Travelling projectionists once crisscrossed Thailand with their canvas screens and suitcases stocked with film rolls.
They would put up the screen in villages — nang re ("travelling movies") or nang klang plaeng ("movies in the middle of the field").
When the sun went down and the fields grew dark, a projector clanked, purred and beamed a ray of light that hit the white screen and became, as if by magic, a movie.
Pre-multiplex screenings would go on until late at night. It's estimated that at their peak, there were over 1,500 nang klang plaeng trucks moving across the country.
It should be noted that the early days of the Kingdom's open-air cinema had another name: nang kai ya, or "movies that sell medicine".
Back then, pharmaceutical companies ran their own outdoor movie units. Their projectionists roamed the back roads of the country, stopping at villages and showing films along the way.
During the screening, when the projectionist paused the proceedings to change a roll of film, the MC would start advertising cough syrups, herbal concoctions for women's troubles or cure-all painkillers. They wouldn't resume the film until someone in the audience bought their products. Later, the practice was declared mercenary by the health agency and duly outlawed.
But that's not really why nang klang plaeng have become a rarity over the past decade. The arrival of VCRs, VCDs, DVDs, computers, cable television, smartphones, tablets and, above all, the proliferation of neon-splashed multiplexes in the provinces — all have greatly altered the way people watch movies in Thailand, and everywhere in the world for that matter.
Movies were once larger than life; now with your iPhone or Galaxy S4, it's not necessarily so.
But the open-air cinema is not totally extinct. There are still a few outfits doing the rounds in the provinces, giving picture shows at village feasts, funerals and temple fairs.
Even in Bangkok and its outskirts, we can still see people gathering in sois at night to watch films under the sky. Most of these take place in Thai-Chinese communities that host annual worshipping rites at local shrines, or saan jao.
Besides pig's heads, boiled ducks and colourful sweets, the host often includes a programme of outdoor movies in the checklist of offerings to the gods. Usually, a short Chinese opera film opens the night — it's Chinese deities we're talking about — followed by Thai or US films.
The size of the screen at such gatherings is much smaller than those of the nang klang plaeng of yore, as is the size of the audience, too.
When digital projection completely takes over — when 35mm film is no longer a standard operational practice — the fate of open-air cinema will become grave.
The number of modern multiplexes is still growing, and movies have increasingly become an abstract entity, usually a set of compressed data in a hard drive. Just like so many other objects listed in this book, the efficiency of digital has replaced the beauty, and clunkiness, of analogue.
If you happen to drive past an open-air screening with a 35mm projector, stop and join them. Maybe it won't last that much longer.
