Transient Spaces and Places: Inside an 80s Cinema Hall in Lahore

Abstract

The space of cinema in Pakistan is a tense, fraught, constantly shifting territory. It has often come under direct attack for being a corrupting Westernizing influence upon society. It has also been made vulnerable as part of a larger scheme of privatization of public and semi-public spaces, and increasing forms of capitalist globalization.

I have been curious about the cinema theater as a site for reception of cinematic content as well as a negotiated space of classed, ethnic and gendered relations. In this extract from a conversational interview, I chat with a Lahori cinemagoer about his memories of cinemagoing in the 1980s. It was a chance to rediscover the city that I grew up in, but in a different time and through someone else’s memories. We talk about his navigation and knowledge of the city’s infrastructure, its possibilities and its limits, all the while locating cinema at the heart of his transgressions under Zia’s military dictatorship