Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry by Tejaswini Ganti Page A
Authors: Tejaswini Ganti
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Ghai-Puri asserted that multiplexes were “encouraging a young breed of filmmakers to make interesting, intellectual films, which were capturing a certain audience,” who were “more sophisticated” than before (Ghai-Puri, interview, May 2006). Akin to the advent of video and satellite television in earlier periods, the arrival and expansion of multiplex theaters have generated considerable discourse by the Hindi film industry, as well as the print and broadcast media, about audiences, aesthetic standards, and cinematic idioms. Much of this discourse is marked by a strong rhetoric of change, progress, and modernization, whether it is addressing the materiality and phenomenology of cinema-going or the symbolic and aesthetic dimensions of film production. Similar to the discussions about video and satellite, the one about multiplexes also serves as a commentary about class, taste, consumption, and filmmaker subjectivity.
While multiplexes have transformed the material conditions and experience of seeing a movie in a theater in India and produced new audience imaginaries within the Hindi film industry, the feature most commented upon by journalists and filmmakers has to do with the engendering of a new type of cinema. Around 2003, the English-language press in India started to discuss the emergence and economic viability of what was initially termed “niche cinema,” which soon got labeled “multiplex cinema,” and attributed a causal relationship between the sites of film exhibition and cinematic practice. Initially used to describe films made with smaller budgets and lesser-known actors, about themes that were characterized as “off-beat” and “different” from a purported Bollywood norm, understood to appeal only to English-educated, affluent, urban audiences, the definitions and descriptions of “multiplex cinema” have been as much about audiences and viewing practices as they have been about aesthetic properties and narrative content.
In the early days of the multiplex in India, they were lauded for their implicit pedagogical function—frequently characterized in a developmentalist vein—of improving the cinematic tastes of the Indian viewer. By offering a range of non-mainstream cinematic choices, multiplexes were cited as the catalyst for reforming the average Indian taste in film, which had been stunted for so long by the formulaic fare produced by the Bombay film industry. For example, in the article, “The Multiplex Effect,” which appeared in the Indian Express , the director of the first multiplex in the northern Indian city of Kanpur, Shailesh Gupta, discussed how, when his theater first opened, “Hindi had a virtual monopoly on the minds of the audience,” and that there was little interest in any other cinema, even big-budget Hollywood films. Eight months later, however, due to his programming decisions to screen a variety of films, patronage of an English-language film like Bend It Like Beckham brought in decent business. Gupta was willing to experiment with his programming, even if it did not garner huge returns, for he assigned himself the responsibility of inculcating more sophisticated tastes for his patrons: “I am keen to help in the maturing process of the Kanpur film-goer” (“The Multiplex Effect” 2003).
Similar to the discussion about video, front-benchers, and the trashy ’80s, the idea of multiplex cinema is premised on the correlation between content, audience, and conditions of viewing. Multiplexes, with their smaller seating capacities and much higher ticket prices—which translates into more elite audiences—were hailed by a number of filmmakers, associated with the parallel cinema movement of the 1970s and ’80s, as making cinematic risk-taking commercially viable. In the abovementioned article, veteran filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan, whose films are in Malayalam and are consistently categorized as “art” or noncommercial, asserted, “Audiences and exhibitors
While multiplexes have transformed the material conditions and experience of seeing a movie in a theater in India and produced new audience imaginaries within the Hindi film industry, the feature most commented upon by journalists and filmmakers has to do with the engendering of a new type of cinema. Around 2003, the English-language press in India started to discuss the emergence and economic viability of what was initially termed “niche cinema,” which soon got labeled “multiplex cinema,” and attributed a causal relationship between the sites of film exhibition and cinematic practice. Initially used to describe films made with smaller budgets and lesser-known actors, about themes that were characterized as “off-beat” and “different” from a purported Bollywood norm, understood to appeal only to English-educated, affluent, urban audiences, the definitions and descriptions of “multiplex cinema” have been as much about audiences and viewing practices as they have been about aesthetic properties and narrative content.
In the early days of the multiplex in India, they were lauded for their implicit pedagogical function—frequently characterized in a developmentalist vein—of improving the cinematic tastes of the Indian viewer. By offering a range of non-mainstream cinematic choices, multiplexes were cited as the catalyst for reforming the average Indian taste in film, which had been stunted for so long by the formulaic fare produced by the Bombay film industry. For example, in the article, “The Multiplex Effect,” which appeared in the Indian Express , the director of the first multiplex in the northern Indian city of Kanpur, Shailesh Gupta, discussed how, when his theater first opened, “Hindi had a virtual monopoly on the minds of the audience,” and that there was little interest in any other cinema, even big-budget Hollywood films. Eight months later, however, due to his programming decisions to screen a variety of films, patronage of an English-language film like Bend It Like Beckham brought in decent business. Gupta was willing to experiment with his programming, even if it did not garner huge returns, for he assigned himself the responsibility of inculcating more sophisticated tastes for his patrons: “I am keen to help in the maturing process of the Kanpur film-goer” (“The Multiplex Effect” 2003).
Similar to the discussion about video, front-benchers, and the trashy ’80s, the idea of multiplex cinema is premised on the correlation between content, audience, and conditions of viewing. Multiplexes, with their smaller seating capacities and much higher ticket prices—which translates into more elite audiences—were hailed by a number of filmmakers, associated with the parallel cinema movement of the 1970s and ’80s, as making cinematic risk-taking commercially viable. In the abovementioned article, veteran filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan, whose films are in Malayalam and are consistently categorized as “art” or noncommercial, asserted, “Audiences and exhibitors
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