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Films have been made in India for Indians since the earliest days of motion pictures. Today the country is one of the largest producers of movies in the world. There has been a national archive to conserve Indian films since 1964. A private foundation and national museum dedicated to preserving cinema and its history opened in the last decade. However, there are few efforts to save India’s remaining single screens. These cinemas, like those around the world, have been shuttered or demolished at an alarming rate since the 1970s. The tangible heritage of India’s diverse modern architectures and intangible heritage of intertwined mores, cultures, and nation-state are disappearing with them. Single screens were once the only places where Indians of different castes, classes, genders, and religions came together under one roof. Ecosystems of sociality and commerce thrived in and around them.  Although symbols of family, community, and national pride, they are also sites of conflict and violence over culture, religion, inclusion, and sexuality. What follows is not just a lament for single-screen cinemas but an exploration of their complex pasts, new avatars, and lessons for heritage and reinvention in India and beyond. 

Today, Clarence Stein is remembered as an architect and planner of social housing and new towns for the motor age.  Little known and unstudied are Stein’s planning and advocacy for movie theatres as community architectures at:  Hillside Homes; New Deal greenbelt towns; new town for World War II refinery workers; and Chandigarh’s first master plan. As producer of The City, a documentary about housing, Stein believed in the power of film to educate.  These projects drew on exceptional entrée to the film industry through his wife Aline MacMahon (stage and film actress) and brother-in-law Arthur L. Mayer (studio executive and showman). When community efforts to repurpose and reimagine struggling movie theatres are growing here and abroad, Stein’s work bears revisiting as an unexplored dimension of his modernity and modernism. Using his archives and writings, the promise and reality of cinemas as community architectures are recovered and scrutinized here.