Essay: When the Lights Go Down

Thinking beyond the movies themselves—the why and what of Cinema with a capital C—it serves to consider the entanglement of factors that condition the who, when, and where of film spectatorship, nearly all of which operate within the seemingly neutral site of the movie theatre. Commonly reduced to an empty venue to be activated by screenings and their attendant audiences, it is easy to ignore the existence of cinemas as spatial and commercial entities that are conditioned by fundamentally capitalist considerations, alongside the complicated relationships they must negotiate between forces of economies and ideologies, as well as cultures and communities.

In Ananta Thitanat’s quiet documentary SCALA, which captures the last days of the eponymous theatre, we arrive in the wake of just such a negotiation that has decisively fallen through. At the time the last stand-alone cinema in Thailand and now demolished, the film begins with this evisceration already underway, soaring land prices and dwindling ticket sales having made quick work out of a once grande dame already on life support. We watch the de-installation of a massive chandelier, one of the Scala's many iconic elements, that once loomed over the atrium with a patrician grace, but whose dignity crumbles as the novelty of distance is removed.

We watch the de-installation of a massive chandelier, one of the Scala's many iconic elements, that once loomed over the atrium with a patrician grace, but whose dignity crumbles as the novelty of distance is removed.

Chatting while each delicate strand of glass baubles is lowered, the workmen and cinema staff comment directly about the act of documentary filmmaking. Slow down, one appeals, noting that the crew is moving too fast for the filmmaker to shoot, followed by a teasing call to focus the lens on a particular person. After another beat the penny drops in a moment of interpellation—the film’s documentarian, whose presence should have receded into the background or remained obscured behind her camera, is recognized by a worker as the daughter of a former colleague. And it is this revelation that so frames the rest of SCALA as an obituary written in the present tense, laden with the personal stakes of the many stalwarts who chose to stick with the cinema to its whimpering, resigned end.

Between the rubble

Sporadic musings pierce the otherwise measured quietude of the Scala’s steady unravelling. An anecdote on the persistence of stray cats seeking shelter in cinemas that forbid their presence, and Thitanat’s memories of a serendipitous encounter with one when she was young, flows into another conversation caught in medias res of two workers wondering whether there is still a need to keep the tenacious felines out. (The answer is, quite naturally, “not anymore”.)

As curtains are pulled down, seats are dismantled, and ceiling fixtures are unmounted, they are soundtracked by similar contemporary banter, remembrances of career beginnings, and a hum of mellow gossip informed by working relationships that have spanned decades. Each tactile gesture in the cinema’s disassembly somehow also reveals something new, namely the attachments and shared aspirations that had long fermented beneath the mundanity of the daily grind. Such dreams emerge, however, devoid of an anchorage, spoken into an air that has been emptied of potential.

Here, Thitanat’s steady eye both chronicles and humanises the choreography of ruination by focusing on the conviviality of deconstruction at a human scale, overheard conversation by overheard conversation. Despite adopting consistent and elegant fixed compositions throughout the entire film, which has not one camera movement, she skilfully prevents the nostalgic glamour of a beautiful ruin from overshadowing the staggered, protracted, bureaucratic processes involved in the closure of a cinema, and the warm, blunt coarseness of its working folks.

Throughout the film, traces of occupancy in backrooms and the rooftop—a wok in the staff pantry, a laundry line amidst a particularly verdant and hardy patch of gardening—provide a warm and unexpectedly domestic contrast to the building’s grand, aloof architecture.

Throughout the film, traces of occupancy in backrooms and the rooftop—a wok in the staff pantry, a laundry line amidst a particularly verdant and hardy patch of gardening—provide a warm and unexpectedly domestic contrast to the building’s grand, aloof architecture.

Architecture and industry

It is precisely at these junctures where differences, textures, and histories accumulate and overlap that SCALA becomes unclassifiable in its valencies. As architectural documentation, it appears a little incomplete in its exposition of the building’s various design elements; as a community portrait, it lacks a defined cast of recognisable characters and a narrative arc of personal development; as a critique on the forces that lead to the demise of the theatre, it is far too ambivalent and elliptical…but still, despite its placidity and wanness, the film bewitches and provokes.

How does SCALA amplify the magic of the Scala even at the brink of oblivion? The answer has to do with legacy, and here an architectural lesson is due. Built in 1969 as one of the career-defining works of Colonel Chira Silpakanok, a prominent advocate for architectural modernism in post-war Thailand, the Scala was the third in a series of stand-alone cinemas that Silpakanok designed for Pisit Tansacha, following the Siam in 1966 and the Lido in 1968. A former partner and manager of the legendary Chalermthai Theatre, which was eventually demolished in 1989, Tansacha chose as location for his three picture palaces a former slum in central Bangkok, one that over time gentrified into the commercial Siam Square district.

