GITA VISWANATH

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The New Spectator

With no history to the multiplex phenomenon in India, we are indeed grappling with a contemporary artefact. However, what we can historicise is the film viewing practices prevalent in India. We may detect some continuities and discontinuities between older ways of going to the cinema and newer ways of going to the multiplex. After the advent of television and the video cassette recorder in the 1980s, most middle class families completely gave up going to the movies leading to a slump in the theatre business. Many were converted to shopping complexes while several continued to operate at lower prices, and subsequently in increasing states of dilapidation. Then in 1994, Sooraj Barjatya created a revolution of sorts by refusing video rights to his “clean, family film” Hum aap ke hain kaun (‘Who am I to you’?). That was when the middle classes re-entered theatres by the droves. The film ran for a record 52 weeks in theatres across the country. From then on, going to the movies once again became a prominent leisure activity for India’s middle classes which were thus introduced to the pleasures of choice, excess and an amoral stance towards spending.

By 1997, India had its first multiplex in Saket in New Delhi with several more following on its heels in quick succession. Multiplexes foster the creation of exclusive spaces for India’s burgeoning middle classes that seem to revel in the sheer availability of “clean and safe” spaces to spend their money in. Whilst the Indian middle class itself is broad and diverse in composition, the absence of the lower class multitude is apparent within multiplexes. When visiting multiplex sites in Bangalore, we found that the audience was overwhelmingly middle class. The typical multiplex audience comprises young people in the age group of 18-35 with a fair mix of both sexes adding up to 55 per cent of the ticket buying public. Most are college students and employees of sunrise industries such as the IT and BPO sectors. There is a greater prevalence of family groups during the evening and weekend shows and during school/college vacations.

In a focus group discussion with students from colleges in Bangalore who regularly visited the multiplexes, a vast majority claimed they went to multiplexes for their cleanliness, comfortable stadium seats, great sound quality (Dolby) and “decent” crowd. Quite clearly, then, the corporeality of the film viewing experience is emphasised here. Of all the reasons to vote for the multiplex, the hygienic environment they provided featured as the top-most.1 The notion of the right to clean public spaces is strong among the middle classes. Since the state and local

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style of dress, visible security and restrained behaviour required at the multiplex environment did not impede their enjoyment of the luxury class ethos. Many of these students also work part time in the BPO sector where it is not uncommon for the employees to work under nick names such as Jackson, Janet, Peter, etc, and trained to speak with a recognisably western accent. To be sure, this is a generation whose identities are no longer stable and cohesive but rest on shifting grounds dictated by the power of the market. Thus audience behaviour is dictated by a combination of social, economic and psychic factors.

As is apparent, the varied audiences comprising students, young employees from the IT and BPO sectors, and families, are not homogeneous as imagined in sociological and mass communication models. Through an ethnographic study of audiences, we learn that they are not passive receptors of dominant ideologies but are resistant to them through careful manipulation of viewing and buying choices. We need to guard against an easy conflation of cinema and consumerism as this mystifies the dichotomy between spectator as imagined by the industry and the flesh-andblood viewer whose actual responses may be quite resistant to imagined constructions.

New Leisure Spaces

The multiplex is not a radically new design concept in the Indian exhibition scene. A number of Indian cities have had two-three theatres on a single site (Galaxy, Gossip, Gemini in Bandra, Mumbai, Nartaki and Sapna in Bangalore) where the consumer had a choice of movies as well as the convenience of hopping from one theatre to another for tickets. These theatres were usually centrally located in the midst of eating places and shopping areas. As a result, people who came to watch a film would more often than not take the opportunity of having a snack and coffee at one of the restaurants and combine it, though not always, with picking up some essential items for the house. Thus movie watching became cause for what in India is popularly known as an “outing”; a fascinating coinage that makes a gerund from a preposition.

