Hot Docs 2023: Scala

It’s almost impossible to imagine that Ananta Thitanat hasn’t seen Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn, the Taiwanese master’s acclaimed 2003 ghost story about an old theatre closing down with a final showing of King Hu’s wuxia epic, Dragon Inn. Thitanat’s slow cinema documentary Scala takes a cue from Tsai’s film in documenting the dismantling of the Scala theatre in Bangkok, the city’s last arthouse theatre and the final bastion of an erstwhile cinema culture. Now all that remains in Thailand are multiplexes, so the Scala’s destruction is the end of an era.

Thitanat, who lived in and around the theatre and its backrooms as a child when her father worked there, chronicles the painstaking and painful process of breaking down the cinema chair-by-chair, fixture-by-fixture. Composed almost entirely of static wide angles showing the former cinema employees dismantling the beloved theatre, Scala conjures a haunted atmosphere. It’s a ghost story as much as a documentary. The droning of fans and air conditioners provides the only soundtrack for the proceedings, a low thrum of dread that permeates echoing halls. Characters speak softly and intermittently. The editorial rhythm is languid, deliberate. Scala is the sort of movie some viewers would mistake for boring, but there’s a lot going on in the repetitious form and poignant content.

Ghosts of the past haunt the corridors of the Scala. Conversations between the workers—often involving the director herself from behind the camera—fixate on all the experiences they had in the cinema over the past several decades. They try to laugh off the cinema’s loss, but you can tell it meant a lot to them, and they’re left reeling. The theatre itself seems haunted by cinema’s past as well. An old poster of Schindler’s List languishes in a hallway, a half-broken Jar Jar Binks statue stands sentry in an office, a Batman Begins poster adorns a cupboard in an employee’s ramshackle living space in the basement. This was a monument to cinema, and a place of refuge for a certain kind of lost soul. Now, with its loss, and after the demolition of Bangkok’s last two other independent cinemas, the Lido and the Siam, over the past decade, Thai cinema culture will never be the same.

Thitanat’s documentary is a cinematic elegy and an elegy for a specific cinema. It’s also a film with almost sacred dimensions, much like Tsai’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Stray cats abound in the frame, wandering through corridors, appearing from beneath piles of scaffolding, watching the workers as they pull down curtains and remove ceiling fixtures. Throughout the world, cats are associated with the afterlife, and so it’s fitting that these stray felines are here to shepherd the Scala into its next life. What’s left in the end are the fragments of memories and the people who are now left scattered in the aftermath, as confused and abandoned as the political protesters that fill the streets of the capital just outside the old cinema’s walls.

8 out of 10

Scala (2022, Thailand)

Directed by Ananta Thitanat.