Amalgamating an Art Deco style drawn from the splendour of Hollywood’s Golden Age with the tropical modernism of Thailand’s early attempts at locating its identity in a equally distinct architectural lexicon, the thousand-seat Scala embraced high drama with restraint. Alongside a vaulted double-story foyer whose columns thicken into the buttresses of shallow dome-like depressions in the ceiling, within each of which a lone bulb offsets a beautiful star-shaped steel plate, bringing to mind the intricate bas-reliefs of classical architecture, other exquisite features include a 50-foot long plaster wall relief designed by Filipino artist Ver V. Manipol inlayed into the auditorium entrance.

And of course there is the showstopper: a five-tier chandelier composed of hundreds of frosted etched glass spheres, a bit of dressing that embraces the spectacle of not just the movies, but going to the movies. An apocryphal but persistent legend follows that the chandelier even predated the entire building, having first been acquired by Tansacha, who then asked Silpakanok to design a cinema for it.

And of course there is the showstopper: a five-tier chandelier composed of hundreds of frosted etched glass spheres, a bit of dressing that embraces the spectacle of not just the movies, but going to the movies.

Beyond the sublime beauty of its architecture, the Scala also belonged to a lineage of standalone cinema halls that began to populate the Thai landscape from the sixties to the seventies, an era when attending a screening became as much a focus as the films themselves: to watch a movie steadily transformed from a simple pastime to a ritual that included dressing up, jostling for tickets, getting popcorns, and settling down in plush seats to enjoy the film alongside the then-rare amenity of air conditioning, followed afterwards by long chats about the experience with friends over food. Undergirding such a ritual, of course, is an illusion of class mobility that allowed for a kind of narcotised aspirationalism: for an accessible price, the poor sit next to the wealthy, and when the lights go down everyone is equally enthralled.

Against nostalgia

Thitanat subtly critiques the steady transformation of the Scala into a synecdoche for a certain nostalgia vaunting the aesthetic and social traditions of cinema-going as an event, a spectacle, a liturgy, instead adopting the register of the small and private to challenge the romance of such a domineering imaginary. A little over halfway into SCALA, we are able to read the following scribbles on an exposed beam: “… money… children… living… sacrifice", which, if somewhat obliquely, narrates the pragmatic concerns of the people who staffed the cinema, and the earthly needs that are met by the cinema’s operation, which outweigh the airy romanticisms attributed to it. Over the course of the film’s 65 minutes, people speak of retiring and of next steps, though the ubiquitous undercurrent is one of stoic acceptance, their modest hopefulness tampered by uncertainty. Through it all, the Scala still maintains primacy as both the framing context and the subject, a point of tension that Thitanat manoeuvres with finesse by never losing sight of the folks who activated and maintained the space. Rather than reducing and instrumentalising the theatre as yet another cultural symbol threatened and destroyed by new forces of capital she elevates it as a stronghold for community, both in front of and behind the screen, that inhabited, cherished, and cared for it as though it were a living being.

Scattered throughout the film too are recollections and rumination on not just the Scala, but also its neighbouring sisters, the Siam—burnt down during a protest—and the Lido, burnt down during another protest before being rebuilt into a modern cineplex. From a former triumvirate that once presided over the moving image culture of a society finding its voice to muted, nondescript ends, their histories speak to what seems like a collective fate for nearly all old buildings in Thailand.

From a former triumvirate that once presided over the moving image culture of a society finding its voice to muted, nondescript ends or non-beginnings, their histories speak to what seems like a collective fate for nearly all old buildings in Thailand.

In a way, the life and times of the Scala is itself rather cinematic—the final screenings at the venue included CINEMA PARADISO (1988), a spiritual forebear programmed no doubt with a sort of self-flagellating humour by the impeccable Thai Film Archive—while its ultimate decimation transmutes its existence into something ethereal, something relegated to the realm of memories and a future canon of regrets. The Scala is doomed and that is why the Scala will live forever: like Norma Desmond in SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950) as she glided down the stairs, grateful for those wonderful people in the dark, the Scala is ready for its close-up, knowing that this end is only a beginning of a new, different life.

Special thanks to Aditya Assarat.

Alfonse Chiu is a writer, curator, and artist based in Singapore. They are the editor of the film platform SINdie and the 2021 e-flux journal fellow.