FilmIndia (May-Dec 1938)

FILMINDIA SLOW DEATH FOR CINEMA OPERATORS The lot of the thousands of Cinema operators working in India, throughout its thousand and odd theatres, is not very enviable. Our army of Cinema operators is steadily breaking down owing to the inhuman and excessive hours of work through which it has been going since the Cinema industry became a major industry in India. The usual hours of attendance for a city operator are from 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. — a continuous span of 10 hours. On Saturdays, Sundays and Holidays, when our theatres give a matinee show at 2-15 the operators have to attend from 1-30 p.m. to 2 a.m. — clean 121 hours at a stretch. In addition to this, some cinemas have Sunday morning shows, which add another 3 hours, making the operator's job a 15i hour labour in a 24 hour day. On other days, but a Sunday, there are private shows in the morning, arranged for producers, censors, trade or press. Almost every second day, the operators are called for these morning shows which last nearly 3 hours every time. Calculating all trials, matinees, special shows and the regular shows the city operators put in over 100 hours' work in a week — an average of over 14 hours a day. The average projection cabin in a city cinema has two employees — the operator and his assistant. The operator is the man in charge and his assistant is there to wind and rewind films and do other odd jobs under the chief. This assistant is usually an unpaid apprentice or if paid, he is very poorly paid. In some cinemas there are as many as four unpaid assistants who are all there to learn the work and all these men have to keep the full hours along with the head operator. The same story of long hours is repeated at smaller towns with only a slight variation in the time of the shows. 4 I May 1938 To ask human beings to work for fourteen hours continuously and most of the time standing is little short of a mediaeval torture. The payment that an operator gets for his job is not very tempting and there is no reason why he should not be subject to the protective regulations which are enforced in case of other city workers. The average projection cabin in our cinemas is not an ideal place for long hours of work. It is a small bit of space enclosed from all sides, and there is hardly any ventilation or fresh air allowed into the cabin. Most of the cinemas in the city are old constructions which have outlived their usefulness in modern times. Even without a visit one can well imagine what the projection cabins of these cinemas must be, when the auditoriums are ill-ventilated and stuffy places. Cinema owners in the city are making huge profits every month, and the very fact that they have to ply their trade till 1-30 in the morning shows that there are people enough to fill up the last shows. The Police authorities seem to have allowed the Indian Cinemas to observe their regulations in breach in the matter of the last shows which con^ elude at 1-30 a.m. The Cinemas are situated in the midst of crowded localities inhabited by office workers and to allow the cinemas to run the shows after midnight, amounts to denying to these city workers the rest and sleep which they so badly need. And the theatre operators are the last people to leave the theatres. They have to kill a little more time than the audiences to clean up the equipment and the cabin and close for the day. The authorities must do something about all this. The hours of the operators must be regulated and so must the hours of the show. When the Police authorities issue a license to a theatre, they should first decide upon enforcing all the conditions of the license or the harmless conditions may as well be removed form the license.