Cinema Everywhere

Truck of Dreams

There was more than one reason why the first films were called `moving pictures'. The vast majority of early screenings were given by itinerant projectionists who operated at fairgrounds, village halls and civic centres. Indeed, it wasn't until Harry Davis and John P. Harris opened the first nickelodeon in a disused store in Pittsburgh in 1905 that the concept of permanent picture houses began to catch on in the United States.

In these days of downtown dream palaces and mall megaplexes, it's hard to imagine that, in certain parts of the world, things haven't changed that much since the turn of the last century and that vast numbers of people see their movies in places a million miles from the average American auditorium. Yet travelling cinema continues to thrive — and in some pretty unexpected places, too — as do open-air theatres and state-sponsored venues detailed to provide the workers with uplifting propaganda at the end of a day's toil.

In Comrades, his 1986 study of the Tolpuddle Martyrs who tried to found a prototype trade union in 1830s Dorset, Bill Douglas showed rural audiences thrilling to the simple, colour images presented by a magic lanternist. Getting on for 200 years later, the arrival of a travelling cinema still generates the same kind of excitment in isolated settlements across Asia and Africa. It doesn't really matter what's playing, as a cinema show is a special occasion. Entire families make a night of it, enjoying picnics as dusk falls over the makeshift screen that's been erected on the largest available patch of open land.

Trucks were first used to bring cinema to outlaying populations by the Bolsheviks, who also fitted out trains and riverboats to convert illiterate viewers to the revolutionary cause through the agit-prop documentaries of Dziga-Vertov and the montage features of Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Dovzhenko. Castro followed suit in the early 1960s, although, as Juan Carlos Tabio demonstrated in The Elephant and the Bicycle (1995), uneducated audiences could sometimes misunderstand a movie's message, in this instance the peasants on a remote island are inspired to rise up against their oppressive landlord by a silent version of Robin Hood.

Spirit of the Beehive

The impact that films can have on those who see so few that they take on much greater significance than an occasional entertainment has been seen in features as different as F.W. Murnau's Tartuffe (1925), in which the adaptation of Molière's play was bookended by scenes of a young man posing as an itinerant projectionist to convince his uncle that he is being swindled by his housekeeper, and Victor Erice's Spirit of the Beehive (1973), in which a seven year-old (Ana Torrent) Spanish girl is so struck by James Whale's Frankenstein that she mistakes a Falangist soldier hiding in a nearby barn for the Monster.

However, nowhere has travelling cinema been so romanticised as in India.

Just as British pioneers sent touring cinemas to Australia and Canada in the 1930s, some 500 outfits were criss-crossing the subcontinent by the end of the decade and today more than 2000 endure interminable journeys across inhospitable terrain to ply their trade. In some cases, the trucks and projectors have been handed down the generations and it's a wonder that so many showman manage to stay in business, as their equipment is so antiquated and they can rarely charge their impoverished patrons more than a pittance for a ticket. What would they give for one of the cinemobiles currently servicing the Borders, Highlands and Islands of Scotland and the further flung communities of Ireland, with their state-of-the-art digital apparatus and comfortable in-lorry seating for 100?