24 frames a second: The forgotten craft behind Bangladesh’s cinema halls

The year is 1998. The Titanic wave sweeping across the globe has finally reached the Bangladeshi shores. Even the thousand-plus-seater Madhumita Cinema Hall is struggling to accommodate the moviegoers assembled to watch the blockbuster. Every single show has been houseful for months.

While thousands of people were hooting and hollering outside, projectionist Jahid and his team had been operating tirelessly within the confines of the projection room for almost four months straight, hardly ever getting time to go home between their 12-hour shifts operating two German-made bulky steel behemoths of projectors.

Film projection, in those days, was a complex and tactile art. It was not simply about pressing a button. There were a hundred details to remember: how a print needed to be threaded through the machine depended entirely on its condition and format.

The purr of a celluloid strip moving through a projector is really 24 clicks a second, one each time the shutter closes so another frame can advance. Each frame must pause briefly in front of the light source, or the image on screen dissolves into a blur.

This is how the Lumiere brothers first projected film in 1895, and how audiences everywhere watched cinema for the next 104 years.

At the heart of the cinema experience

Modhumita, located near Motijheel's Shapla Chattar, remains one of the oldest anchors of the city's cinematic history. Established in 1967 by Mohammad Siraj Uddin, a businessman from Old Dhaka, the hall opened its doors on 1 December with the Hollywood blockbuster Cleopatra. It was built on 3 bigha of land, designed to entertain 1,221 viewers at a time — a premier destination for anyone seeking a window into the world of cinema.

Jahid Uddin came here in 1984 from Pirojpur, driven by a simple love for watching movies and the desire to show them to others. "Before starting at Modhumita, I got into this line of work at Ira Talkies in Pirojpur," Jahid said. "Then I learned the ins and outs of the craft here from my guru, Babu Bhai, who was the first projectionist of this hall."

"We used to collect films from the production houses and distributors; after signing the deal, they used to hand over the reels of the film, usually in my screening room," Jahid said. "Those reels used to come in huge boxes. Then I had to prepare them for the screening."

The projection machine not only projected the film reels; it also acted as the sound system. 

"Our machine was from Germany's renowned film projector manufacturing company Zeiss Ikon. We had both 35mm and 70mm film projectors. Depending on the film reel, we used to operate the machine," Jahid recalled.

Across town, in Farmgate and Tejgaon, Ananda and Chanda stand as one of Dhaka's most recognisable twin screen cinemas, run side by side under Alpana Chhayachitra Private Limited. Ananda was built with better ventilation, grander architecture and finer acoustics, aimed at middle-class families, courting couples and cinema lovers willing to pay more for star-studded premieres.

"Digital is easier but not as fun as the analogue one. When we used to operate analogue machines, it felt like we were doing something important. Now it doesn't feel the same."

Shohag, Projectionist, Ananda and Chanda Cinema Halls

Chanda was smaller and cheaper to run, built for student groups, day labourers and budget-conscious viewers, screening second-run blockbusters at a discount or lower-budget action films aimed at a livelier, mass market crowd.

Both halls still run daily. On Fridays there are five shows, from a ten o'clock morning show to one at nine at night, and on weekdays four, minus the morning slot. 

The first two shows are handled by one projectionist and the last two by another. Shohag has run the afternoon and evening shows here for years, over 20 years in the hall altogether, and has lived through the shift from analogue to digital himself. 

"Digital is easier but not as fun as the analogue one. When we used to operate analogue machines it felt like we were doing something important. Now it doesn't feel the same," Shohag said. 

How the analogue craft worked

The work was gruelling — so gruelling, in fact, that it was a two-person job. Films arrived from distributors in massive, heavy metal boxes. Inside were the reels, usually eight to 16 for a single feature. Jahid and his partner would divide them equally. "If I started the first reel, my partner would have the second one ready on the other machine. It went back and forth like that."

"The film must be loaded upside down and backwards," Jahid explains. This is because the projector's optical lens flips the light as it throws the image toward the screen. By feeding the film in wrong, the lens naturally corrects the orientation so the movie appears right-side up to the audience.

