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 to see movies. Still others remember that it was within those crumbling edifices that they first discovered the magic of the movies, and made deep, lasting connections.
Cinema Pe Cinema, a remarkable documentary by Vani Subramanian and Cornell professor emeritus Mary Norman Woods, meanders through theatres in small towns and big cities across India, creating a memoryscape of women and men whose lives have been touched by single screen cinemas. As subjects reminisce about the cinema-going experience and its connections to their lives, the film becomes an act of resistance against forgetting, helping to keep alive both memories of these iconic theatres and the films they showed through traces of their audio, visual, and physical ephemera. With more and more single screen cinema theatres shuttering across India, Cinema Pe Cinema testifies to the importance of the single screen theatre-going experiences during in polarized times and the age of multiplex cinemas.
Filmmaker Vani Subramanian and producer Mary N. Woods, Professor Emerita in the College of Art, Architecture, and Planning, 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, neighbourhood 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 visiting/guest faculty at School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, College of Arts, Architecture & Planning & the Department of Theatre, Film & Dance, Cornell University, NY, as well as Sushant School of Architecture, Gurgaon and Mahatma Gandhi Hindi University, Wardha. 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 is Professor Emerita in the College of Art, Architecture, and Planning at Cornell and 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). The first woman tenured in the history of Cornell’s architecture department, she is the inaugural Michael McCarthy Professor of Architectural Theory and recipient of the Tau Sigma Delta Silver Medal. Forthcoming are essays reimagining Indian single screens and Clarence Stein and cinemas; exhibition and catalog of Mumbai’s architecture of the night with photographer Chirodeep Chaudhuri; and book on postindustrial cities in U.S. and India with Annie Schentag, historian and preservationist, and Nipun Prabhakar, architect and photographer. Her B.A. is from Duke University and Ph.D. from Columbia University. She and filmmaker Vani Subramanian co-produced Cinema Pe Cinema: The theatres. The movies. And us (2024).