Umesh Singh has opened an ice cream parlour and his elder brother Uday Bhan Singh runs an English medium school after their cinema hall, Parijat Cinema, closed down three years back. The Singh brothers, joint owners of Parijat Cinema, have decided to turn the hall into a commercial complex. Parijat Cinema was one of the biggest and most popular halls in Salkia. “We have decided to close the hall as business has been down since 2001. The hall has around 1,000 seats but the audience was sometimes even less than 100. In such a situation, we were left with no option but to close the hall,” said Umesh. Singh, who used to be busy in the office room of his cinema hall since morning at one time, now can be seen at his ice cream parlour opposite M.C. Kejriwal Vidyapeeth every morning and evening.

Not only Parijat, most of the cinema halls in Howrah have been sold off and turned into shopping malls, party offices or housing complexes. Bangabasi Cinema has already turned into a shopping complex after the owner sold off the hall to a developer. Aloka Cinema, that remained closed for nearly 15 years, has been demolished and a shopping complex is on its way there. A housing complex is being built on the land of Liluah cinema hall that remained closed for several years.

(Top) The ruins of Aloka Cinema, (above left) Liluah Cinema being demolished and (above right) Shanti Cinema in Kadamtala still runs. Pictures by Gopal Senapati

Most of the 28 cinema halls in Howrah that once did brisk business till the first half of the 90s are now shut. Only a few of them that have been kept open till date are now fighting a grim battle for survival, thanks to the PVR Cinemas and Inox in Howrah. “People these days are no longer interested in going to single screen cinemas after they have been to multi-screen halls. Most of the multiplexes are located inside shopping malls, where people can shop, eat and then round off the day with a film. The comfort offered in the multiplexes is absent in the single screen cinema halls in Howrah and Calcutta also,” said Umesh Singh.

The owners of standalone halls are also not in a position to turn their cinemas into multiplexes in the face of tough competition from PVR Cinemas in Avani Mall in south Howrah and Inox in north Howrah. “The multiplexes are run by big names in the business. There are instances where single screen cinema halls have been turned into multiplexes but still they failed to draw crowds. Because apart from facilities like shops, eateries and gaming parlours, brand names of the multiplexes also matter,” said Sunit Singh, the owner of Rakhi Cinema in north Howrah. Rakhi is one of the few cinema halls in north Howrah that still manages to survive. “But I will have to close the hall in a couple of years because it is becoming tough to run it. Most of the people these days prefer to visit Liluah Inox than Rakhi,” said Sunit. He said that he did not try to modernize his movie hall; instead, he turned to the business of cinema distribution in the last five years.

People in the business of cinema halls also believe that big halls with a large number of seats are now obsolete. The present requirement is for small halls with multi-screens in view of the fast dwindling audience. But most of the cinema halls in Howrah have a minimum of 600 to 1,000 seats. “The PVR Cinemas and Inox have no more than 250 to 300 seats and the halls are also small. It is also easy to maintain such small halls,” said Uday Bhan Singh, the joint owner of Parijat Cinema. He said that his inability to maintain the hall is one of the reasons for closing the cinema.

“The audience of multiplex and single screen are also different. In the single screen cinemas, the audience turns violent at the slightest pretext and damages the furniture inside the hall in case of a power failure or low picture quality. But such problems do not arise in multiplexes. The audience here are educated and sophisticated,” said Latika Mal, one of the owners of Parbati Cinema. Parbati Cinema was closed two years back and owners of the hall are now trying to reach a consensus among themselves to hand over the hall and the land to realtors to pave way for a commercial complex.

Anup Bhattacharya

(From top) A shopping complex opened up at Bangabasi Cinema some months back; Parijat Cinema, too, has been closed since three years and Parbati closed down two years back

Most of the cinema hall owners agree that a steady fall in the audience since the middle of the nineties turned the cinemas into a sick industry. “There was a time when members of local clubs visited our office before the release of any blockbuster film like that of Uttam-Suchitra or Amitabh Bachchan with requests for 50 or 100 tickets. Otherwise, they would have had to stand in queue for the whole night for a ticket,” said a cinema hall owner of Howrah. He said that everyday policemen from the local police station would be posted near the halls to maintain the queues and stop blacking of tickets. “Often police would chase away the ticket blackers. There was a time when a section of people used to eke out a living by blacking tickets near the cinema halls. Many believe that the advent of television channels is one of the reasons why women stopped coming to cinema halls. “The matinee show was exclusively meant for housewives and elderly women. Hundreds of them visited cinema halls during matinee show, most of who now spend time watching mega serials at home,” said Latika.

The residents of Howrah, however, are still nostalgic about the cinema halls in Howrah. “I still remember when the night before the release of an Uttam-Suchitra hit, I, along with my friends, spent nights near the counters of the cinema halls for a ticket. The hey days of cinema business has gone as most of the films are not worth watching,” said Chanchal Mukherjee, a school teacher and a film artiste.