway 12 - which runs the width of north-central Thailand from border to border - is marked by a drastic shift from rural to urban, rice paddy and cane field to concrete slab. From the road, it looks as if an entire Bangkok neighborhood has been broken off from the megalopolis and flung into the countryside, one enormous discarded piece of a jigsaw puzzle. I am reminded that in Thailand, concrete is not only the building material of choice, but it is the building material of empire.

To escape from this concrete monotony, which is wholly encompassing in Chumphae, a near monopoly, one must turn to the movie theater - which is also made of concrete. Reprieve can be found in the form of an enjoyable film, but more firmly in the notion that the Chumphae Cineplex, as it is named, serves a function not unlike a public square: a space for social interaction, or quiet relaxation. I found a bit of both in the spacious and airy lobby of the this late-addition stand-alone.

A hand-painted billboard advertises the latest Thai ghost-comedy, Ban Phee Pob. Behind it, the Chumphae Cineplex is aglow in morning light.

Just like the Chumphae Cineplex, a large portion of Thai stand-alone movie theaters are set back in courts, plazas, or otherwise removed from street-side adjacency. Although the space in front is often used by movie-goers to park their motorbikes, the distance between theater and thoroughfare serves as insulation against noise, pollution and noise pollution. As public space is painfully absent in most Thai urban areas, a downtown cinema, with an open-air lobby, is indeed, akin to a park.

Simply designed, with a true functionalist aesthetic, the Chumphae Cineplex .

The term "cineplex," when applied to a single-screen, stand-alone movie theater is a little misleading. Breaking the compounded word into two we are left with "cinema" and "complex," which implies a plurality of parts. Conventionally speaking, a cineplex will either have more than one screen, or more than one function. But in the case of many late-era Thai stand-alones, of which there are few, the term is applied for strictly semantic reasons. Cineplex sounds more up-to-date, more fashionably modern than the traditional terms of "cinema", "theater," or, in the Thai lexicon, "rama." So don't be fooled! The Chumphae Cineplex, along with a handful of theaters to come, are in actuality stand-alones.

Lower lobby view

In the shark's jaws and ticket vendor's hands

In a way, an art gallery.

A cinematic transaction.

Upper lobby.

Lobby lounging

The Chumphae Cineplex auditorium has just over 200 seats. Not a giant like those built during the height of Thailand's movie theater boom. But that, of course, was a different era.

Signage

Thailand's all-time highest grossing film, Suriyothai, did wonders for the domestic movie theater industry. In some cases, theaters which had gone out of business in recent years prior, reopened for exclusive screenings of this royally produced (and I mean that literally) historical epic. That was in 2001, the same year the Chumphae Cineplex came into existence. It might be a stretch to say that this late-era stand-alone was built to capitalize on the publicity of Suriyothai, but the timing didn't hurt. More generally, one can easily imagine desperate exhibitors, owners of theaters on the verge of shutting down, getting their hopes up as capacity crowds turned out on a nightly basis for the propaganda. A palliative event, however, in the long run. Demographic shifts, the spread of home entertainment, combined with the opportunism of multiplex chains have ensured a slow death for the independent theater operator.

The manager of the Chumphae Cineplex - a bizarrely attractive woman to be running a small town movie theater - casually mentioned that she would be closing it permanently in the near future if attendance didn't pick up.

The Kaen Kham Theater - Khon Kaen, Thailand

The frame of a street-side marquee is one of the last bits of discernible evidence that the Kaen Kham Theater exists.

At the end of the alley is the side of the Kaen Kham Theater. When it was operating, the metal frame attached to the side held giant hand painted billboards advertising the day's showing. The missing aesthetic would certainly have added some needed color to this otherwise drab urban wasteland.

