KOCHI: The 1988 Italian film Cinema Paradiso has shown how a community is emotionally attached to a movie house. The story of Sridar Cinemas in Kochi, which enjoyed a cult status among moviebuffs for long, is no different.
The theatre which entertained generations of moviegoers with the best of English films, now screens movies from Bollywood and Hollywood.
Ramkumar is an avid cinephile and a treasure trove of information about movies. He has preserved what he calls ‘movie cards’, a rare souvenir which film students and film historians would be ready to die for.
These cards feature a variety of film classics of various genres which were released in Sridar Cinemas. Alan J Pakula’s paranoid thriller Klute (1971), Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda’s counter-culture cult film Easy Rider(1969), Clint Eastwood’s For a Few Dollars More (1965), Next Stop Greenwich Village(1976) and the revisionist Western Soldier Blue(1970) are some of the classics featured in these cards.
Ramkumar said newspapers were the only form of advertisement at that time through which the movie goers were able to know about the movies playing in Sridar. Though posters were still in vogue, the artists often failed to give the artworks on time. The situation was difficult and when the posters did not arrive they were forced to resort to some desperate measures. “When we play a cowboy movie and if the posters did not arrive on time, we used to place a cut out of Clint Eastwood. Clint was so synonymous with the Westerns that he was featured in the poster of every cowboy movie, even in those films which he was not in,” Ramkumar said. The movie post cards were born because of this necessity.
“We introduced the system of movie cards as a way of cost-free advertisement. The theatre was established in 1964 and we had a devout group of viewers who regularly attended the movie screenings. Any person who wanted to know about the the screenings could subscribe to our printed movie cards, which had all the details.
We used to keep an address book of all the subscribers,” Ramkumar said. The post cards were an instant hit among the followers of the ‘Sridar Cult’ and it continued to exist till 1975.
From 1964 to 2003, 99 per cent of the movies released were in English language. After 2003 the fan base for English movies gradually declined. And it was not possible to survive showing only English movies, he said. “After 2003, we started showing Bollywood movies as they lured in more spectators and it was profitable,” he said.
But Sridar had always been known and loved for its foreign movies. And the post cards are sure to offer the movie buffs an unforgettable time travel ride back to that glorious era.
