Cinema sentiments in the Asia Sentinel

One of my favorite sources for news across Asia just published a piece I wrote about Southeast Asia's vanishing stand-alones.

See it here in the Asia Sentinel

The Saeng Si Theater - Bua Yai District, Khorat Province, Thailand

Bua Yai is a train town. A train junction town, to be more specific. Here the Nong Khai - Bangkok line grows a spur which cuts over to the west, towards Chaiyaphum Province - though never actually reaching the provincial capital itself.

Remnants of old Thailand, the one that grew up in the decades prior to the highway boom, are easily found in train towns. Streets and sois developed in the absence of the car in train towns. Buildings tend to huddle together, dense, low-rise, along narrow streets, stretching out like ribbons parallel to the tracks. This is where commerce would have been at its most brisk in the days before trucking.

Only river towns can rival train towns for the lover of antiquity. Riparian trade predates the train system, thus spawned a stock of vernacular architecture, mostly wooden, older and increasingly harder to find than what developed in the era of the locomotive. Since neither the train nor rivers represent particularly robust portions of the economy these days, both river towns and train towns tend to retain older charms lost to towns which sit on major highways. For the best in early-modern Thai antiquity, one must visit a town which has both a train station and a river port, but no highway.

Nestled within Bua Yai's narrow lanes, just a block from the train tracks, stands the Saeng Si Theater. Presumably a product of the Thai movie theater boom years (late 1960's to the mid-1970's), today the Saeng Si limps on, a shadow of its former self, with movies only shown during weekends. Fortunately for me, it was a Saturday when I was in Bua Yai. Unfortunately for me, the flooding down in central Thailand had impeded the distribution company from delivering its scheduled film. The Saeng Si Theater was dealt another blow, while I was left kicking the can in Bua Yai, unable to deliver on what I came to do.

The entrance to the Saeng Si Theater has been changed from the front to the side door. The front of the theater has been rented out to a clothing shop. Something tells me this one won't be around much longer.

Door designs

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)

Photo Exhibit at Cinemanila

A second film festival exhibit in as many months is in the works for the SEA Movie Theater Project. Cinemanila International Film Festival, the Philippines premiere film festival - also its longest running - will be displaying a series of my photos at one of their venues. I won't be in attendance this time around like I was at last month's Busan International Film Festival, but that shouldn't detract from the good times. Among the Cinemanila festivities, one of my favorite horror directors of all time, the legendary Dario Argento, will be receiving a lifetime achievement award.

The 13th annual Cinemanila Int'l Film Fest will be taking place from November 11th - 17th, in the Tauguig City area of Metro Manila. If you should happen to be in the vicinity, check out some hot new flicks from around the world. And keep an eye out for some photos of stand-alone movie theaters!

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.

Back on Track

After a long, restrained hiatus, new life and new images are soon to come. Stay tuned.

American Movie Palaces, Up Close

About a week ago, a friend turned me on to the web-site of yet another kindred spirit who's gone out of his way to show us the unparalleled beauty of America's tattered palaces. He calls his site After the Final Curtain. If you like what goes up at the SEA Movie Theater Project, have a look at this one. It'll knock your socks off!

Auditorium of Loew's Palace Theater of Bridgeport, Connecticut.

Courtesy of "After the Final Curtain"