To see Khon Kaen's Kaen Kham Theater is to see the word 'derelict' objectified. Stripped of all its identifying markers - sign, marquee, poster cases and ticket booth - the Kaen Kham resembles an old warehouse or meat packing plant as much as it does a movie theater. The only life it knows these days is an old woman who rents out a small room in the back of the theater and a band of vagrants who live beneath the auditorium in perpetual drunkenness. Vagrants combined with packs of stray dogs aggressively patrolling the area made my visit to the Kaen Kham one of the more on-edge theater experiences I've had in a while. But in spite of its current dismal aesthetic and downtrodden way, locals adamantly placed the rotting Kaen Kham at the pinnacle of Khon Kaen's once-illustrious cinema scene. "This was the biggest and most popular theater in town," recalled a 60-something woman running a mini-mart in the theater's equally derelict surrounding plaza. "Until business started to fall off, the Kaen Kham was the rave of the town. It was full almost every show, and that's with more than a thousand seats to fill."

Weed strewn lot at the back of the Kaen Kham Theater.

Although the structure's interior has been vacant since the reels stopped spinning about ten years ago, the Kaen Kham briefly found new life as home to a weekly market held in the open space beneath its auditorium. But that didn't last very long, apparently. This area of town lost its economic foundation when the Kaen Kham itself went out of business. The theater, after all, was the life support for the surrounding businesses. Once the movie crowds stopped coming, the plaza's shops and restaurants started to decline until it had devolved into its current state of lock-jaw decrepitude.

Behind the Kaen Kham

Granny Liam lives in a little room at the back of the theater. Prior to its closing she worked there as a cleaner. The fond memories she holds of its glory days have slowly eroded like the building itself. "The bank's got the property deed now," she claimed. "They're trying to sell it off, but ain't nobody buying this rotten old tomato. It's a big vacant mess with nothing but little old me, some mangy dogs and that gang of nut cases who sleep around the side. By the way, you'd best be careful 'round them. They're kind of the desperate type; a little unpredictable come years of white whiskey drinking. You'd do to watch your step."

Granny Liam's words were heeded. Had they not been, I may not have lived to tell you of the Kaen Kham Theater, once Khon Kaen's largest answer to the malaise of everyday life (and in an offbeat way, still very much so).

The Prince Theater - Khon Kaen, Thailand

A handsome street-side marquee and sign has been welcoming movie-goers to the Prince Theater since 1985.

"Hey Projectionist! Have you been to the Prince Theater in Khon Kaen yet?" has been the most repeated question I've gotten about any one movie theater in Thailand to date. From this common inquiry and the bit of hearsay I've heard about the place, I developed a deranged obsession with wondering about it. In my mind, the Prince took on legendary qualities. It became a theater that absolutely had to be checked out lest my life come to an incomplete close. Well last week I did just that, only to find the Prince stripped of its royal heritage; a dethroned and disemboweled movie theater noble with its guts hanging out.

Deceased royalty, the corpse of the Prince

A demo crew removes the innards

A year too late and the Prince is no more, currently undergoing a morbid transformation into an apartment building. While climbing through the eviscerated corpse of the old theater, I uncovered bits and pieces of movie memorabilia: a shredded movie poster, piece of a cardboard cut-out from a lobby display, a sliver of a movie ticket and some scraps of brittle, discarded film - the remains of a soon-to-be forgotten world.

Tommy Lee Jones on a Men in Black lobby card, trashed.

An Owen Wilson cut-out lies discarded among rubble and junk

Segment of a poster with George Clooney, shredded

A Mission Impossible 2 poster about to meet the trash heap

The remains of a movie poster in the rubble

The Prince was only 23 years old when it met its untimely death last year. It was likely one of the last stand-alone theaters to get built in Thailand. For those years it was the flagship theater of the Prince Theaters chain - a modest Khon Kaen-based film exhibition company with two other branches in Mahasarakham and Kalasin provinces respectively. After the Prince closed down about a year ago, Prince Theaters moved its Khon Kaen operations to Fairy Plaza, where they reopened in the old Fairy Cineplex - a four-screen multiplex on the mall's top floor. So if by chance you're in Khon Kaen and go to see a movie at the Fairy Cineplex, you're actually watching at the reincarnation of the Prince.

