A Member Remembers the Day Our Club Was Mistaken for a Cinema

In the autumn of 1974, an unfamiliar queue gathered outside the hall on Paltan Bazaar where our society held its Saturday screenings. A retired schoolteacher named Babul Chandra Bora, a member since the club's second year, kept a small diary of such incidents. His account of that September morning has become one of the most circulated stories among our older members — a tale of how a few handbills and an open gate convinced the neighbourhood that we had quietly turned ourselves into a picture palace.

What happened speaks to something many cinephiles recognise — the porous boundary between a film society and a public theatre. In Brisbane's Fortitude Valley, in Sydney's Paddington, and at the ACMI's home in Melbourne's Federation Square, the same eagerness that draws Australians to a festival matinee is what sent a hundred strangers to our door before noon. Babul's recollection gives us both a comic episode and a small history of how a club with serious intentions was, for one bright morning, mistaken for the very thing it had spent twelve years trying not to be.

The morning the handbills went out

The episode began, according to Babul's notes, on the preceding Wednesday. Our society had commissioned small notices for a retrospective of Japanese cinema, and the printer — an obliging neighbour named Ganesh Bhai — had delivered two hundred extra copies by mistake. Rather than discard them, our secretary distributed them to local tea stalls and bookshops. The handbills named the date, the venue, and the title of the first feature: a print of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai from the Calcutta film library.

What Ganesh Bhai had printed was the version of the poster used for our marquee. To an untrained eye it looked much like the board outside any heritage picture palace in Brisbane, or the placards that hung outside Sydney's Hayden Orpheum. A title, a time, a line about tickets — but nothing to mark the gathering as one for members only.

The queue that grew before lunch

By ten on the Saturday, a line had begun to form outside our modest doorway. Babul, arriving early to set up the celluloid, found forty people waiting. Some carried tiffin boxes; others leaned against the iron railing as if they knew the place. A man in a white shirt was handing out little paper numbers to those further down the street, in the manner of a ticketed queue at a Melbourne premiere.

Our club had no reserved seating, no refreshment counter, and no staff to manage a crowd. Admission for members was a rupee and a half, collected to cover the electric bill. To those outside, the whole arrangement still read as an old-fashioned movie house — the kind of fixture that survives in pockets of Australian suburbia, from the volunteer screens dotted through Sydney's inner west to the family-run projection rooms around Brisbane's bayside suburbs.

The moment at the threshold

When Babul opened the wooden door to admit the first arrivals, he was met with a polite demand for programmes and a request for "balcony seats, if available". Our hall was a single room with a raised platform at one end and folding chairs facing a bedsheet that doubled as a screen. The so-called projection booth was merely a small table at the back, where our projectionist, a soft-spoken former railway clerk named Hemanta Da, would set up the Czechoslovak Elmo.

The visitors were not easily dissuaded. One elderly gentleman produced a walking stick and asked whether the matinee would clash with the evening screening. He had walked from the railway colony because his nephew told him our society ran "complete days of cinema, just like the Astor in Melbourne". Babul had to explain that there was to be one film, the chairs were free for whoever arrived first, and that the only programme was a stencilled sheet pinned to the wall.

The stranger with the tiffin carrier

Among those who entered, one figure has lingered longest in club memory. A middle-aged woman carrying a three-tiered stainless-steel lunch carrier asked Ila Baideo, the secretary's wife, whether she might leave her snacks in a "cloakroom" until the interval. The interval — a foreign concept in our club's programming — was explained as kindly as possible, and she was invited to keep the carrier beneath her chair. She watched the whole of Seven Samurai without once opening it.

This kind of patient persistence, Babul wrote, was exactly what had built Indian cine culture in small towns and big cities alike. He compared her to the loyal subscribers of Melbourne's Palace Cinema who once walked through rain to keep a treasured single-screen venue alive. The strangers were not freeloaders; they were devotees of the moving image, willing to follow a handbill through unknown territory in pursuit of a shared experience.

The afternoon call from the local hall owner

Around mid-afternoon, the manager of a commercial hall a few streets away telephoned our president. He had spent the morning turning away people with tickets for his Saturday matinee, since his establishment was not, in fact, running Seven Samurai. Could the society, he asked with considerable dryness, redirect its printing budget away from his name? Our president — a retired judge fond of sardonic replies — suggested the manager might post his own handbills.

The call is recorded in the diary because it crystallised something the club had long suspected: in the city's cultural life there was an unmet appetite for serious cinema that no existing picture palace was satisfying. The same appetite, our archives suggest, keeps small screening rooms busy from Adelaide's Mercury to the volunteer forums attached to Melbourne's ACMI, where audiences continue to turn up in numbers greater than the venues were designed for.

An echo in other screening rooms

Word of the morning's mix-up travelled faster than the club had anticipated. By the following week, Babul had received letters from cine societies in Shillong, Dibrugarh, and Silchar describing comparable situations. A film circle in Jorhat had once been turned away from its own venue by a wedding party that had booked the space through a clerical error. Similar misunderstandings, he observed, are not confined to the northeast of India.

The volunteer-run picture palace movement in Australia — from the Saturday retrospectives staged inside Brisbane's Powerhouse to the busy film forums attached to Melbourne's ACMI — has long wrestled with the slipperiness of the word cinema. Both communities have learned that the language of a movie house — marquee, ticket, snacks, queue — travels further than the formal distinction between a paying customer and a member of a film society. Once spoken, it brings with it all the expectations of an evening out.

What the episode taught the committee

That evening, after Seven Samurai had finished and the borrowed Elmo had been wound down, the committee gathered for an impromptu meeting. The motion, recorded in pen on the back of an old programme, was to print future notices only in the local Assamese papers and never, under any circumstances, at Ganesh Bhai's press. A second motion proposed a small wooden sign above the doorway declaring plainly that the building was a registered film society and not a commercial theatre. Both passed unanimously; the sign, painted by a member's nephew in 1975, still hangs above the entrance.

Looking back across five decades, the incident has become a gentle inside joke. It reminds us that the boundary between a club of cinephiles and a neighbourhood movie house was always thinner than most founders of such societies cared to admit — even before streaming made every living room a viewing room. The same confusions, we are told, have played out in Sydney's Surry Hills, in Melbourne's Carlton, and in Brisbane's West End, wherever a small group of film lovers has tried, against the odds, to keep the projector warm.

If this recollection stirs something in your own memory of late-night screenings and small clubs, we warmly invite you to explore the society's history — and perhaps to consider lending your own voice to a future memoir.