Thailand’s Movie Theatres: Relics, Ruins and the Romance of Escape
Philip Jablon
River Books: 2019
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In my youth, in Butterworth, Malaysia, the sprawling air-force base contained a classic, old-fashioned theatre that made watching Saturday afternoon movies a timeless delight. The joy of watching movies in old theatres has never left me, from my university days frequenting the venerable Valhalla Cinema in Melbourne to my more recent visits to the splendid Capri Theatre in Adelaide, with its Wurlitzer organ.

In January 1997, in the northern Myanmar town of Hsipaw, I entered the art deco shell of the Sein Myit Tar Cinema and wondered what movies were showing amid a civil war and a thriving drug trade that had ravaged that part of the world for decades. The cinema’s still there today, behind the flashy exterior of an Apex Bank branch. Later, when living on the Thailand–Myanmar border, I became equally obsessed with the Mae Sot Rama, in whose gutted shadow I worked at the owner’s T-Corner cafe. I often speculated what movies the Wiang Mai theatre in somnolent Mae Sariang had once screened, before it was unjustly transformed into a shop selling propane tanks.

It’s these romantic, nostalgic memories of an aesthetic experience, as much as of the movies themselves, that are the elixir of Philip Jablon’s sumptuous book on Thailand’s lost movie theatres. Jablon’s journey into the history of Thai cinema began in late 2007, when he discovered the secluded, broken grandeur of the Tippanetr theatre down a quiet side street in Chiang Mai. The book intersperses a history of Thailand’s cinema culture with profiles of specific theatres, which at one count was more than 700 nationwide. Only three still operate, including the Sala Chalerm Krung (Royal Theatre) in Bangkok.

• Tags: David Scott Mathieson, Issue 18, Philip Jablon, Thailand