Where the modern multiplex differs is in bringing together all of the above on the same site. Multiplexes are housed in a single multi-use structure such as a mall which has restaurants in the form of food courts offering a choice of cuisine, shops, usually big brands, both national (Westside, Shoppers’ Stop, Landmark) and international (Swarowski, Marks and Spencers, Cookie Man) and video gaming courts. Unlike the shops that surround single screen theatres which are usually small, dingy, crowded, with goods stacked or dumped without regard for tasteful display, shops in malls are spacious, with enough room for ambling around without chances of bodily contact with co-shoppers, pleasantly sensuous with air conditioning and soft music, spic and span with clean rest rooms and convenient due to the structured stacking of objects. This design innovation that has created aspirational and exclusivist spaces is ideologically grounded. It encourages buying of goods, through the valorisation of particular kinds of lifestyles and commodity fetishism. It promotes consumerism which is the mainstay of capitalism by fostering a certain kind of consumer behaviour deemed as normative. Here are some economic indicators of rising consumerism:

So, alongside consuming the film, the movie audience is forced into consuming the mall space. The easy slippage between film going and consumption is bolstered by the 1990s practice of tie-ins between commercial products and films.3 Such an embodied experience of film viewing is integral to the construction of the new multiplex spectator as “spectatorship involves the acts of looking and hearing inasmuch as the patterns of everyday life are dramatised, foregrounded, displaced or otherwise inflected by the cinema” [Mayne 1993:31].

The Multiplex Film

This section of the paper seeks to explore the possibilities for experimentation open to the film-maker due to a new exhibition platform like the multiplex. Multiplexes in their constant endeavour for optimum capacity utilisation provide ample opportunities to new and upcoming filmmakers to exhibit their work. The greater range of films on offer at the multiplex must nevertheless be qualified, since it necessarily excludes the B and C grade popular films that target the lower social classes.

In order to suggest that the “multiplex film” is perhaps a new genre, the paper will stay with a generic understanding of cinema even as it acknowledges its limitations. Unlike Hollywood, Hindi films do not adhere to generic norms. Indeed, Hindi cinema has consistently challenged the notion of genres. A genre constitutes films that have recognisable character types and predictable story lines, some of which may be culture specific. According to Tom Ryall, “genres may be defined as pattern/forms/ styles/structures which transcend individual films, and which supervise both their construction by the filmmaker and their reading by an audience” [in Neale 2000:12]. Hindi cinema, on the contrary, anticipates a postmodernist eclecticism wherein the serious, the comic, the spectacle, action – all overlap to form a sumptuous filmic text. However, if we examine films from the 1990s onwards, we can see that there is an attempt to circumscribe the effusiveness of Hindi cinema within generic boundaries. Here, the cinematic menu on offer becomes crucial for situating the multiplex within the shifting mythic terrain of the Indian cinema. The compulsion to produce a complete entertainment package with action, comedy and romance as in the films of the 1960s and 1970s has steadily given way to the pursuit of various themes and styles targeting specific social groups – a logic formally enshrined by the rise of the multiplex. Whether we attribute this development to satellite television, increased access to international cinema or the growth of multiplex cinema houses or not, the fact is there are films that adhere to generic norms like the gangster films of Ram Gopal Verma, the war films of J P Dutta or the romantic family melodramas of Karan Johar. Broadly, a multiplex film may be described as “usually a medium-budget, non-formulaic film that works best at the 250-odd multiplexes that have opened in Indian metropolitan areas since 1997”, while the single theatre movie is “a more pedestrian film with broader appeal, likely to work best at the old-style single theaters, where ticket prices are much cheaper” (http://kamlabhatt. wordpress. com/2006/10/29/, site visited on March 16, 2007).

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Most multiplex films interpellate audiences that are familiar with global television channels and Hollywood films. Thus, we have Kabul Express that would have resonances of National Geographic and Pyar ke Side Effects that would seem like an Indian version of Friends. Most low-budget films that are screened in multiplexes do not have huge star casts relying on relatively new talent and keep the focus on story and technical finesse. The multiplex movie, acknowledges Kanika Verma, director of Dansh “is a big boon for filmmakers with limited budgets and smaller canvases. It’s very encouraging, as we don’t have to keep thinking of filling up 1,000 seats every show” (http://www. telegraphindia.com/1050902/asp/calcutta story_5185154.asp, site visited on March 12, 2007).

