Adrian Athique
University of Queensland
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Media, Culture & Society | 2008
Adrian Athique
In recent years, Indian media producers have increased their efforts to combat the effects of piracy on their export earnings. They are facing a number of challenges, many of which can be traced to the particular nature of the Indian film industry itself and the idiosyncratic development of its political-economy over the past six decades. This article explores the dynamics of Indian media piracy and, in doing so, makes the case that Indian cinema could not have attained its considerable global standing without the distributive networks constructed around media piracy. This article also seeks to correlate the prevalence of media piracy with the murky world of Indian film finance. Finally, the article looks to the future in the guise of corporatization within the Indian film industry, the synchronization of intellectual property regimes and the pursuit of market control by means of the anti-piracy drive now being pursued in certain key export territories.
Archive | 2010
Adrian Athique; Douglas Hill
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.
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies | 2008
Adrian Athique
Writing in Metro at the end of 2005, Sapna Samant (a trustee of the Asia Film Festival Aotearoa) is stirred into action by a sense of indignation at the ‘appropriation’ of popular Indian cinema by the ‘machinery’ of the Western media industry. Recent attempts by Hollywood to sell hybridized ‘Bollywood’ style to Western audiences and the profusion of Bollywood copy in glossy magazines have all served to threaten Samant’s sense of ownership, and of privileged inside knowledge, over the products of the popular Indian cinema. As Samant puts it: ‘Bombay cinema is my cinema. I know what it’s all about . . . I don’t like those Johnny-come-lately ignorant Westerners and media people advising me about it’ (86). The argument made by Samant is all about authenticity: that the real experience of Indian cinema can only be accessed by those who are steeped in its cultural context and its history. By extension, those viewers must be authentically ‘Indian’ or, at the very least, India specialists. This is a position open to criticism in a number of respects, but here I will restrict myself to the specific context of cinema. Firstly, by pointing out the long-standing influence of Western film fashions on Indian filmmaking and the frequent ‘appropriation’ of Hollywood styles, themes and even scripts for the Indian market. Secondly, by recognizing that the Indian cinema has, from the 1930s onwards, enjoyed popularity with audiences spread across the globe (see Eleftheriotis 2006; Larkin 1997; Rajagopalan 2006). Many of those viewers have been non-Indians with little detailed understanding of Indian society but who have nonetheless consistently found enjoyment in the mixture of action, eroticism and sentimentality pedalled by the Bombay filmwallahs. In Samant’s defence, however, it is also fair to say that the breathless insiderism of Western journalists explaining to their readers how to enjoy Indian cinema as kitsch, cult and ‘full of colour’ is every bit as patronizing as the scorn that used to be poured upon Indian films when they were laughably unfashionable. It is understandable, therefore, that all this might annoy anyone with a long-standing commitment to the Indian cinema. It may also prove to be the case that while the blissful miscomprehension of the more subtle aspects of Indian cinema by viewers in Nigeria or Greece has had little influence on the workings of the industry itself, the newfound interest by dilettantes in the anglophone world could have far larger implications for the way that the Indian film industry functions.
South Asian Popular Culture | 2005
Adrian Athique
This article draws on a body of interviews conducted during 2003–04 with movie‐viewers, distributors and exhibitors of Indian movies in Australia, primarily in the Sydney region of New South Wales. My immediate concern is with the manner in which Indian movies reach an audience in Australia and how that audience is described, both by themselves and by those who seek to cater to them. The wider context of this study is its contribution to a transnational perspective on Indian movies and the cultural understandings that they generate within and across specific localities. As such, this article attempts to reformulate the conception of media‐communities by replacing an ethnographic model with an emphasis on surveying the diverse inhabitants of a ‘cultural field’ constructed around the Indian movie.
South Asian Popular Culture | 2011
Adrian Athique
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.
