The film exhibition sector in India belongs to the disorganized industry. And it also goes without saying that the exhibition of films in India is the most under-studied area in the Indian cinema. The form of exhibition in India fueled by the liberalization of the economy has experienced a major change over the last decade. This change is seen in the rapid mushrooming of multiplexes throughout the major metros and suburbs in India. The content and the form of films are also getting influenced by this emerging trend of multiplexes in India. In this dissertation I have tried to connect various socio-economic and political events which helped the multiplexes to grow so rapidly in the last few years. I have also discussed about the logic behind multiplexes being constructed inside shopping malls, their structures and interiors and how all these appeal to the Indians. The stories or content of the films are also changing with the form of exhibition in India. This dissertation also tries to find an answer behind this. To sum it up, this dissertation is an account of new form of exhibition of films in India and how is this having an effect on the Indian film industry.
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During the decade of its existence in India, the multiplex cinema has been very much a sign of the times – both a symptom and a symbol of new social values. Indicative of a consistent push to create a ‘globalised’ consuming middle class and a new urban environment, multiplex theatres have thus become key sites in the long-running struggle over cultural legitimacy and the right to public space in Indian cities. This book provides the reader with a comprehensive account of the new leisure infrastructure arising at the intersection between contemporary trends in cultural practice and the spatial politics that are reshaping the cities of India. Exploring the significance, and convergence, of economic liberalisation, urban redevelopment and the media explosion in India, the book demonstrates an innovative approach towards the cultural and political economy of leisure in a complex and rapidly-changing society. Key arguments are supported by up-to-date and substantive field research in several major metros and second tier cities across India. Accordingly, this book employs analytical frameworks from Media and Cultural Studies, and from Urban Geography and Development Studies in a wide-ranging examination of the multiplex phenomenon. "This is a pioneering attempt to situate the multiplex not merely as a space of film exhibition, but a space that becomes the arbiter of cultural economy and aesthetic evaluations. Locating it within the larger debates on changing Indian cities, the authors establish how the closed dialectical relationship between the space and those who inhabit it becomes a key negotiation between self and the legitimate other. This extraordinary book must be read widely and acknowledged for its courage to argue against the aesthetic subversion of many publics, their cities, and their film-exhibition spaces by the multiplex." - Akshaya Kumar; Contemporary South Asia, Vol. 20, No. 3, September 2012
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South Asian Popular Culture
The reconfiguration of the social spaces in which the theatrical exhibition of feature films takes place, from dedicated single-screen large capacity cinema halls to multiplex venues, has progressively transformed cinema exhibition across the world since the 1980s. The rise of the multiplex in India since 1997 has been an integral, and highly visible, component of the general spread of mall culture; with multiplex venues often being housed within shopping mall developments and other new forms of privatized ‘public’ leisure. As such, the multiplex has powerfully altered the nature of cinema as public space and thus, crucially, what it means to be in the cinema hall. While the reconstitution of the cinema crowd within the multiplex might be seen as constitutive of the ‘globalizing’ trends now at work in Indian cities, this article seeks to demonstrate that the particular dynamics of the Indian multiplex at the present time must also be understood within the historical trajectory of the Indian cinema hall and the political struggles that have been played out within its confines.
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explores question of cinema's location and function in the city through theoretical literature and cinema history in Delhi
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Asian Journal of Multidimensional Research (AJMR)
Cinema theatres are the common landmarks in Pondicherry city, where almost all the road junctions in Pondicherry city had cinema theatres. Among these landmarks only a few still have cinema theatre in that particular location and others just remain as a landmark. With the developments in technology and the changes in audience leisure practices, the spaces of cinema exhibition too has changed at present across the globe. The present study emphasis that, the location of cinema theatre is one of the important factors for the growth of a cinema theatre. The study also notes that, even though there are very less number of D - Cinema equipped theatres in Pondicherry, digitalisation in cinema exhibition sector helped theatres in Pondicherry city to stay alive. And it could be even stated that digitalisation has helped majority of the semi urban as well as rural cinema theatres in Pondicherry to survive. This study explores the cinematic landscape of cinema theatres in Pondicherry city, wherein it tries to understand the present status of cinema going in Pondicherry city and also the programming practices of movies in cinema theatres of Pondicherry city.
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In 2004, with Sasura Bada Paisawala, a vernacular film industry was re-born in India. While numerous Bhojpuri music videos had been extremely popular among the working class Bhojpuri speakers, it was the visibility Bhojpuri films achieved via theatrical exhibition that infused new energy into film production. This paper investigates the emergence of this third phase of Bhojpuri Cinema. In doing so, it traces the historical trajectory of the segment of film exhibition within which Bhojpuri film industry emerged – the decrepit theatres, marked by the absence of any female audience. Therefore, this paper observes the resonance across two simultaneities: i) the reconfiguration of the sites of public leisure around the middle class woman, and ii) the reconfiguration of the film genres around the absence of female audience. Therefore, gender and space come to regulate each other around the key public sites within the cities, of which cinema has long been a vital component. In tracing the history of exhibition-led trade imaginaries within the film economy, then, we can situate fringe and mainstream genres in relation to the specific demography they targeted. The film text, after all, does not exist independent of the overall habitus that stages the encounter between the text and audience. This paper investigates the gendered vocabulary of this habitus, and the key shifts within the production-exhibition dynamics across the history of cinema in north India. By consolidating this analytical strand, I offer the category of the ‘rearguard’ – a site-specific exhibition-led trade sector of cinema. I then go on to situate the multiplex-mall within this history, not as an unprecedented departure, but a complex that amplified already existing tendencies, hierarchies and exclusive social practices. As the pre-eminent site within the data-mapped network, the multiplex led a far more consolidated economy and thus freed up numerous sites of alternative filmgoing practices, of which Bhojpuri Cinema became the most visible component.
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The dissertation titled ‘New Middle Class Narratives: Re-definition of the Indian middle class in mainstream Hindi cinema in the last decade (2004-2014)’ would try and explore the redefinition of the Indian Middle Class in Mainstream Hindi Cinema, especially in the last decade, along with Bollywood’s imagination to be a part of the global elite world of commerce and culture. Since 2001, there has been a tendency in Hindi Mainstream Cinema focusing on the portrayal of the Indian Middle Class, with a stark difference from the ‘middle class’ portrayal in the 60’s and the 70’s. The period of the dissertation (2004-2014) is chosen particularly to address a spectrum of films which, in their portrayal of the middle class, has associated it with Globalization and the rising consumerist attitude, not explicitly, but interweaving them with the narrative and giving rise to a representation of a particular desire among the middle class, which leaves the scope for interesting debates regarding class and its representation in Cinema.
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While earlier cinemas were built in response to growing urban populations during the twentieth century, the first wave of multiplexes in India were built in anticipation of future wealth. In recent years, multiplex developments have been targeting various areas identified for growth in the urban redevelopment plans now being adopted across India, anticipating a larger “consuming class” spreading beyond existing pockets of affluence and occupying suburban and satellite townships in what were until recently brown and greenfield sites. Exclusive leisure facilities such as the multiplex illustrate the growing socio-spatial segregation in Indian cities, and suggest the ways the consuming classes are transforming urban space in their own image. As such, while the significance of the multiplex to cultural perspectives in the “New India” is widely noted, they also illustrate much broader issues of the political economy of India that are almost never discussed in the same breath as cinema, including taxation and investment, environmental management and the politics of land zoning and land acquisition. Douglas Hill & Adrian Athique (2013) Multiplexes, corporatised leisure and the geography of opportunity in India, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 14:4, 600-614,
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for changes in land allocation to facilitate the …