What used to be the Prince's auditorium, complete with terraced seating, is in the process of being split into two levels for apartments.

Construction workers turning the dead Prince into an apartment complex

The woman on the motorbike is Moo, an accountant for Prince Theaters. She's been employed at the company since she graduated from college. If it weren't for Moo, I may never have found out that the old Prince Theater lives on in Fairy Plaza. Otherwise I might be mourning the loss of yet another independent movie theater proprietor. Fortunately the company survives. But trouble is in the air. At the beginning of December the Bangkok-based SF Cinemas chain opened a branch in Khon Kaen's brand new Central Plaza shopping mall. SF, which is the second largest theater chain in the country after Major-EGV, is making its first foray into the Isan movie exhibition market, posing a potential threat to the local brand.

In my most rudimentary Thai, I asked Moo if SF is an enemy of Prince?

"I don't know yet," she replied. "It's still too early to tell. They just opened at the beginning of the month."

"Are you worried about them moving into the Khon Kaen market?" I probed.

"Yeah, we're a little bit worried," she confided. "We've never had to face this kind of competition before. But I think the Khon Kaen market will respond better to our products than what SF exhibits. We play movies that are dubbed in Thai. That's what our distributors (Five Star, Pranakorn Films) supply and that's what the Khon Kaen market demands. SF shows all its foreign films with their original dialogue and Thai subtitles. There's not much of a market for that in Khon Kaen. People here don't like to read movies. SF ticket prices are also about 30 percent higher than ours. There's not a whole lot of big money in Khon Kaen, so that's also to our advantage. Our 90 baht ticket price is more appropriate for the market here. In all," she concluded, "I think we'll be alright"

For the most part, Moo seemed confident that SF's entrance into the local market would not have much of an affect on Prince. I hope she's right. History, however, is not on her side. In the other up-country markets that either Major-EGV or SF have entered, the local theaters have not fared well. All of Nakon Sawan's local operations, for example, have closed since Major opened in the Big C Supercenter. The same goes for Phitsanulok and Udonthani. Here in Chiang Mai, the locally-owned Vista Gad Suan Kaew multiplex (my second home here) hangs on in spite of the Major Cineplex at Airport Plaza shopping center. The Vista Group, however, has since closed and subsequently razed its three stand-alone neighborhood theaters, along with a two-screen theater near Gad Suan Kaew. Chiang Mai's current movie theater geography is as vapid as it's been in 70 years.

As for the Prince @ Fairy Plaza, only time will tell. The Thongrompho brothers, owners of the SF empire, have definitely got some effective marketing strategies for their theaters. In Khon Kaen SF will also have the lugubrious benefit of being in the city's hot new Central shopping mall - a natural crowd drawer. They're likely to be a formidable foe for a small theater company like Prince. Nonetheless, as Moo explained, Prince will have certain natural advantages. And where it is lacking, well, I hope the Prince gets Machiavellian on its new nemesis.


The original Prince Theater, however, is nothing more.

The Pyramid Theater - Ban Phai, Khon Kaen, Thailand

One train stop south of Khon Kaen city is the little town of Ban Phai. It's an average little town, as far as I could tell. Nothing too out of the ordinary. It's got a fresh market, some Sam Lor drivers, stray dogs and a mix of wooden and concrete shop houses. All the things that most little Thai towns have. But in this day and age, with nearly all the small town movie theaters put out of business, Ban Phai has an edge. It's got the Pyramid Theater.

A group of movie-goers drive home after the 11:00 AM showing of Yaem Yasothon 2. The theater is down the alley.

Billboards advertising the movie stand at the mouth of the alley.

The yellow and green semi-octagonal lobby of the Pyramid Theater, one of Thailand's last small town theaters.

