The movie theatre of my childhood does not exist anymore. No Apaches are riding on horses there anymore, no comedians of the moving image are eliciting smiles or tears from the most wholehearted audience of all - the kids. No children's laughter is heard there anymore and no children's eyes are wide-open to embrace the drama of love and death, of life and loneliness, of desire and fear, of freedom and repression, of daringness and cowardliness, of firmness and betrayal on the big screen of a Sunday afternoon or Saturday evening cinema show. We never stepped out of the magic globe of the myths, which reveal the life of man on earth, unchanged.
On Sunday afternoons, my younger sister and I rode there on our bicycles. We bought a ticket each for 1.50 German Marks. And later, after the screening and lightyears of dramatic emotions in the Wild West, we left the cinema riding home on our horses - of course as Apaches and not cowboys or soldiers, because we were always solidly united with the righteous and the oppressed and unjustifiably ill-treated; as we still are till today.
This world of our magic globe, unfolding on the screen in the darkness of the auditorium, does not exist anymore. Its innards, its heart and brain and lungs and vocal cords and lacrymal glands were destroyed, smashed, ripped out. The magic globe was broken. The radiating, moving images of light and darkness did not return. An alien ghost moved in and possessed the corpse. The place was turned into one more supermarket. Faithful to the blown-out movie theatre, I stubbornly never entered it.
Nothing we can buy at a supermarket will remain. The powerful moments of the screen - equal to those of our lives - , burned into our memory by the light of a film projector, will remain until we die; and maybe even beyond.
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Fred Kelemen, May 3 2014

(Published in:
"ONCE UPON A CELLULOID PLANET : WHERE CINEMA RULED - Hearts & Houses of Films in Thailand"
by Sonthaya Subyen and Morimart Raden-Ahmad, Filmvirus, Bangkok/Thailand October 2014)
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