Haubitz + Zoche “Hybrid Modernism: Movie Theatres in South India”

In period from 1950s to the 1970s, a large number of cinemas were built in both the urban and rural areas of South India. The buildings display an unconventional mix of local building styles and Western influences. The colourful facades, suggestive and theatrical sets, provide a foretaste of the cinematic experience in the hall itself, in which extravagant shapes and ornamentation are continued and put the viewer in the right mood for the cineastic world before the screening itself. On three journeys to India between 2010 and 2014, Sabine Haubitz and Stefanie Zoche documented these buildings, whose architectural language can be described as a hybrid modernism. Their photographs bear witness to a rich cinematic culture that has since vanished in Europe and America, ant that soon be supplanted by multiplex cinemas in India as well.