The Wik Kru Thawee Cinema - Photharam District, Ratchaburi Province, Thailand

Opening the old-fashioned, wooden bi-fold doors of Wik Kru Thawee Theatre is reminiscent of a scene in a mummy movie where the lead actor – perhaps an intrepid archaeologist, or explorer - pries open a long-sealed tomb. Dust stirred as the stagnant theatre air mingled with air from outside. Rays of midday sunlight beamed across the darkened chamber, only instead of revealing a gilded sarcophagus flanked by riches galore, the only treasure to be found was row after row of wooden bench seats; the thrones of movie-goers of decades passed.

The Wik Kru Thawee Theater: A cinematic gem from 1958

To be sure, the Wik Kru Thawee Theater is the Photharam equivalent to a cinematic tomb. The quaint little town in central Ratchaburi Province has only ever had one venue dedicated to the exhibition of film, and it’s been shuttered - tomb like - for 16 years. Its worn and weathered appearance blends  seamlessly with the rustic two story shop houses – some approaching the century mark – that comprise a good portion of the town.

Heritage preservation is high on the collective agenda in Photharam, once a key stopover for riparian travelers going between Kanchanaburi and the Gulf of Thailand via the Mae Klong River. Unlike many of Thailand’s older river port, Photharam’s core is still characterized by narrow lanes and wooden shop houses. The gradual widening of roads to accommodate cars and trucks has little presence in much of the town’s core. Conscious of its early 20^th-century aesthetic and human scale, residents have made efforts to keep it up.

Under the veranda of the Wik Kru Thawee.

Timeworn photos of the King and Queen still hang above the poster board. Judging from their look, they probably are as old as the theater itself. 

Ticket booth

Wooden bi-fold doors: a mainstay of Thai movie theaters built before the 1970's.

The Wik Kru Thawee Theater featured prominently on the list of Photharam’s preservation initiatives, a landmark institution since its grand opening in 1958. Though out of business since January, 1998 (the last movie screened there was James Cameron’s Titanic), in recent years local activists have sought ways to revive it, with the aim of using it to educate future generations about the community spirit that once accompanied movie going.

“We’ve tried to build support around the old theater,” said Mr. Weewat Suweerathanapat. “But it needs a lot of investment to bring it up to code. That’s not easy to find.”

Mr. Suweerathanapat is well acquainted with the old theater. During the 80’s and 90’s he was employed as the theatre’s art director, tasked with painting the giant movie cut-outs and posters that advertised the day’s film. His long association with Wik Kru Thawee also positions him as the theater’s de facto historian, able to detail its back story in full.

“The theatre in its present form,” he explained, “was built in place of a much older theater made entirely of wood. In the late 1950’s that original theatre was demolished, then rebuilt out of concrete and steel and given its present name.”

Wooden bench seats and a screen best suited for 16mm film.

Balcony seating.

Former poster painter at the Wik Kru Thawee, Mr. Weewat Suweerathanapat. 

Signage for the Wik Kru Thawee Theater is barely visible any more. It used to be on the windows.

The name “Wik Kru Thawee,” it turns out, is a composite of the given name and occupation of the builder/owner – a local school teacher named Thawee Aekarath. Kru Thawee (Kru, in Thai, means teacher) was passionate about film and viewed the medium as good way to expand the horizons of the people of Photharam. His love for film was also inherited by his son, Thira Aekarath, who went onto to an illustrious career as a cinematographer, best known for shooting the 1970 watershed film Monrak Luk Thung.

As far as Thai stand-alone theatres go, the Wik Kru Thawee comes from an unusual era. It was built in a transitional period for Thai movie theaters, well after concrete had replaced wood as the material of choice, but just shy of the nationwide theatre boom which began in 1961. That same year the United States government started pumping millions of annual aid dollars into the Thai economy, a political countermeasure aimed at thwarting the spread of communism. That aid stimulated social change far and wide, spurring development and market integration in even the most far flung corners of the country. With growing wealth and sophistication, a taste for cinema blossomed, and for roughly the next 20 years stand-alone movie theaters were constructed in nearly every district in every province of Thailand.

