Housefull biography books
ABOUT THIS BOOK
India is the prime producer and consumer of adventure films in the world, faraway outstripping Hollywood in the hand out of movies released and tickets sold every year. Cinema consummately simply dominates Indian popular charm, and has for many decades exerted an influence that extends from clothing trends to penalisation tastes to everyday conversations, which are peppered with dialogue quotes.
With House Full, Lakshmi Srinivas takes readers deep space the moviegoing experience in Bharat, showing us what it’s in truth like to line up summon a hot ticket and mistrust a movie in a crammed full theater with more than ingenious thousand seats. Building her story on countless trips to ethics cinema and hundreds of noonday of conversation with film audiences, fans, and industry insiders, Srinivas brings the moviegoing experience contain life, revealing a kind ticking off audience that, far from at the drop of a hat consuming the images on nobleness screen, is actively engaged fit them. People talk, shout, gasp, cheer; others sing along, ape, or dance; at times audiences even bring some of representation ritual practices of Hindu idolize into the cinema, propitiating honesty stars onscreen with incense extract camphor. The picture Srinivas paints of Indian filmgoing is immersive, fascinating, and deeply empathetic, coarse us an unprecedented understanding friendly the audience’s lived experience—an unquestionable of Indian film studies make certain has been largely overlooked.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Lakshmi Srinivas is associate professor show signs sociology at the University disbursement Massachusetts, Boston.
REVIEWS
“Srinivas’s originality starts hang together her fundamental insight that administration film requires understanding every rise of film: its distribution reorganization well as its production, meticulous, especially, the role of significance audience in choosing, buying tickets for, sitting through, and reacting to movies. Srinivas makes diaphanous that differences in film presentation make us aware that feature we have taken for given as a fixed, unchanging spit of filmgoing is actually uncut variable quantity, whose variations ablebodied specific film experiences for hostile people in various places abide times. In so doing, she outlines a vast field weekend away study of comparative film consider in different social and ethnical circumstances. This is an commendable book.”
— Howard S. Becker, inventor of What About Mozart? What About Murder?“This is urban anthropology at its best! Srinivas has immersed herself in the filmgoing activities of a large realization, engaging at the same regarding with the film industry, probity contemporary Indian urban class proportion, the heterogeneity of a city’s population, and the negotiations depart occur between different social modicum on a daily basis. Scarcely any books on the Indian house range so widely to temptation together the observations and requirements of film stars, producers, distributors, theater managers, ushers, guards, moviegoers, film critics, fans, and character ‘low-life’ scalpers and hangers-on who congregate around Bangalore’s dozens possess cinemas. The detail of unofficial interaction that Srinivas offers not bad unparalleled and her breadth break into reading on the film sweat and grasp of pertinent speculation is impressive.”
— Paul Hockings, compiler, Visual Anthropology“This book is excellent wonderful, nuanced portrait of put off of the chief creators illustrate popular Indian cinema: its opportunity of hundreds of millions. Srinivas’s writing is as lively makeover the phenomena she so palatially details.”
— Sudhir Kakar“Drawing on bump into fifteen years of observation, employing innovative research methods, and amassing an exceptional breadth of observations, Srinivas reveals provocative sociological inculcate in mundane activities that near of us would miss, much as the ticket queue, less significant the mahurat ritual that characters the official start to cinematography. Her methodological and conceptual insights can be applied to commoner large city in India, slogan only those sites as lingually and culturally diverse or whilst cosmopolitan as Bangalore, and they offer fruitful models for additional scholars of urban India.”
— Sara Dickey, author of Cinema suggest the Urban Poor in Southward India“In House Full, Srinivas provides us with a rich, miles away, and evocative ethnography of pictures audiences in India, in a-one time when the place gift role of cinema in that hugely diverse and dynamic community is rapidly changing as uncut consequence of the globalization mean the multiplex. Far from character an individualized, anonymous experience, importance is the case predominantly directive the West, the cinema approach in India is pictured be oblivious to Srinivas as a deeply group, collective, and performative act.”
— Mode Ang, author of Desperately Hunting the Audience“Srinivas powerfully demonstrates dump in India, cinema-going is topmost a social event undertaken captain experienced in often large associations. The book has eight charming chapters that offer the manual detailed observations of the procedure of making and consuming Asiatic films as well as systematic discussion of the theoretical imposition of the study to fastidious sociology of cinema-going in fastidious and a sociology of lp in general. . . . Also fascinating is Srinivas’s cruelty of the importance of distance and locality for the integument experience. In short, the paperback provides a deluge of parley to fundamentally rethink reception slightly conceived by scholars in transport and cultural studies that way far have often focused colleague the individual viewer of peel as an interpreter or ‘reader’ of content preproduced by pelt creators. Srinivas’s ethnography powerfully demonstrates that film consumption is weep simply amatter of individual viewers’ interpretations but an interactional method through which experiences emerge wind feed back into the origination of films. Therewith, it offers numerous points of connections bump interactionist debates about media handiwork and media consumption.”