You could not look away from the machine. "We had to be there constantly so we didn't miss the end of a reel," he said. "There were marks at the start and end of each reel — small cues for the projectionist. You needed careful eyes to catch them, otherwise the screen would go dark. If we did our job well, the audience never even knew the reel had been changed."

The light was often generated by carbon arc lamps that burned with an intensity that could melt the film if it stopped moving for even a second. "Sometimes the reel would burn, tear or snap," Jahid said. "At times there was breakage or damage in the reels. If there was only damage in one or two frames, it would not matter much. But if the reel got torn, we had to attach that instantly with a solution called film cement," he explained.

They would scrape the emulsion layer off the edge with a razor blade, apply film cement — a chemical solvent that literally melted the plastic — and clamp the ends together. In a few seconds, the two pieces would fuse into one. It was a messy, high-pressure fix performed in the dark while a thousand people sat downstairs, unaware of the crisis.

"In the newer format, we had to just put heavy-duty polyester splicing tape across the seam. We would fold the tape over to secure both sides and use the splicer's built-in blades to punch clean sprocket holes through the tape."

This process, however, gave birth to an unfortunate byproduct: the infamous 'cut piece' culture — short strips of locally produced, uncertified celluloid pornography or extreme violence that projectionists surreptitiously spliced directly into the film reels — which began in the mid-1990s and peaked during the early to mid-2000s.

According to Shohag, some cinema halls, in the reel era, took advantage of the process of assembling prints. Producers, distributors and sometimes hall operators would supply separate reels or cut pieces to screen alongside the main film. 

"They would cut a scene from a 'cut piece' reel and put it in between the original scenes to keep the crowd excited," Shohag said. It was a manual, unauthorised process that required a projectionist with a razor and tape who knew exactly where to make the cut.

The missing colours

The reward for the laborious manual projection was a quality of light that digital has not quite replicated. 

Jahid insists that the colours in 35mm and 70mm reels were far more natural. 

"The exact colour which we see upfront used to come in the films. You would never find that colour anywhere. At that time there were separate colour labs where they did the colouring work, and now it is done on a computer easily. The colour captured in film and projected from the carbon machine was so beautiful, you would not believe it unless you saw," he said.

What digital changed

The shift to digital in Bangladesh's cinema halls did not happen all at once. It crept in gradually, driven less by choice than by necessity, as film stock became harder to source, processing labs closed, and distributors increasingly began delivering content on hard drives instead of reels.

Digital projectors had by then become dramatically more capable — brighter, sharper and, by most measures, able to match 35mm for detail. Some are now compact enough to be mounted on a cinema wall and switched on with an iPad by staff who have never set foot inside a projection booth.

"Things are not the same anymore," Jahid said. "Now we sit almost idly. Because there is not enough film, enough audience. And on top of that, the system has also changed. The digital projector machines never feel the same. It's just playing the film from a cloud server. You don't need to put much effort into this. Back then, it required adjusting sounds and focus constantly while screening films. Now nobody bothers to do so. We just play it from the server, and it keeps playing automatically."

He still tends to the old analogue machine, keeping it clean and running it every now and then just so it stays functional. "First DVD, then phone and now multiplex screens have stolen our business," he said. 

"But the main reason is the scarcity of films produced each year. One or two films of Shakib Khan can never fill the gap. Directors these days have failed to produce the charm classic films had. So it doesn't feel the same when we project films."

Shohag describes a similar sentiment. "When we used to operate analogue machines, it felt like we were doing something important. Now it doesn't feel the same. I operate in both Ananda and Chanda cinema halls at the same time, because I just have to press the button to play it, and once I have adjusted everything, I don't need to worry much about the screening now."

That ease came at a cost. The biggest disadvantage of the digital system is how little room it leaves for troubleshooting. When something goes wrong mid-screening, an analogue projectionist could make a quick fix to keep the show moving. 

A digital issue, by contrast, usually means the screening simply stops until someone with the right technical access can step in, and there is rarely a quick workaround.