Cinema and its spectral returns: the single-screen viewer at the site of artistic re-imagination

This photo-essay uses images to revisit the art projects (done by the author), at the site of the now non-operational Gem cinema, located in Central Calcutta / Kolkata, India. I am thinking through the questions of reinventing and reimagining disappearing cinema-halls, its reinvention as art space and what may be describe as its ‘spectral returns’. My first art-installation, executed in 2017, revisited the landmark film Sholay (dir. Ramesh Sippy, 1975), and memories of watching the film at Gem cinema. The installation explored how Sholay becomes a tissue of quotations, and the ways in which the text now entails the intensity of public viewing, and its multiple spill overs. While commenting on other collaborative projects, I also consider a short anaglyph 3D video project (by the author) which mapped the location of Gem cinema, and located it within the layers of other maps of the place and the locality. On one hand, art exhibitions in the hollow womb of Gem cinema is no way same as viewing films in the theatre, on the other, the Sholay project, and the companion work, became a provocation for the neighbourhood crowd who arrived at the art exhibition in search of a lost film-viewing experience.