Abstract:
This thesis looks at how radical changes in contemporary Indian popular cinema have been engendered by the arrival of the multiplex as a cinematic exhibition space. Multiplexes first appeared in 1997, but since then they have proliferated across the urban Indian landscape, overrunning traditional single screen theatres. Their rise has engendered thematic and aesthetic shifts in popular cinema, as it breaks away from the omnibus format of the films of old single screen theatres and diversifies into a wide range of forms and styles. This shift is best manifested in the ‘multiplex film’ – an umbrella term for a range of alternative, genre-diverse, medium to low-budget films that are box office successes. This project explores the centrality of the multiplex in fostering this ‘new wave’ in Indian popular cinema, with special reference to the ‘multiplex film’. The thesis argues that exhibition space influences cinematic form and shapes audience experience, as the phenomenology of the exhibition space articulates with elements of film aesthetics to immerse audiences in new modes of cinema-going. Indian multiplexes, embodying a symbolic break from the past, express a specific interior and exterior spatial dynamic. By relocating a middle class audience to this exclusionary space with its specific dynamic, multiplexes have attached the film experience to a particular audience demographic and organised a new production-distribution-exhibition logic, thus linking exhibition space to economic power and social status and connecting cinema-going to a specific social identity. The thesis argues that this influences the kind of films that are made to be exhibited in the multiplex. In this context, the multiplex space, in both its material and imaginative dimensions, becomes the interpretive framework through which to explore its cinematic narratives, where a consideration of both the material aspects of multiplex exhibition infrastructure and the experiential terrain of its spaces is used to interrogate the narrative and formal strategies that multiplex films employ to re-imagine the audience. The thesis claims that multiplex films can be located in this intersection where screen aesthetics transect with the spatial dynamics and imaginative matrix of the multiplex space, thus organising a field of cinematographic experience that is concurrent with the new modernity of contemporary India.