He did odd jobs at a theatre before graduating to projection assistant. In 1973, he applied for a licence to become an operator. It was a demanding examination, involving a theory exam and a practical test. The law, even today, mandates that a cinema screen can only be run by a licensed operator. His work began with getting the reels of the film ready in sequence. A standard Indian feature film would run to 10-12 reels, sometimes more. Each reel held up to 2,000 feet of film, clocking roughly 15-20 minutes of runtime.

At the time, most theatres used a two-projector setup. First, the film reel would be threaded through the rollers and sprockets of one projector. The machine would whir to life with a crackle and whoosh when the carbon-arc lamp was switched on, bathing the screen in the light of the moving picture. As the film rolled, the strip would move from the feed reel on top to the take-up reel below.

The operator kept an eye on the screen through the porthole, the tiny glass window in the projection booth. A little before the end of the reel, a black dot would flash on the corner of the screen for exactly four frames and for a fraction of a second. This was his cue to fire up the second projector, which would already be wound up with the second reel. Another cue mark would flash just before the first reel ran out—this was the signal to switch. The projectionist’s art was in timing this move to perfection. The audience should not have noticed anything.

“If the changeover is done poorly,” Hari told me, “whole scenes can end up getting chopped off.” The smooth purr of the second reel meant that it was time to remove the spent reel from the first projector and load it with the next one. This is how the dance continued, back and forth, until the end of the film.

In India, the digital revolution did not wait for the DCI. Digital projection first appeared in theatres in India around 2003, spearheaded by Adlabs Entertainment in collaboration with director Subhash Ghai’s company, Mukta Arts. Given the picture quality limitations of the technology they employed, Adlabs initially focused the project on smaller towns and cities. The first installations were completed in Trimurti theatre in Sangola and Bharat Cinemas in Mangalwedha, both in Maharashtra’s Solapur district.

In December 2003, Namrata Joshi reported for Outlook magazine from another unlikely outpost of Bollywood’s digital revolution: the town of Hathras in Uttar Pradesh. In the dilapidated Prakash Talkies, a “small laptop stores images as files and pops them onto a dirty, dusty screen,” while the “giant 35mm Zenith project almost looks like a relic.” Outside, a poster advertised: “Nayi computer machine dwara dekhiye Gangaajal!” See Gangaajal through the new computer machine! Although Adlabs had ambitious plans at the time—they intended to retrofit 1,500 screens by 2007—this venture didn’t quite take off.

The baton was picked up again in 2005, when Chennai-based Qube Cinema Technologies and Mumbai-based UFO Moviez separately rolled out digital distribution and exhibition apparatus. Qube, founded in 1992 by Jayendra Panchapakesan and Senthil Kumar, was already in the thick of India’s digital cinema transition. It provided the technology for the first ever digitally-edited film in India, Kamal Hassan’s Mahanadhi, released in 1994. ^[4] Qube was also the Indian licensee for DTS, the digital surround sound system that became ubiquitous in South India in the second half of the 1990s.

UFO Moviez’s digital projectors were of 1.3K resolution, as opposed to the DCI standard of 2K. UFO used their proprietary technology to transmit the digital prints via satellite—the low resolution meant that satellite bandwidth was sufficient—and, in the process, became the global pioneers of film distribution via satellite. Qube distributed films on hard disk, also at the 1.3K resolution. Both companies installed servers and projectors in theatres, and even oversaw the digital mastering of the film print.

Producers and filmmakers started to warm to this new technology. The convenience and cost savings more than made up for the comparatively inferior quality of the projection. A 400-foot roll of Kodak 35mm film today, for instance, costs ₹16,000 plus taxes. It provides roughly four-and-a-half minutes of shooting time. Translate this to a two-hour feature film, accounting for retakes, and you’re likely to need ₹50 lakh worth of shooting film. Distributing it would cost about ₹5 lakh per print, and that’s without factoring in the costs of processing and scanning.

If this film was released with 100 prints, each of them would have to be transported in heavy aluminium trunks to various parts of the country. Once the film finished its run, all but one or two archive copies would be trashed. The economics dictated that the number of prints was limited by the producer’s budget and risk appetite. So film releases would be staggered, premiering first in the big cities and towns: the “A” centres. Then, they’d move to the smaller towns, and finally to the smallest towns and villages, the “C” centres. This also meant that pirated videotapes and, later, DVDs of the film would reach the smaller centres before the official theatrical release. ^[5] The advent of cable television in the 1990s meant that local cable operators could broadcast the pirated copy of a new film to thousands of people.

