Cinema paradiso no more

Cinema paradiso no more

The history of small people is forgotten with the vanishing of old stand-alone cinemas, says the documentary Phantom Of Illumination

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Cinema paradiso no more
Phantom of Illuminationa, film Wattanapume Laiwuwanchai

Everything changes. It changes in its own time.Cells die. Cells grow. Death and birth happen all the time.Like the mind, it's gone before you even know. Like when I project a movie, a reel of film rotating at high speed looks like a still image.

Like a sermon, or like a Buddhist-science lecture, the opening remarks of the film Nirand Ratree (Phantom Of Illumination) are spoken by film projectionist Sumrith Praprakone. He was a farmer in the late 1980s. He knew nothing about film. But he moved to Bangkok to find work and landed a job first as an usher then in the projection room of Thonburi Rama, a prime specimen of stand-alone cinema's squalid splendour. Sumrith worked and lived in the theatre for 26 years -- until the 2010s when film reels were replaced by hard disks throughout the world and his job became obsolete, meaningless, extinct.

Everything changes. Cells die, cells grow, like cinema in the 21st century.

Phantom Of Illumination (opening today at SF CentralWorld) is a documentary film that records the final days of a stand-alone movie house through the eyes of its projectionist, the simple man who speaks about the mind and the changing of times with the voice of a scholar. If Thonburi Rama is an example of how old-school cinemas were rendered outdated by new technology, Sumrith is an example of how a low-wage worker suffers in an economic storm.

"His story had a real impact on me," said director Wattanapume Laisuwanchai, who spent four years filming several stand-alone cinemas around Bangkok.

"Sumrith's story follows the familiar narrative of a worker who came from the provinces to find work in the capital. Instead of finding one in a factory, he finds it in a movie theatre. He stays for 26 years, and when the 'factory' closes, he has nowhere to go but back home."

Shot in digital, with a formal panache that captures the interplay of light and shadows of an old-school movie hall, Phantom Of Illumination is another artistic attempt to document the gradual extinction of stand-alone cinemas in Thailand. The replacement of hand-rolled film by digital screening machinery is a historic shift in the movie-projecting -- and moviegoing -- experience of the 2010s, one that extends into debates and lamentations on various topics, from film aesthetics to architectural preservation (think the Scala); from showbiz economics to pure nostalgia.

Before Phantom Of Illumination, Aditya Assarat made The Scala, a short documentary about the lives of people who have been working at Bangkok's last stand-alone, palatial-style cinema. Philip Jablon (who sometimes contributes to Life) conducts ongoing research for what he's called the Southeast Asia Movie Theater Project, in which he photographs and exhibits the fading majesty of late 20th-century cinema houses in Southeast Asian countries, including many in provincial Thailand. Jablon's agenda is to encourage preservation of valuable architecture from the Southeast Asian tendency of demolishing old buildings for real-estate development. Right now, the only so-called respectable stand-alone cinema in Bangkok is the Scala in Siam Square. A few others that still operate have gone second-class, showing porn.

Also devoted crusaders of stand-alone glory, Sonthaya Subyen and Morimart Radenahmad three years ago published Sawan 35mm, or Once Upon A Celluloid Planet, a photobook featuring hundreds of photographs of stand-alone cinemas around the country. Then last year they published Stand Alone, Die Alone, a compilation of moviegoers' experience and memory of stand-alone theatres. In fact, Sonthaya, a well-known publisher, has long planned a documentary film to be called Phantoms Of Sleepless Cinema, which he still hasn't finished.

"I talked to a number of small theatre owners and outdoor cinema businesses, and for them, what they'd been doing for a living for decades is now over because of the digital transformation," Sonthaya said to Life in 2014. "Many employees were cast adrift. Not many theatres have the kind of huge investments [to convert film projection to digital projection] that would extend their lifelines.

"For viewers, this doesn't affect them. But there are many sad stories behind the screen."

Sumrith's story -- the one told in Phantom Of Illumination -- is perhaps one of them. For Wattanapume the director, the stories of the humans who live and work in the cinema in times of momentous change are more touching than the actual demise of the cinemas themselves.

"Though he's a projectionist, I have a feeling that Sumrith doesn't feel connected with movies the same way young moviegoers like myself do," said Wattanapume the filmmaker. "I'm not sure he even likes watching movies. For him, it's just a job that keeps him going. The cinema is his working space, his office, his home, because he lived there for 26 years."

For Wattanapume, a rising filmmaker in his late 20s, Phantom Of Illumination is also an experiment in storytelling as he inserts his own memory and obsession into the story of Sumrith's. The film has footage of the last day that Thonburi Rama screened movies, before it stopped. (It is now still waiting to be turned into a parking garage.) But the film contains a startling scene of another cinema being demolished: the Rama on Rama IV as it is wrecked into piles of stones and rubbish. (The lot, near Samyan intersection, now hosts a high-rise condominium.)

"I understand change. I'm not anti-change," says Wattanapume. "But for me, it's more than just old cinemas being destroyed and replaced by something else. It's about history -- of the place and of the people associated with it, people like Sumrith and others who worked there. Thai history doesn't care about small people, so we don't care to preserve the places where they belong. We only care to preserve temples and palaces. That's the essence I found out in the process of making this film."

In the film, Sumrith the projectionist left the cinema after it had closed and returned to his family home in the provinces, where he tried to work as rubber tapper. But according to Wattanapume, he wasn't happy with that life. He is now ordained as a monk. One light has gone out of the projector and another has turned on in the mind of the projectionist.

After the 8pm screening of Phantom Of Illumination at SF CentralWorld tomorrow, there will be a panel discussion on stand-alone cinemas in Thailand.

Do you like the content of this article?
COMMENT