This article proposes that the altered economics of film-making due to the multiplex theatre has facilitated the production of low-budget, at times, issuebased films without resort to big stars. Introducing films like Kabul Express, Traffic Signal, Pyar ke Side Effects, Khosla ka Ghosla and Black Friday, this article suggests that the multiplex has made new space for films on critical issues facing India today, whilst paradoxically ensuring that their appearance remains economically and numerically marginal to the workings of the cinema.

Most multiplex film-makers have a fairly clear target audience in mind. The English titles are a major indication. To facilitate easy identification, many plots revolve around middle and upper middle class characters, their lives and concerns barring a few exceptions like Traffic Signal and Parzania for instance. There exists a productive tension between the way in which the multiplex reinforces, and legitimates, the dominance of the consumable middle class family film, whilst at the same time offering, through its excess capacity, a toehold to film-makers producing small offbeat films.

Recent multiplex films may be clubbed into two groups. One, films like My Brother Nikhil, Traffic Signal, Parzania and Black Friday and the second group comprising films such as Pyar ke Side Effects, Khosla ka Ghosla, Honeymoon Travels Private Limited and Just Married. The first group consists of films that take up politically sensitive issues (usually sidelined by mainstream cinema) and build their narratives around marginalised characters. Films like Black Friday, Traffic Signal and Parzania articulate themes that are peripheral to mainstream cinema, thus forcing the captive theatre audience to engage with the darker aspects of Indian reality. Black Friday is a film that purports to be the true story of the Mumbai serial blasts of 1993 with scenes that resemble Ardh Satya, a film by Govind Nihalani, usually associated with the parallel cinema movement in India. Traffic Signal by Madhur Bhandarkar dramatises the lives of children and adults who make a living on the streets of Mumbai by selling flowers, newspapers or begging at the traffic signals. By portraying the economic and social dynamics of the urban underbelly, the film brings into the elite spaces of the malls, those social classes excluded from the narratives of developmental economics. Parzania is a searing real life tale of a family whose young son goes missing during the communal riots of 2002 in Gujarat. The films work at the unconscious levels of multiplex visitors by delineating alternative visions of society that destabilise their established views which would have perhaps remained entrenched in the normal course of their lives thus underlining the political nature of cinema.

The second group portrays mainly middle and upper middle class characters and concerns, much like those that multiplex audiences could identify with. To cite one instance, a scene in Pyar ke Side Effects is shot inside a mall where Sid (Rahul Bose) and Trisha (Mallika Sherawat) meet after their break up. They discuss the therapeutic value of shopping and Sid makes a wry comment on how people in Mumbai go to the malls to take a walk. The film thus contains an internal critique of the proliferation of malls while all along showcasing them and the people who frequent them. The stories in these films are akin to the time tested lore of Bollywood cinema like love, marriage and family. They have a point of crisis midway through the film around the time of the intermission and the resolution coming at the end of the film. In these they are no different from big budget blockbusters such as Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna, Kal Ho Na Ho, Parineeta and the like. Nonetheless, they remain niche films as they do not have stars to fall back upon for success at the box office. In addition, with limited budgets, most multiplex films do not get the kind of publicity that high budget films do leaving these films at the mercy of multiplex owners who need to double up as publicity agents.

They rely mainly on word-of-mouth publicity and therefore, the story and an attractive format become strong imperatives for their success. Says 89 Cinemas general manager Prashant Srivastava: “I know people who mistook My Wife’s Murder as an English movie and never bothered to check out the film. A good opening is alien to these small multiplex movies and they only bank on strong word-of-mouth publicity. So, usually, the second week collections are better than the first”. All the same, multiplexes have widened the horizons of filmmaking and have provided a viable space for exhibition of niche films some of which that go beyond the formulaic and present what are known as meaningful or reality-based themes.