Digital distribution solved these problems to a large extent. Now, producers could have wide and simultaneous releases in lavish large-screen formats without spending a lot of money. The age of piracy wasn’t over, but its first run was.

The average film projector cost under ₹5 lakh at the time. With good care and maintenance, the sturdy electro-mechanical devices could be expected to run reliably for decades. Of a range of manufacturers including Photophone, Westrex and Kinoton, only Christie has managed to survive the transition in India. These days, it also makes DCI-compliant digital projectors, having licensed the technology from the US company Texas Instruments. The others have wound up or exited the country. 

DCI-compliant projectors are imported and prohibitively expensive, costing upwards of ₹50 lakh. The e-Cinema ones come in at under ₹30 lakh, still a substantial outlay for a non-multiplex theatre owner. These numbers highlight how the cost benefit of the transition accrued mainly to the producers, while exhibitors have had to shell out a great deal more than they used to.

Hollywood found a way to address this producer-exhibitor imbalance: producers subsidised the exhibitor’s investment in the technology by paying out a Virtual Print Fee (VPF) for each release. This is not how it’s played out in India, where many theatre owners, particularly single screen proprietors, don’t have the financial muscle to put down a ₹30-60 lakh investment for a digital projector. Instead, they end up leasing the system from Qube or UFO, who stand to gain in two ways: they get to keep the VPF from the producers, and the revenue from the advertising that is screened alongside a film. ^[6]

Photographic film has already become an old medium for a young art form. Compared to music, literature or theatre, cinema was born yesterday. As recently as a decade ago, most people who worked in cinema would have physically handled celluloid; the sight, smell and feel of film would have been an integral part of their working lives.

In 2012, American film historian Haden Guest wrote that “something important” was lost with the removal of the cue marks. Cue marks were symbolic of the art of the projectionist, “those showmen and women whose interpretation of aspect ratio, frame rate, sound level, intermissions, subtitles” brought shades of variations to films.

Film prints elevated the projectionist to the level of a craftsman. Hari laughed when I asked if projectionists miss working with film. “Actually the current projectionists have no idea how to operate the old projectors at all,” he said. “If you give them a reel, they’ll probably drop it, and all the film will come unspooled.”

Filmmakers often speak about the romance of film, and some have tried to put their money where their mouth is. Director Christopher Nolan, for instance, does a lot of shooting on celluloid. In 2018, when he flew down to Mumbai to announce a collaboration between production solutions company Filmlab and Kodak, he participated in events to encourage Indian producers and directors to do more of their shooting on film.

It hasn’t quite panned out that way. “People here are struggling to survive. They don’t have enough money to spare in the theatres. Are we going to preach the greatness of celluloid to them?” renowned cinematographer Rajeev Ravi told The Hindu at the time. “Only a small section of people, a privileged few, still hold nostalgia for celluloid.”

Whether it’s vinyl records or shooting photographs on film, analogue formats are now mostly indulgences that serve as markers of taste. They are often dismissed as affectations by those more directly concerned with the economics of art. A vinyl record costs a minimum of ₹1,500. A roll of Kodak Gold photographic film—with 36 exposures—retails for ₹600. Shooting and distributing an entire movie on film, however, is an indulgence on a millionaire scale.

The scant demand is visible in the number of places supplying and processing film. Raju Shah of Filmlab, one of the last of its kind in India, told me that only two or three independent movies shot on film (on the smaller, cheaper 16mm format) processed in his lab are currently in post-production. When it comes to distribution and exhibition, even these will have to convert to digital.

I've often wondered how all of this plays out outside the cinephile community. The regular movie-goer, far from having strong feelings about format, probably didn't even realise how and when this transition took place, unless they noticed a neighbourhood theatre advertising their leap into the digital age.

In the Fall 2012 issue of Cineaste magazine, Grover Crisp, executive vice-president of restoration at Sony Pictures, brought up a Canadian study in which the audience was shown movies in both film and digital formats. Crisp said the audience was told which was which and then asked which they liked better. “In every test, the audience chose the digital version. Then, someone decided to make a switch and told the audience that the print was the digital version and vice versa. At that point, the audience said they preferred the print, which they thought was the digital.”