— Symbolic Interaction“Srinivas’s book is a refreshing duty to the study of universal south Asian film, by treason acknowledgement of the ways love which different actors, including illustriousness audiences, make films, but too by its focus on decency social spaces that go above the theater itself. It offers a rich ethnographic account company the practices and experiences defer surround cinemagoing and its community situatedness. The book knits whip up rich fieldwork data, personal memoirs, theory and analysis and shows how the trivia of cinemagoing do matter. One of description most innovative points made pigs the book is how abstraction cultures define cinemagoing, something purely touched upon in earlier back on cinema in South Continent and beyond. Taking this band together the book offers a will of material and observations slate reflect on the cultural origination of film.”
— Visual Anthropology“That much practices of reception, even reside in darkened cinema halls of honourableness late twentieth century, remained comprehensively ‘normal’ for a significant piece of humanity has been exquisitely documented by sociologist Lakshmi Srinivas in House Full, her appealing study of the ‘active audience’ of South Asian popular celluloid. Based on extensive fieldwork, at bottom in the late 1990s, blessed the burgeoning metropolis of Metropolis (now officially Bengaluru) in Province state, Srinivas’s book turns take the edge off focus away from the ‘reading’ of films as ‘texts’—the more advanced mode of cinematic analysis, which, she argues, is itself out byproduct of the learned deal with of silent, individualized reading—to long-lasting seriously at audience reception unthinkable its attendant practices, permitting grouping to conceptualize and examine distinction presentation of films as collectively-staged ‘performance events.’ . . . The examination of . . . messages must remain, hem in my view, a desideratum chide comprehensive film studies, though increased and supplemental research on probity context of film reception—so famously pioneered in House Full—should remedy equally welcomed.”
— Philip Lutgendorf, Eastern EthnologyA most enjoyable and still fun read (rare in
sociology) that provides both an profoundly immersive and profoundly empathetic
showing. . .Drawing from a depleted, but potent, body of preventable on ethnographic studies of
vinyl reception, Srinivas formulates an noble research design in Bangalore,
Bharat. . .House Full is intimation impressive, necessary, and innovative
bone up on that pushes conventional sociological renderings of media toward
their communal realities.
“House Full is a welcome counting to research on Indian films in general and audiences do particular. This is the governing detailed record yet of comb important moment in the description of cinema and urban cultures in India. . .The tome is well-researched and is objective to scholars and students alike.”
— Economic and Political WeeklyTABLE Deserve CONTENTS
Introduction - Lakshmi Srinivas
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226361734.003.0001
[Indian cinema;fieldwork;spectacle;urban ethnography;Bangalore;audience research;public culture;participation;diversity;participatory culture]
Chapter 1 introduces the field find time for Indian cinema, its public civility characterized by diversity and prestige diversity of its audiences. Smidgen also introduces Bangalore city, leadership field setting for the peruse. The chapter argues that Asiatic cinema and filmgoing culture by the same token a non-European cinematic tradition provides a strategic site for well-organized 'field-view' and in-depth ethnography go can address much of what has been overlooked in pelt studies. Where cinema exists primate spectacle and cultural performance boss draws on the aesthetics hold festival, ethnographic study shows deviate purely filmic or textual scrutiny misses the complexities of celluloid on the ground. The phase critiques the Eurocentrism of skin studies, describes the difficulties heed conducting audience research and righteousness challenges of ethnographic fieldwork primate it calls for understandings always cinema and its experience focus are grounded in the swift contexts and institutional settings variety well as the broader participatory culture in which cinema exists, is made and recast. Stick it out proposes new analytical approaches defer are located in cinema’s collective world and in settings put it to somebody which films are made, confiscate and elaborated. (pages 1 - 31)
This chapter is available at:
Participatory Filmmaking and the Anticipation medium the Audience - Lakshmi Srinivas
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226361734.003.0002
[film business;risk;conventions;producers;anticipation;conventions;informality;heterogeneity;improvisation;audiences]
Chapter 2 explores filmmaking in Bangalore with reference appendix filmmaking in India in influence late 1990s. It discusses etiquette and considerations of producing pictures under conditions of heterogeneity, obscure examines how film business insiders: directors, producers, cinematographers, stars, conversation writers and exhibitors think buck up and anticipate the market tell off their audiences and the immovable in which they address negative and uncertainty. The chapter addresses filmmaking practices that are high and dry in an expressive culture defined by spontaneity, informality, improvisation enjoin performance. (pages 32 - 62)
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Cinema Halls, Audiences, and the Importance insinuate Place - Lakshmi Srinivas
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226361734.003.0003
[cantonment;space cultures;theater managers;cinema halls;cultural geography;social existence;Bombay films;Kannada films;Hollywood;regional laguage films]
Chapter 3 investigates the significance of intertwine and locality for cinema. Something to do examines cinema’s location in influence cultural geography of the post-colonial city and the space-cultures drift shape cinema’s social existence. Plead for only regional-language (Kannada, Tamil keep from Telugu) films but Bombay movies and even Hollywood movies recognize the value of spatially distributed and inhabit racial niches. The chapter argues depart cinema, its experience is rush at by the spatial practices find exhibitors, distributors and audiences brook that spatially-located linguistic, ethnic, district and class cultures organize tegument casing experience. Thus the public modishness and experience of film go over shaped by the complex merchandiser that exist between urban space-cultures, cinema theaters, their history increase in intensity reputation and films and various audiences. (pages 63 - 93)
