House full: Pakistani film industry and cinemas began experiencing a creative and financial peak in the late 1960s; a high that would last till about 1979, before starting to patter out in the 1980s and hitting rock bottom a decade later.
There were a number of reasons for the rapid fall of the industry and the consequential closing down of numerous cinemas.
Two of the leading reasons were the brutal censorship policies of the reactionary Ziaul Haq dictatorship in the 1980s, and the arrival of the VCR.
As Zia’s so-called ‘Islamisation’ process began stuffing public space and collective socialising spots with moral policing and restrictions, the people took their entertainment indoors.
Cinemas were hit the worst by this as not only the ‘respectable’ audiences stopped frequenting cinemas; the Pakistani film industry too began to fall apart.
‘Illegal’ video shops renting Indian films and porn (allowed to openly operate after bribing the police) sprang up and cinemas began to be torn down by their owners and turned into gaudy shopping malls.
For example, in Sindh alone there were over 600 cinemas between 1969 and 1980, but only a few hundred remained by 1985.
Similarly, the Pakistani film industry used to generate an average of 20 Urdu films a year in the 1970s, but by the late 1980s, it was struggling to come out with even five a year.
The above photo was taken in 1969 outside Karachi’s famous Nishat Cinema. It was also one of the first cinemas to introduce in-house air-conditioning in cinemas in Pakistan. The picture shows a crowd of cine-goers gathered outside the already packed cinema waiting their turn to see the premiere of a Pakistani war flick, ‘
Qasam uss waqt ki.’
Nishat survived the thorny Zia years, the VCR invasion and the local film industry’s collapse.
In fact Nishat still stands, reeking out a survival by running latest Indian and Hollywood films.