The theater boom gave international movie distributors a healthy market in Thailand. Although dominated by imports from Hollywood, the international viewing fare was rounded out by films from Hong Kong, Japan, India and Europe. In fact, a glimpse of a newspaper’s movie section from the 60’s or 70’s will reveal a far more diverse range of available films than is shown in Thai cinemas today – ironic considering the far more cosmopolitan Thailand of today than of 40 years ago.

The domestic film industry also began to flourish, breaking with tradition in order to keep stride with technical innovations from abroad.  Some of Thailand’s most iconic stars - the likes Mitr Chaibancha and Petchara Chaowarat, Sombath Metanee and Aranya Namwong - became household names during this era.  

The Chalerm Thong Kham Theater - Ban Pong District, Ratchaburi Province, Thailand

Digging up the history of old movie theaters in Thailand can lead to some very high places. Movie theaters, after all, are prestige structures, which require deep pockets to construct. Accordingly, it's not uncommon for even the most neglected old theater to have regal origins. Local nobility or their direct descendants (as in the case of Chiang Mai's Suriwong, Suriyong, Suriya and Sang Tawan Theaters, built by a member of the House of Chiang Mai; or the well known Sala Chalerm Krung Theater in Bangkok, built by King Rama VII) have been often active in the realm of cinema entertainment. 

Aside from nobility in the formal sense, heavy hitters from the fields of industry, business and the professions were also known to expand their portfolios into entertainment through the addition of a movie theater. Examples of this can found throughout the country. Usually, however, time tends to render these connections moot, as the former theater owners search for new sources of income. But some things don't change that much at all. Especially in the case of smaller towns. 

The Chalerm Thong Kham Theater, in Ban Pong, Ratchauri, is testament to that old linkage between the movie theater and power in Thailand.

The Chalerm Thong Kham Theater, nestled behind some older shop houses.

Ban Pong is a junction town. Both the railroad and highway fork at Ban Pong, connecting the south with Bangkok to the east and Kanchanaburi to the west. Yet another rail spur heads north towards Suphanburi.

Towards the end of World War II, Ban Pong was slated for an aerial bombardment by the Allies as a means of destroying the westbound rail link going towards the Burmese border. That link, which inspired the movie Bridge On the River Kwai, would have enabled the Japanese in Burma to have a supply route from the east. Overcast skies on the bombing day, however, shielded the Ban Pong from the bomber's view. The town, with its bustling market area flanking the Mae Klong River and the railroad tracks, was spared. 

But what war could not do away with, fire did. In 1955, the market area went up in flames, wiping out the densest part of town. 

A few years after the fire much of Ban Pong's market area had been rebuilt, construction being led by a number of wealthy merchants with vested interest in the area. One of the those merchants was Prayun Khotsapongsa, a second generation Chinese settler whose family owned much of the market. Included in Prayun's redevelopment plan was an enormous, state-of-the-art movie theater to anchor the surrounding business community. He named the theater after his mother, Grandma Thongkham Wongsarot. In 1958 the Chalerm Thongkham Theater opened for business.  

The growth of film in Thailand in the post-war years led to healthy competition between theater operators. Prayun Khotsapongsa and his family rode the wave of movie industry growth by expanding into film distribution. Chalerm Thongkham Films, as it was called, distributed films to theaters in 8 nearby provinces, including Kanchanaburi, Petchaburi, Suphanburi, Prajuab Khirikan, Samut Sakhol, Samut Songkram and Ratchaburi. Ban Pong's position as a junction town helped make this possible.

The unique facade of the Chalerm Thongkham Theater

When the Chalerm Thongkham first opened in 1958, movie theater technology in Thailand was still fairly rudimentary. Ceiling fans were used to cool the theater, and patrons sat on wooden bench seats, not the detached bucket seats common in movie theaters today. But by 1967 air-conditioning and bucket seats were installed; 800 hundred of them on the lower level, plus another 300 on the balcony.

Competition stiffened further when a new theater, the Ban Pong Rama, opened on the opposite side of town. To stay competitive, the Khotsapongsa family enlarged the screen to accommodate 70mm projection capabilities. The large format film allowed for a bigger, crisper picture, equivalent to the Imax theaters of today.

Once an theater, now a motorcycle dealership.

But by the close of the 20th century, the Chalerm Thongkham was suffering the typical syndromes afflicting independent movie theaters in Thailand. Following the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, the theater and distribution company went out of business.