Contemporary South Asia | 2009
Adrian Athique
The ascendance of the multiplex film theatre in India has great significance in the creation of new public space, and is part and parcel of the long-running contestation of modernity and citizenship in postcolonial India. However, while the histories of urbanism, cinema and modern politics are usefully indicative of each other, their relationship in this instance also needs to be further related to the history of leisure capital in India and, in particular, to the contemporary dynamics of the media economy. The rise of the multiplex is closely related to the re-organisation of working practices and of capital investment within the film exhibition sector. The aggregation of interests within what has traditionally been a highly fragmented industry with largely informal organisation is a result of both the entry of outside concerns into the theatrical market and of operational change within the industry itself as leading players pursue an agenda of ‘corporatisation’. It is these new corporate entities, funded by institutional investors and public flotation, that dominate the multiplex business, which has arisen in marked contrast to the loose agglomeration of family-owned theatres that have previously characterised theatrical exhibition in India. As the leading multiplex brands embark upon a massive programme of expansion into Indias second-tier cities, this paper provides a critical account of the emerging political economy of the multiplex paradigm.
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies | 2014
Adrian Athique
The exchange of information, discourse and meaning across a bewildering array of cultural, geographic and political barriers has become a central concern for a broad range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. As such, there is a growing body of empirical work in academic journals and doctoral theses that addresses particular instances of transnational reception. It is nonetheless fair to say that as a field of study, our knowledge of transnational audiences remains highly fragmented and lacks a common conceptual or comparative framework. In the main, overarching theories of global media flows and markets continue to rest upon theoretical understandings of media reception that are largely derived from a previous epoch where media mobility and intercultural communication was not a primary focus. As a consequence, contemporary studies of transnational media reception still require a coherent geography capable of addressing the unique demands of this kind of work. There is a pressing need, therefore, to articulate the theoretical work on the transnational itself with a technologically and politically updated configuration of media reception in the twenty-first century. Ambitious as this proposition might sound, defining this terrain in a comprehensive and accessible fashion has become a necessary step in furthering critical debates in this exciting and important field. This article will not achieve this goal, naturally, but will instead seek to lay out some of the conceptual terrain from which we might proceed.
Inter-asia Cultural Studies | 2013
Douglas Hill; Adrian Athique
abstract 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.
South Asia-journal of South Asian Studies | 2008
Adrian Athique
Abstract This article examines the visualisation and narrative construction of the India–Pakistan border, and human interactions across that liminal space, as depicted in two films directed by J.P. Dutta, the high-profile, multiple award-winning war film Border (1997) and his subsequent feature Refugee (2000), which was more loosely described in its publicity literature as ‘a human story’. 1 Through these films, Dutta established his reputation as the leading Indian director of the ‘war film’, a genre marked by its relative absence in the Indian cinema prior to the 1990s. Both Border and Refugee thus constitute part of what has retrospectively been described as Duttas ‘war trilogy’ (along with the more recent LOC Kargil of 2003, which focuses on the 1999 Himalayan conflict). 2 In the first two films of the set, which I will consider here, the border in question is not the Line-of-Control (LOC) that divides Kashmir, but rather the southern portion of the long border with Pakistan that runs from the southern bank of the Sutlej River across the Thar Desert to the Arabian Sea. Refugee, moreover, is not a war film in the accepted sense, and I will make the argument that it is not so much the martial posturing which constructs the thematic inter-relation of the two films considered here but rather their attempts to naturalise the abstract barrier created by the Radcliffe Line in the west. 1 Border, dir. J.P.Dutta, J.P. Films, 1996; and Refugee, dir. J.P.Dutta, J.P. Films, 2000. 2 LOC Kargil, dir. J.P.Dutta, J.P. Films, 2003.
International Journal of Cultural Studies | 2016
Arezou Zalipour; Adrian Athique
Drawing upon interviews and focus groups with Asian migrants, this article interrogates responses to ‘diasporic’ films that seek to represent multicultural experiences in contemporary New Zealand. We argue that these responses provide an effective demonstration of the operation of the ‘social imagination’, a discursive process that articulates the fundamental linkage between symbolic representation, community formation and social action. As our respondents narrated the personal meanings that they construct around ethnically specific media, they were compelled to describe known and hypothetical others, to elucidate symbolic and moral codes, and to reveal social empathies and anxieties. In this study, we found that discussions around migrant stories revealed a series of deeply personalised notions of self and place that were always situated in juxtaposition with externalised projections of community formation and the ‘mainstream’ culture. This dynamic reflects what can be conceptualised as the central preoccupations of a ‘diasporic social imagination’. These responses, therefore, constitute a case study of social imagination at work in a multicultural context, underlining the utility of narrative media in providing a public forum for discussing cultural diversity.