Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of listening to cinematographer and photographer Hemant Chaturvedi speak about his extraordinary project photographing India’s vanishing single-screen cinemas. It was less a lecture and more a love letter to architecture, to memory, and to the slow death of a public ritual. As he described traversing the country with his camera, chronicling crumbling talkies, I found myself imagining the ghostly grandeur of those halls: ticket booths sealed with dust, gilded murals of goddesses and film stars fading into each other, velvet seats collapsed under the weight of years.
Once upon a Friday, the entire city revolved around the cinema. Posters flapped like prayer flags in the wind, rickshaw radios blared film songs, and the queue outside a talkie was longer than any temple line. Inside, the air was thick with perfume, sweat, and the scent of frying samosas. Lovers communicated through the delicate Morse code of coughs and glances. It was an evening of transformation; for a few meagre rupees, the common man could enter a palace of dreams.
These palaces were not accidental. They were built with a kind of civic imagination now rare in the architecture of entertainment. In the 1930s and ’40s, as cities like Bombay and Calcutta embraced modernity, cinema halls became their proudest symbols. Art Deco arrived and met the Indian penchant for ornamentation halfway. The results were majestic hybrids: neon façades, mirrored foyers, goddess reliefs, and geometric staircases. The Apsara, Regal, Eros, Minerva, Liberty – their very names suggested a glamorous democracy. Inside, velvet drapes framed the screen like temple curtains. Chandeliers sparkled overhead. For a few hours, the world outside could dissolve in a haze of romance and song.
Then, quietly, the interval arrived. Malls mushroomed, multiplexes multiplied, and air-conditioned anonymity replaced the communal chaos of the talkie. Watching a film became an exercise in efficiency rather than emotion. Tickets were booked online instead of haggled over in sweaty queues. Families now watched in polite silence, popcorn tub in hand, while the messy, democratic theatre of public feeling retreated into memory.
In the ruins of these old cinemas, however, something continues to hum. It is this strange afterglow that Chaturvedi has been capturing with such patience and precision. His photographs are forensic yet tender: a torn curtain, a projector frozen mid-reel, sunlight streaming through a cracked roof (where the roof still stands!). Each image feels like a still from a larger story we once lived in. He has travelled through multiple towns and cities, often driving dusty roads to find a theatre that no longer screens films but still holds history in its bones. The series is not nostalgia for its own sake; it is documentation of an architectural vernacular that embodied a nation’s collective imagination.
In these images, one sees the layers of design and desire: the colonial façades adapted to Indian flamboyance, regional flourishes of tile and plaster, hand-painted signs in Gujarati, Marathi, or Tamil that once called out to passersby. Each theatre was a miniature museum of its town, part cultural barometer, part public salon. Their disappearance is not merely aesthetic loss but a civic one. When a cinema dies, a corner of community life dies with it.
What, then, should become of these buildings? Demolition is the obvious choice, but perhaps the least imaginative. Around the world, old cinemas have found afterlives as performance venues, cafés, bookstores, even art galleries. There’s no reason India cannot dare to dream similarly. To repurpose these halls is not to embalm them in nostalgia but to keep them in circulation as spaces where light and gathering still matter. Imagine a talkie reborn as a community arts centre where films are screened on weekends, local artists exhibit in the lobby, and the smell of coffee mingles once again with conversation.
Every generation loses something of its collective romance with the world. Radio yielded to television, letters to WhatsApp, and now the darkened hush of the theatre to the blue glare of streaming platforms. Yet, for all our on-demand convenience, there remains a yearning for that moment when the lights dim, the chatter fades, and a single beam cuts through the dark. Perhaps that is why Chaturvedi’s work resonates so deeply: it reminds us that cinema was never just about the film. It was about the architecture of feeling, the gathering, the anticipation, the democratic intimacy of strangers breathing in the same dream.
As the talkies crumble, they leave behind a peculiar kind of beauty: the beauty of what refuses to be erased completely. Chaturvedi’s photographs capture that final flicker, not of film, but of memory. They are, in the end, less elegies than invitations: to look again, to remember, and to imagine what might yet be possible if someone, somewhere, turns the projector back on.