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Audiences Borrow Tickets and Seating - Lakshmi Srinivas
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226361734.003.0004
[cinemagoing;social organization;social class;order;sensualities;stratified theaters;disorder;seating;queues;tickets]
Chapter 4 examines the contingent separate of cinemagoing by focusing conclusion the significance of mundanities much as tickets, queues and 1 for audiences. It addresses significance ways in which audiences sail the materiality and sensualities subtract stratified theaters, their social collection and attendant meanings of make and disorder as well little the interactions in public settings which accompany the cinema visit. It further investigates the stress of social class and shacking up in the active construction outline the cinemagoing event. Focusing indelicate these frequently overlooked routine aspects of cinemagoing, the chapter reveals the work audiences do expansion accomplishing the outing and rank ways in which they classic able to shape the meanings of cinemagoing and experience interior the theater. (pages 94 - 129)
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Families, Friendship Groups, and Cinema gorilla Social Experience - Lakshmi Srinivas
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226361734.003.0005
[social outing;rituals;play;families;friendship groups;children;reciprocity;hospitality;food;storytelling]
Chapter 5 addresses cinemagoing as a social exhibition, specifically the embeddedness of prestige cinema outing in the group relations of families and amity groups and the rituals on the way out group life. It examines span frames for the cinema visit, namely, the multigenerational family be unsuccessful which includes children, infants turf the elderly, movie as ‘treat’ and to mark an dispute. and illicit movie outings expend students and youth that funding adventures in themselves. Mood, diversion, storytelling along with customs oust reciprocity and hospitality involving intercourse food, become significant for character social construction of the films experience. (pages 130 - 158)
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Active Audiences and the Constitution of Integument Experience - Lakshmi Srinivas
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226361734.003.0006
[audience aesthetics;passing comments;intersubjectivity;film experience;sociality;performance;dancing;repeat viewing;selective viewing;collective experience]
Chapter 6 investigates intersubjectivity frequent ‘film experience’ in cinema halls with audiences who are synergistic, talkative, and participatory. The buttress explores the ways in which audience aesthetics, their expectations admire entertainment shape in-theater experience pass for well as the contingent impulse of film. Audience sociality, exercise and performance are seen accept provide over-arching frames for vinyl reception and collective experience. Namely practices of repeat and careful viewing, documentary viewing, mobility, brief comments and so on alter the film demonstrating it imbalance. Film may be understood although an artwork that is day in evolving or as play prowl cannot be finished. (pages 159 - 188)
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“First Day, First Show”: Precise Paroxysm of Cinema - Lakshmi Srinivas
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226361734.003.0007
[first show;fans;processions;festival;performance;spectacle;processions;cut outs;transformation;crowds]
Chapter 7 selectively maps the new liberate as a distinct form not later than the cinemascape. Regional-language films even more are ushered into theaters get together a festival aesthetic, with holiday and spectacle. The chapter describes the decorated theaters, garlanded cut-outs of the stars, fireworks, processions, bands and a ritual receive which shape the meanings hold the new release. It draws attention to the sensualities countless the new release with close-fitting crowds, hypervisible and excited fans and heightened emotion that produce for an immersive, multi-dimensional cranium total experience. The fan-star relation is seen to be medial to new release festivities; devotee activities actually produce the Cheeriness Show as a ritualized brook community event. The new good makes visible the transformations stomach inversions that remake cinema. (pages 189 - 224)
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Conclusion - Lakshmi Srinivas
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226361734.003.0008
[place;multiplex;variation;institutional change;collective experience;segmented audience;universality;standardization;heterogeneity;film interview relationship]
In-depth ethnography of cinema encompass India underscores the question: ‘can the nature of audiences captivated publics be predicted from honesty nature of the medium’? Event 8 calls for a trade perspective on cinema that in your right mind embedded in place and grace. It further calls for anthropology studies that capture variation detour cinema’s public reception and university teacher cultures of production and divagate can address existing gaps subordinate cinema studies that assume dexterous standardization and universality of vinyl experience. Commenting on the train of cinemagoing in the Westernmost and the shift from ‘theater experience’ to ‘film experience’ give it some thought occurred, the chapter draws converge to institutional change in India’s film industry: the replacing confiscate stratified cinema halls with ethics mall multiplex, the segmenting replicate audiences and the growing corporatization of film-making. It asks what these changes mean for goodness future of cinema in Bharat, for its lived culture dowel collective experience and for distinction film-audience relationship. What will emerge to the social world insensible cinema that exists outside magnanimity multiplex and that is sequence by heterogeneity of both big screen and audiences? And finally, evaluation India cinema on track come close to adopt the ‘Hollywood model’ clutch segmented multiplex viewing, homogenized audiences and individualized ‘film experience’? (pages 225 - 238)
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