For many in India, their first movie wasn’t in an air-conditioned, terraced, multiplex, or on a TV screen hooked up to a VCR. It was shown to them by a travelling cinema, a truck with multiple aging film projectors bolted to its floor, and a team of projectionists who lived in it.
This was the opposite of a drive-in theater; instead of driving to the screen and watching from your car, the film came to you, but stayed in its vehicle.
Shashwati fondly remembers her experiences with this dying breed of entrepreneurs:
These companies were commercial ventures with ancient 35 mm projectors, they would go to where the audience was, set up a screen and show a movie. When I was in school, that is how films used to be shown to us. Mr. Movie Man (we actually called him that) would come with a projector and usually an ancient Tarzan movie. We would re-arrange our chairs, and take down the partition between the classrooms …Once, by mistake, Mr. Movie Man put in a French film, it was fading and probably from 1960. It wasn’t anything special. A woman in a long coat and sunglasses walked into a beach cabin. She sat there, and then a man came in. And he kissed her, on the mouth! After that first kiss, there was either deadly silence or a collective gasp, then the lady took off her clothes, not all of them, but enough for the film to be stopped and reel yanked out. Then we were back to seeing “savages” and a full grown man leaping through trees, something much more salubrious for our tender psyches. [Shashwati]
A few years later, the film projector was gone and replaced with a VCR, and by that time I was gone from the lovely grade school I had attended into the Convent. And that is how I first saw the “The Evil Dead,” on the feast day of the patron saint of our house. [Shashwati]
Photographer Jonathan Trogovnik captures some of the lyrical images associated with these travelling salemen of dreams: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. If you like these pictures, he has a whole book of photos related to India and the popular culture of the cinema [Thumbnails of selected images]. I’m quite fond of this homage to Gandhi and his spinning wheel, myself.
