The Economist December 18th 2021 Holiday specials 47
In Leh, Ladakh’s capital, some 11,500 feet (3,500 me
tres) above sea level, a PictureTime truck settled in the
city’s cricket ground, surrounded by the peaks of the
Karakoram. The touring cinema that emerged from the
truck was nothing like the one in Pusegaon. In place of
the tent was an inflatable yellow cube, with dimples
for better acoustics. It was airconditioned. The floor
was carpeted and there were plastic chairs. The picture
was crystal clear, the sound Dolby. Once the lights
went down and the film came on, it was easy to forget
you were sitting in a barren field.
PictureTime’s tickets are cheap, at between 30 and
70 rupees, compared with an average ticket price of 191
rupees at pvr’s multiplexes. Mr Chaudhary argues that
3,000 hundredseater screens selling tickets for 70 ru
pees and operating at just 30% capacity could add as
much $122m to India’s annual boxoffice collections.
It is an audacious plan. Whether it works comes
down to an abstract question, the sort spreadsheets re
main unequipped to answer: is there really something
magical about going to the cinema? Certainly there
was in 1896, when the Lumière Brothers screened “The
Arrival of a Train”, a 50second documentary which
showed a mail train pulling into a platform and which,
the legend goes, so terrified viewers that they leapt up
and ran away. That magic was still there in 2002, when
Mr Torgovnik witnessed “the raw joy of the villagers”
in Pusegaon. But what can be the magic of the moving
image in 2022, when video saturates the world like
highfructose corn syrup in American food?
Perhaps audiences will discover it in the feeling of
sitting in a darkened hall, or in the rituals of buying sa
mosas and popcorn and sugary drinks. Or maybe it will
be in the communal experience, the cinematic equiva
lent of a live concert. Or in the singleminded atten
tion they must pay to the big screen, so unlike the noti
fication and distractionfilled experience of looking
at a mobile phone.
Cultural artefacts, from Guignol to Punch and Judy,
from village fetes to county fairs, and from the circus
to the cinema, live on because older generations incul
cate in younger ones a love for the things they love. As
long as parents introduce cinema to their children and
help them form memories of being spirited to another
world, the tradition of going to the movieswillendure.
All that the world’s film industries needtodois to pro
vide the spaces for that magic to happen.nlegged audience. He is determined to keep the busi
ness going by diversifying into children’s games and
Ferris wheels as more reliable moneyspinners at the
village fairs. “The theatre has become our office in the
mela, and we live and eat in it,” he says. “But I will con
tinue to run it. There are just a few of us left. We have to
keep the tradition going.”
Sushil Chaudhary, the founder of a new chain of
touring talkies called PictureTime, is making a differ
ent bet on the possibilities of cinema. The son of an ar
my man, he spent his childhood moving to a new city
every few years. He graduated from one of India’s elite
engineering colleges and then worked as an itconsul
tant across Latin America. He has no background in
cinema. Scouting for entrepreneurship opportunities
when he returned to India a few years ago, he found
himself wondering about the paucity of screens. Con
cluding that high property prices and a burdensome
regulatory environment were, as he puts it, “very silly
reasons”, he reckoned he could solve both problems
with travelling cinemas. Renting public space is
cheap; in much of India, touring cinemas need just
three licences. mr chaudhary’s insurgency
Oldfashioned touring cinemas have little to offer to
day’s smartphoneequipped smalltowners. But pro
vide a transporting experience at an affordable price
and people will be queuing up around the block.
Mr Chaudhary started his company in 2015 and has
since set up 37 moving screens seating between 100
and 250 people. He is on track to open 100 in the short
term. His goal is 3,000 screens. A quarter will be in cit
ies—especially at railway stations—and the rest will go
to underserved areas, including some of the most re
mote. Already he has cinemas wandering around in
Tawang, a comically inaccessible town in the eastern
Himalayas where Bhutan, China and India converge,
and the badlands of central India, which are infested
with Naxals, Maoists dedicated to the violent over
throw of the state. Insurgents, it turns out, like Bolly
wood as much as the next Indian.
This summer, he set one up in Ladakh, a remote ter
ritory where in 2020 Indian soldiers clashed with Chi
nese counterparts along a disputed border, and which,
more urgently for its residents, has not had a screen
since the last cinema shut decades ago. Once the
film came on,
it was easy
to forget you
were sitting
in a barren field
↓Jonathan
Torgovnik captures
cinema-goers
and makers