Gracefully curving staircase leading to balcony seating.

Balcony view

Seats remain in place on the balcony.

Today, the Chalerm Thongkham Theater houses a motorcycle dealership, a far cry from its glory days as the heart of entertainment in Ban Pong. The building, however, is still a source of pride for the Khotsapongsa family, who take pains to ensure that it looks sharp from the exterior. 

As for the the Khotsapongsa family, they continue to wield influence in Ban Pong. The current mayor, in fact, is a Khotsapongsa. 

Mr. Suthin Khotsapongsa is serving his second term as the Mayor of Ban Pong. Although not a Khotsapongsa by blood, Mr. Suthin married the daughter of Prayun Khotsapongsa, who he met when he worked at the Chalerm Thongkham Theater as a poster painter as a teenager. In reversal of custom, Mr. Suthin took on his bride's family name.

Suthin claims to be "the only mayor of a Thai city that started out as a poster painter at a movie theater."

Poster painter-turned-mayor, Nai Suthin Khotsapongsa.

1950's era signage.

The above video was shot for Thai PBS in November of last year. It features interviews with a former employee of the Chalerm Thongkham Theater (as well as the author of this blog). 

Movie theater ephemera from central Thailand

Movie-goers of yesteryear often sat on wooden bench seats like this:

The Khosit Theater - Ban Pong, Ratchaburi, Thailand

As a professional art form, architecture is taken quite seriously in Thailand. Although the most highly touted architectural works in the country tend to relate to the national narrative - generally either royalty or religion - there is a wide range of world-class work outside of that limited scope. 

Modern architecture, in particular, is especially well represented throughout Thailand. Most Thai towns are, in fact, comprised largely of various offshoots of that broadly defined school known as the"International Style." Though much of it is pure stock in both gauge and dimension, there are truly outstanding pieces all around, some of them tucked away in the most obscure of places.

Ban Pong's Khosit Theater falls into that category: Outstanding obscura. Forgotten, but unique modern Thai architecture.

What is it about the Khosit that makes it so architecturally special? For one, you seldom see buildings with this kind of top-heavy massing . The brutally heavy upper bulk seems to float weightlessly over the empty lower lobby. From this perspective, the Khosit appears as if the foundation was raised up and left suspended in the air. 

But the contrast between the bulky top and empty bottom is tied together by the wrap-around marquee and strip of windows set between the two. The marquee, it should be noted, protrudes out around the edges, while the windows are set back. One is reminded of a cold-cut slice sticking out from the enclosing bread.

Add some asymmetry to the package, along with a softly curved corner (to lessen the severity of and the bulk) and the Khosit stands out as a highly sophisticated structure. The roof-top signage, moreover, with the lettering done on large squares of metal, matches the bulkiness below. 

The Khosit Theater has a language all of its own.

 

The Khosit Theater from a slight distance.

Thai modernism often does not get its due credit. Case in point, the Khosit.

The Khosit was the last of three theaters to be erected in Ban Pong, one of Ratchaburi's most industrial districts. It's age and any additional background data were unavailable, though conjecture dates it to about 1980, give or take a few years.

Rails for skate kids at the Khosit.

Though utterly abandoned, the Khosit holds the unique distinction among Thai movie theaters of being the only former cinema in the country that has been co-opted by the local skateboarding community. Every evening, the lower lobby serves as a refuge for local skate kids. Ollies and tailslides abound in a space once reserved for passive waiting and socializing. 

A pair of rails and a ramp, used for stake tricks, attest to this new found use.

Skate culture often goes hand in hand with graffiti culture, which too has taken root in the abandoned Khosit.

  

Graf

Main staircase leading to upper lobby.

Lobby tagging

Signs of cinema still abound among some newer graffiti. 

Stairs leading to the auditorium, all tagged up.

The upper lobby at the Khosit Theater is gated off. The large entrance leads to the auditorium.

Softer light

Upper bulk of the Khosit Theater. Brutally beautiful.

Signage

Modern Thai architecture wears a unique visage in the Khosit Theater. 

Thai PBS catches up with the SEA Movie Theater Project

A news crew from Thai PBS met me in the town of Ban Pong, Ratchaburi for a short story on the SEAMTP. What they produced was broadcast this evening.