From Bioscope to Cinema

Denzil Jayasinghe

5 min read

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Just now

There was a time — in my boyhood of the sixties — when films did not trouble themselves with realism. They existed elsewhere, in a dimension faintly superior to our own, and we entered the cinema as one might enter a shrine: subdued, expectant, prepared to be altered.

The theatre was part of the enchantment. Fluorescent bulbs trembled in their sockets, unsure of their allegiance to light or darkness. A dusty shaft from the projector travelled across the hall and struck the lime-washed wall, its cracks and blisters briefly dignified, as though they marked territories on some ancient chart. We watched the beam as much as the screen; it was proof that something invisible had been set in motion.

Before the main picture, a disembodied voice would rise — clipped, colonial, faintly paternal — recounting British football tournaments. It was an inheritance we had not chosen. The players, pale and grainy, ran across distant fields that bore no resemblance to ours. We did not always understand the rules; allegiance was abstract. Yet the ritual steadied us. The hum of the projector, the cough of a stranger, the warm, metallic smell of celluloid — these were preparations of the spirit. When the feature finally began, disbelief slackened without resistance. For a few hours, our small town withdrew from importance.

My father’s experience had been more elemental.

In the nineteen-fifties, films were still called bioscope. The word carried astonishment within it. One heard that the people inside the white cloth moved — that they gestured, sang, galloped on horses, drove motorcars — and yet remained confined to a sheet. The marvel was not story but motion.

The bioscope arrived in Dalugama, at the Myna camp near his home. The Myna Theatre was an improvised structure of timber posts and corrugated tin, its benches worn smooth by the expectancy of bodies. “Theatre” was perhaps too ambitious a name, but when the lamps dimmed, it justified itself.

There he encountered Sinhala and Hindi stars who seemed to descend from a more vivid order of existence. Rukmani Devi possessed a composed radiance. Premnath with his sharp edged moustache moved with muscular assurance. Nargis and Dilip Kumar enacted love and sorrow with operatic gravity. And Raj Kapoor — tramp, romantic, innocent — seemed fashioned for universal sympathy.

Years later, I would find their printed likenesses hidden among his belongings, folded carefully inside old instructional books — relics of youth, preserved without commentary.

For my father and the men beside him, the question was asked in earnest: How do they move? How do they sing? How can a horse gallop within a cloth and not tear through it?

It was not a foolish inquiry. It was metaphysical. It sought to understand how life could be captured and made to repeat itself.

By the time I sat in my own darkened halls, the mechanism no longer troubled us. We accepted the apparatus; we trusted the trick. But for him, in that flickering Myna Theatre in Dalugama, cinema was evidence that the world extended beyond explanation — that somewhere beyond the boundaries of his village, movement itself could be imprisoned, illuminated, and returned again like a controlled miracle.

— —

There was a time — in my boyhood of the sixties — when films did not trouble themselves with realism. They existed elsewhere, in a dimension faintly superior to our own, and we entered the cinema as one might enter a shrine: subdued, expectant, prepared to be altered.

The theatre was part of the enchantment. Fluorescent bulbs trembled in their sockets, unsure of their allegiance to light or darkness. A dusty shaft from the projector travelled across the hall and struck the lime-washed wall, its cracks and blisters briefly dignified, as though they marked territories on some ancient chart. We watched the beam as much as the screen; it was proof that something invisible had been set in motion.

Before the main picture, a disembodied voice would rise — clipped, colonial, faintly paternal — recounting British football tournaments. It was an inheritance we had not chosen. The players, pale and grainy, ran across distant fields that bore no resemblance to ours. We did not always understand the rules; allegiance was abstract. Yet the ritual steadied us. The hum of the projector, the cough of a stranger, the warm, metallic smell of celluloid — these were preparations of the spirit. When the feature finally began, disbelief slackened without resistance. For a few hours, our small town withdrew from importance.

My father’s experience had been more elemental.

In the nineteen-fifties, films were still called bioscope. The word carried astonishment within it. One heard that the people inside the white cloth moved — that they gestured, sang, galloped on horses, drove motorcars — and yet remained confined to a sheet. The marvel was not story but motion.

The bioscope arrived in Dalugama, at the Myna camp near his home. The Myna Theatre was an improvised structure of timber posts and corrugated tin, its benches worn smooth by the expectancy of bodies. “Theatre” was perhaps too ambitious a name, but when the lamps dimmed, it justified itself.

There he encountered Sinhala and Hindi stars who seemed to descend from a more vivid order of existence. Rukmani Devi possessed a composed radiance. Premnath with his sharp edged moustache moved with muscular assurance. Nargis and Dilip Kumar enacted love and sorrow with operatic gravity. And Raj Kapoor — tramp, romantic, innocent — seemed fashioned for universal sympathy.

Years later, I would find their printed likenesses hidden among his belongings, folded carefully inside old instructional books — relics of youth, preserved without commentary.

For my father and the men beside him, the question was asked in earnest: How do they move? How do they sing? How can a horse gallop within a cloth and not tear through it?

It was not a foolish inquiry. It was metaphysical. It sought to understand how life could be captured and made to repeat itself.

By the time I sat in my own darkened halls, the mechanism no longer troubled us. We accepted the apparatus; we trusted the trick. But for him, in that flickering Myna Theatre in Dalugama, cinema was evidence that the world extended beyond explanation — that somewhere beyond the boundaries of his village, movement itself could be imprisoned, illuminated, and returned again like a controlled miracle.