An­ge­lo Bisses­sars­ingh

Re­cent­ly I read a deeply sad­den­ing post on my Face­book blog, Vir­tu­al Mu­se­um of T&T: the long­stand­ing Pal­la­di­um Cin­e­ma, which since 1918 (the year World War I end­ed) has pro­vid­ed end­less mo­tion pic­ture en­ter­tain­ment to the peo­ple of Tu­na­puna, would be clos­ing its doors at the end of Ju­ly and in a last grand ges­ture to its thou­sands of pa­trons, would be of­fer­ing free ad­mis­sion un­til the lights were dimmed for the fi­nal time.

The clo­sure of Pal­la­di­um is the penul­ti­mate demise of yet an­oth­er icon­ic chap­ter in the his­to­ry of cin­e­ma in T&T. There will soon be no sur­vivors of the cadre of old-school cin­e­mas which once stretched from Ce­dros to Scar­bor­ough.

South­ern­ers yelped in glee when in the past cou­ple years, two old leg­ends, Na­tion­al and Em­pire, re­opened their doors with a fresh new face. Now, their fu­tures seem bleak as two new mul­ti­plex­es are set to be com­plet­ed in 2015, right on the out­skirts of San Fer­nan­do.

The ad­vent of the cine­plex with its mul­ti­ple the­atres and mas­sive spin-off en­ter­tain­ment is but a sin­gle rea­son be­hind the demise of old cin­e­mas, which be­gan in the 1970s and 80s with the in­tro­duc­tion of the home video. The first cin­e­ma in the is­land, as re­count­ed in an ear­li­er ar­ti­cle, was the Lon­don Elec­tric The­atre, which opened in Wood­brook, on Feb­ru­ary 2, 1911. Known to lat­er gen­er­a­tions as the As­tor cin­e­ma, it pro­vid­ed the first news­reels seen in Trinidad, show­ing the bat­tles of World War I. The Lon­don Elec­tric was im­mor­talised in Sir VS Naipaul's sem­i­nal nov­el A House for Mr Biswas:

"The evening show be­gan at half past eight. Mr Biswas and Anand left the house at about eight. Not far from the cin­e­ma there was a Chi­nese cafe. Some­thing had to be bought there; it was part of the cin­e­ma rit­u­al. They had eigh­teen cents to spend. They bought peanuts, chan­na, and some mint sweets, six cents in all. The en­trance to the Lon­don pit was through a nar­row tun­nel, as to a dun­geon of ro­mance. It al­lowed not more than one per­son to ad­vance at a time and en­abled the tick­et-col­lec­tor, who sat at the end with a stout stick laid across the arms of his chair, to re­pel gate-crash­ers. Mr Biswas and Anand ar­rived to find the mouth of the tun­nel blocked by a tur­bu­lent, un­ac­com­mo­dat­ing mob. They stood hes­i­tant­ly at the edge of the mob, and in an in­stant, dri­ven from be­hind, found them­selves part of it."

At the Lon­don Elec­tric and at its im­me­di­ate coun­ter­part, the Olympic in Bel­mont, there ap­peared an odd so­cial di­vi­sion in the au­di­ence, ac­cord­ing to who sat in the bal­cony, house or pit. The de­ter­min­ing fac­tor was price, with bal­cony cost­ing more than three times the tick­et for the pit.

There were cin­e­mas out­side of Port-of Spain as ear­ly as 1914 and 1915 with the open­ing of the Fla­vian at La Brea and the Palace in San Fer­nan­do. By the 1930s, largest set­tle­ments had at least one movie house. The Fla­vian was con­struct­ed in a time when La Brea was a far cry from the de­cayed land­scape it now is. Mon­ey flowed freely from the work pro­vid­ed at near­by Lake As­phalt and in a few years, there would be oil wages to add to the pot when prospec­tors be­gan open­ing up the hin­ter­lands in the hunt for black gold.

There was no na­tion­wide elec­tric­i­ty grid un­til 1955 so cin­e­mas out­side of Port-of-Spain and San Fer­nan­do re­lied on gen­er­a­tors known as Del­co plants to pow­er the pro­jec­tors and lights. In or­der to pre­vent the in­te­ri­or of the vast, closed build­ings from be­com­ing en­tire­ly suf­fo­cat­ing, large ro­tat­ing wind-catch­ers were in­stalled, many of which can still be seen to­day. Pro­jec­tor op­er­a­tors were skilled in the minute tech­niques of mount­ing the mas­sive cel­lu­loid reels that had to be care­ful­ly mon­i­tored. Some­times, af­ter many screen­ings, the reels would burst sud­den­ly and then the hap­less pro­jec­tion­ist would have to bar­ri­cade him­self from a bay­ing crowd or else beat a hasty re­treat.

The out­ly­ing coun­try dis­tricts were served by a tent out­fit known as Teelucks­ingh's Trav­el­ling Cin­e­ma, which was owned by politi­cian Sar­ran Teelucks­ingh. He brought the mag­ic of the sil­ver screen in­to the dark rur­al nights. For a cou­ple weeks in ad­vance of the tent cin­e­ma's ar­rival, hand­bills would be dis­trib­uted in the com­mu­ni­ty and colour­ful posters bear­ing the names of the stars and star­lets of Hol­ly­wood's gold­en era would be past­ed in all the shops where they could not es­cape no­tice. This facet of old Trinidad found recog­ni­tion in the short sto­ry A Day in the Coun­try by Ismith Khan and Michael An­tho­ny's The Year in San Fer­nan­do.