India’s vanishing picture palaces: Cinematographer Hemant Chaturvedi on the death of single-screen cinemas

Chaturvedi’s photographs are on display at an exhibition, “India’s Vanishing Picture Palaces”, till January 25, as part of the sixth Self Discovery via Rediscovering India Festival organised by the Tuli Research Centre for India Studies at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi. His documentary, Chhayaankan which was also screened, mapped the creative journeys of well-known cinematographers who have worked in the Mumbai film industry between 1962 and 2012.

Chaturvedi talks about how cinema halls that once shaped the social atmosphere of our towns and cities were never merely places to watch films. They were landmarks and gathering points. “Cinema halls taught us how to feel together,” he says.

Theatres built in the late 19th and early 20th century began as drama halls inspired by British theatre architecture before being converted into cinemas. They featured circular balconies, wooden stages and elaborate facades. The Art Deco cinemas of the 1940s and ’50s spoke of modernity and optimism.

Hemant Chaturvedi (Courtesy: Hemant Chaturvedi/ Tuli research Centre for India Studies)

In many abandoned theatres, Chaturvedi found old projectors. “I remember standing in a projection room where the projector was still there, coated in dust. The caretaker told me it had not moved since the last show. For him, that machine was not outdated technology, it was something he had spoken to every night,” says the photographer. In another town, an elderly projectionist refused to let go of a broken machine. “He told me, ‘Isne meri poori zindagi chalayi hai. Main isse kaise phenk doon (It has led me my entire life, how can I leave it behind?)’,” adds Chaturvedi.

An experience that stayed with him was the Globe Theatre in Ranikhet, built in the late-19th century, that was later converted into a cinema. Located beside a British-era control room, access was nearly impossible. Chaturvedi slipped in early one morning, photographed the interiors before the guards stopped him. The last film screened there was the Shahenshah (1988) and inside the crumbling lobby lay a faded poster of Amitabh Bachchan. “These places don’t shut because films stop working,” he says, “They shut because time, disputes and neglect slowly corner them.”

The most decisive shift came with the arrival of multiplexes in the late 1990s. Cinema moved from town centres to malls, from one large hall to multiple smaller screens. Ticket prices rose and the idea of cinema as a shared experience weakened. The neighbourhood theatre, once accessible to all, gave way to controlled spaces shaped by consumption and convenience. Single-screen cinemas, unable to compete with changing economics and technology, began disappearing. The numbers underline this loss. Studies show that from nearly 24,000 single-screen cinemas in 1990, India now has less than 2,000, a number that is fast declining.

What was also lost in this transition was the deep sense of collective emotion that cinema talkies once nurtured. Iconic Bollywood dialogues became legendary not merely because of the films themselves but because thousands had heard them together, repeated them and carried them back into their everyday lives.

With multiplexes segmenting audiences and OTT platforms pushing cinema into private, solitary viewing that shared emotional rhythm has steadily weakened. The experience of watching a film shifted from social ritual to individual consumption, eroding the cultural bonding that once defined movie-going in India.

Gayathri Manoj is an intern with The Indian Express