Photos: Tour forgotten single-screen cinemas from across India
Photographer Hemant Chaturvedi has been on the road for two years, shooting single-screen cinema halls as they stand, neglected and crumbling, across India. He’s made his way across 32,000 km in 11 states so far. “In the next 25 years, most single-screen theatres will have ceased to exist. Somebody needs to document them,” he says.
Inside the Capitol Theatre in Mumbai. Between the strains of competing with multiplexes and streaming platforms, and now the pressures of Covid-19, it is likely that many single-screens that hung on until 2019 will now never reopen.(Photo by Hemant Chaturvedi)
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At the abandoned Empire Theatre in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh. India had about 20,000 operational single-screen cinemas in 2000. By 2019, that number had dwindled to just over 6,000.(Photo by Hemant Chaturvedi)
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The overgrown sign for the abandoned Empire Theatre in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh. Chaturvedi has photographed over 650 single-screen cinemas across 500 towns so far.(Photo by Hemant Chaturvedi)
A lone attendant sits on a deserted red carpet, while the stars look down silently from their posters, at Nishat Talkies, Mumbai.(Photo by Hemant Chaturvedi)
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The imposing façade of Shah Cinema, Srinagar. The grand architecture of India’s surviving single-screens is evocative, Chaturvedi says, both for the grandeur it once represented and the unforgiving manner in which the world has moved on.(Photo by Hemant Chaturvedi)
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Modus Vivendi (1000 people – 1000 Homes), 2000: In this self-portrait, a work of mixed media on canvas, Kallat appears as a swaggering, bespectacled juggler of heart and brain. The painting is an exploration of selfhood in the city of Mumbai, where he grew up and lives. The individual, lost in the multitudes, wanders in a state of perpetual disorientation, as reflected in the work. The radiating streaks of red, orange and green, reminiscent of thermal imagery, were achieved by texturing the canvas with layers of paint or canvas and then peeling off some parts to attain the desired visual effect.
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Sheer delight: While out surveying the remote Phoenix Islands Archipelago, Schmidt Ocean Institute scientists captured rare footage of a “glass octopus”, named so because it is completely see-through. What one does see when one shines a light on it is its optic nerve, eyeballs, and digestive tract. Even though this species has been known to science since 1918, scientists were forced to study about this animal through specimens found in the guts of predators, before this sighting.
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Herald / Harbinger is a permanent public art installation by Ben Rubin and Jer Thorp. It broadcasts the sounds of the Bow Glacier cracking and breaking 200 km away, to the centre of Calgary, one of Canada’s largest cities, almost in real time. The sounds and imagery shaped by data from a glacial observatory are broadcast through 16 speakers and seven LED arrays.
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Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022): The movie explores the many dimensions of parenthood and love through the story of a Chinese-American immigrant named Evelyn Wang (played by Michelle Yeoh) who, while struggling to run a failing laundromat business, uses her newfound powers to travel across multiple realities to save the world and work on her strained relationships with her loved ones. It’s a family drama that’s fast-paced, funny and, above all, tackles earnestly the idea of healing from intergenerational trauma.
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At first sight: For centuries, sunspots were thought to be Mercury passing across the Sun. By the early 17th century, with the invention of the telescope, astronomers could get a clearer look. In 1610, Galileo Galilei (who first used the telescope to observe space) in Italy and his British contemporary Thomas Harriot identified these as spots on the Sun. Seen here are 35 drawings of sunspots created by Galileo between June 2 and July 8, 1612.
