Cinema Pe Cinema: The Theatres. The Movies. And Us
For some, India’s single-screen cinemas are a legacy to be celebrated and preserved. For others, they remain a place still frequented to see the movies. Yet others lament their widespread demise, remembering how within the dark cavernous neighborhood cinema hall or grand picture palace they first discovered the magic of the movies. However, cinema theatres are much more than just sites of nostalgia and personal memory.
The documentary Cinema Pe Cinema: The Theatres. The Movies. And Us (2024) explores the past, present, and futures of single-screen cinemas across India. While migrating films, designs, and technologies shaped these theatres, so have migrations of their people from cinema artists to owners and audiences. Symbols of family, community, and national pride, cinemas are also flashpoints for longstanding controversies over politics, sexuality, and rights to the city. As its subjects reminisce about their cinema-going experiences and connections to their lives, the film becomes an act of resistance against forgetting. But it also gives us glimpses of new lives for some iconic theatres of the past. As more and more single screens shutter across India and the world in the age of streaming and multiplexes, Cinema Pe Cinema testifies to movie theatres’ importance for fostering community during polarized times.
Film director and screen writer Vani Subramanian, New Delhi, and producer and researcher Mary N. Woods, Professor Emerita, Department of Architecture, Cornell University, will join for a post-screening conversation.
Free admission! Sponsored by the South Asia Program and the Migrations Program at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.
In Hindi, English, and Tamil with English subtitles. Courtesy of the filmmaker; more information at: vanishes.in
About the filmmakers
One-time advertising writer, Vani Subramanian has been a feminist activist and documentary filmmaker since the nineties. Her work as a filmmaker explores the connections between our everyday practices, perceptions and prejudices, and the larger political questions confronting us through the lens of everyday practices, perceptions and prejudices – be it about gender and space, sex selective abortions, sectarian intolerance, education, food practices, cinema spectatorship and culture, neighborhood histories and memory, or justice and the death penalty.
Vani's films have been screened and received awards, both nationally and internationally. Over the years, she has extended her practice to video art in performance, mixed media installations and pop-up digital art shows. Vani has been a Fulbright Fellow in Performing and Media Arts, Cornell University, and has also served as visiting/guest faculty at many universities in India. She is also the Creative Director of reFrame Institute of Art and Expression, an initiative that produces, mentors and disseminates artistic efforts that respond to contemporary challenges.
Mary N. Woods, historian of cities, architecture, and media, is the first woman to be tenured in Cornell’s Department of Architecture. She is the author of such seminal works as: Women Architects in India: Histories of Practice in Mumbai and Delhi (2016); Beyond the Architect’s Eye: Photographs of the American Built Environment (2009); and From Craft to Profession: Practice of Architecture in 19th-Century America (1999). Mary continues to publish on gender and architectural design and practice and single-screen cinemas and community in the US and India. She is now collaborating with photographer Chirodeep Chaudhuri for a work about Mumbai’s architecture of the night and with Annie Schentag, historian and preservationist, and Nipun Prabhakar, architect and photographer, for a study of the post-industrial cities of Buffalo and Bhopal and New York and Mumbai.