Going to the movies

The SEA Theater Project has been at the fore of my meager existence for the past year now. It's brought me bizarre joys and an offbeat sense of satisfaction to document this waning form of entertainment in a rapidly changing corner of the world. As both a voyeur and participant, I have learned a lot about my surrogate homeland, albeit mostly from historical perspective. Visiting the Pyramid gave me a living point of view, however. A rare window into a social practice which is increasingly no more than nostalgic reminiscence for Thais middle-aged and above.

It was Monday the 7th of December, a national holiday in Thailand. All schools and government offices across the country were closed in honor of the King's birthday. Mum Jokmok's eagerly awaited sequel to the wildly popular Yaem Yasothon had just opened the week prior. At the Pyramid Theater, Ban Phai's last hurrah for cinemadom, an additional 11:00 AM showing of the film was tacked on to the usual schedule of two shows per day. A large turn-out was anticipated. After all, it was a national day of rest, and Yaem Yasothon is a comedy based in rural Isan. You can't get much more 'Isan' than Ban Phai. They came in droves.

A mother and son from Ban Phai examine the lobby cards and posters for Yaem Yasothon 2 in the lobby of the Pyramid Theater.

More than three-quarters of the Pyramid's 400-plus seating capacity was filled for the one o'clock showing of Yaem Yasothon 2. It was quite a spectacle! The audience, about half of whom walked to the theater, consisted mostly of families and younger teens. Unlike the tightly regulated multiplexes, where patrons are not permitted to enter the auditorium until the start of the half hour-long commercial session before to the film begins, the Pyramid opened its doors as soon as it was cleaned up from the prior showing. The energetic crowd chose their seats freely upon entrance, as the auditorium buzzed with chatter. Friends and neighbors greeted one another in passing, and folding chairs were pulled out for those lucky enough to find seats in the center aisle to put their feet on. An atmosphere of warmth prevailed. This was the Thai movie theater of lore; the community social venue so fondly recalled by Thais from across the spectrum; the pillar of unity in big cities and small towns, from the northern highlands to the southern seas, down to the sweltering streets of Bangkok. And it wasn't only alive, it was thriving; pulsating with laughter and life.

A snap shot into the Pyramid Theater five minutes before showtime. Notice the folding chairs being used as foot rests at the far end of the aisle.

When the movie finished, I ran like the wind to get out before the crowd. The few people I spoke to were a little disappointed with the film. At the outset the crowd was into it, laughing hysterically and cheering their favorite characters from part 1 as they were reintroduced. But as the movie rolled on, the laughs grew fewer and farther between. A typical case of an inferior sequel riding the original's success. Mum, however, is laughing all the way to the bank.

Movie-goers going home


An empty lobby after the film

Standing proudly next to the theater's advertising truck is Pradit Gaewsimma, owner of the Pyramid Theater. Pradit arrived shortly before show time to admire the throngs of patrons who came to watch at his theater. But as quickly as he came he departed, off to Khon Kaen city to attend to other business. He left me his business card, though, which reads "Pradit Film - purveyor of movies at sacred ceremonies and special events." In other words, he owns a traveling, out-door movie company aside from the Pyramid. Nang glang praeng, or movies in the open, was once a popular means of exhibiting movies across the country. Now it's only really prominent in Isan.

My own riveted enthusiasm for the Pyramid Theater was knocked down a notch by the sobering account of this man, the theater manager, who took the time to give me the dirty details of the movie theater business in rural Isan. "The distributors squeeze our profits" he explained. "On good days we'll gross 10,000 baht (about US300), but the distributors charge exorbitant rates. After paying them and then taxes, we're hardly left with enough to pay ourselves." His grim revelation shook the fool out of me. "Sure, you saw it," he continued "It was mobbed up here today. But that's just once in blue moon. Only when a Mum movie comes around, that's what this audience wants to see. They're not interested in Hollywood junk, but more often then not that's what the distributors send us. Then they got the nerve to charge all that money for the movies. They really want us to go under! But we get by! Yeah, by the skin of our teeth, we get by."

The Pyramid Theater: serving Ban Phai since 1976, before the town even had electricity.