4.2: Bollywoodization, Immaterial Labor, and Mass Creativity
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- Shanti Kumar
- University of California Press
The term Bollywood was coined in the 1970s to capture—often pejoratively—the similarities between India’s national Hindi film industry based in Bombay (now Mumbai) and the globally dominant Hollywood film industry in the United States. However, as Ashish Rajadhyaksha argues, Bollywood in recent times has been used not just to describe Hindi films produced in Bombay but also to refer to “a more diffuse cultural conglomeration involving a range of distribution and consumption activities from websites to music cassettes, from cable to radio.” 3 Therefore, Rajadhyaksha uses the term Bollywoodization to signify a very recent phenomenon in Indian cinema that has emerged since the 1990s as a result of the “synchronous developments of international capital and diasporic nationalism.” 4
In the dominant “national” model of Indian cinema, the relationship between production and consumption has always been clearly demarcated, dividing those who make films (directors, producers, writers, actors, and other crew members or below-the-line workers) from those who watch films (moviegoers, fans, and consumers of film-based media, memorabilia, and culture). As Derek Bose argues in Brand Bollywood , when hundreds of formulaic Hindi films are being mass-produced in Bombay, the process of filmmaking often resembles the assembly-line mode of industrial production on a factory floor. 5 Recounting a time in the 1990s when industry output had reached over 900 films per year and over 14,000 titles were registered with the Indian Motion Pictures Producers Association (IMPPA), Bose writes, “Actors like Govinda and Anil Kapoor were doing as many as five shifts a day and Mahesh Bhatt acquired the distinction of being India’s first ‘director by remote control.’ At any given time, he had three or four projects on the floor and he would sit at home, instructing various assistants on telephone to can his shots. Films were thus directed by proxy, in keeping with the best traditions of assembly-line production.” 6
Many of these films were major box office hits because the assembly-line mode of mass production was sustained by a national network of financier-distributors whose monopoly over clearly demarcated distribution territories could ensure that mass audiences would always throng into theaters to watch their favorite movie stars on the big screen. The fairly standardized model of formulaic filmmaking and the national system of financing and distribution did not allow for—or did not require—much input from the mass audiences in relations of production. In an industry driven by what Tejaswini Ganti calls “the ratio of hits to flops,” filmmakers considered the commercial success or failure of films “as an accurate barometer of social attitudes, norms, and sensibilities, thus providing the basis for knowledge about audiences.” 7 Of course, the failure—or the fear of failure—of big-budget, big-star films was always a good reason for producers to incorporate audience feedback into the production process. But the creative power of the mass audiences to reframe cinematic narratives or to reshape filmmaking practices was limited in the national model of mass production, mass distribution and mass consumption in Indian cinema.
However, with the Bollywoodization of Indian cinema since the late 1990s and early 2000s, a more diffused, global model of cultural production has emerged where the relationship between film producers and consumers has, of necessity, become less hierarchical and more transversal. The changes in creative and industrial practices produced by the Bollywoodization of Indian cinema have been deftly analyzed by Aswin Punathambekar in From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry . Contrasting the new Bollywoodized mode of production with the traditional model of filmmaking in Indian cinema, Punathambekar argues that the “ongoing changes in the domain of marketing and promotions are emblematic of broader reconfigurations of relations between capital, circuits of information and forms of knowledge . . . in Bombay’s media world.” 8 For instance, discussing the growing centrality of paratexts such as trailers, posters, music videos of song and dance sequences, and media events such as the mahurat (ritual inauguration of a new production) and promotional tours by film stars and singers, Punathambekar examines how marketing and promotion have become new sites of decision making, communication, and knowledge about the film commodity even before a film is released or produced.
Since the paratexts and media events discussed by Punathambekar are not traditionally considered integral parts of the filmmaking process or the film commodity, the labor involved in their production (including advertising, marketing, promotion, spot films, web sites, online chat sessions with fans, and games and contests for mobile devices) is what Lazzarato would define as immaterial labor. To recall Lazzarato’s definition outlined earlier, immaterial labor consists of two types of work in the capitalist production of a commodity (such as a film): informational labor (such as the use of digital technologies, paratexts, media events, marketing, and promotion materials before, during, and after production) and cultural labor (the production of affective value through the circulation of the film commodity in social life—such the pleasures of producing and consuming the texts and paratexts of a film, the thrill of participating in media events, the social bonds of sharing and recommending “free” marketing and promotional materials about the film to online and offline friends, and so on). Taken together, the two types of immaterial labor—informational and cultural—produce affective value for the film commodity in all aspects of social life.
The affect of immaterial labor is, of course, difficult to track. As Thrift points out, there are many definitions of affect, and they are often “associated with words like emotion and feeling, and a consequent repertoire of terms like hatred, shame, envy, fear, disgust, anger, embarrassment, sorrow, grief, anguish, love, happiness, joy, hope, wonder.” 9 However, Thrift finds that these words are not good translations of affect and therefore proposes to move away from definitions that focus on individualized emotions. Instead, Thrift favors approaches that define affect in terms of general tendencies and lines of forces. Of these approaches, Thrift highlights four: affect as embodied knowledge, affect theory associated with but differentiated from psychoanalytic conceptions of libidinal drives, the Spinozian-Deleuzian notion of affect as emergent capacities, and neo-Darwinian frameworks of affect as a universal expression of emotion. Summarizing his extensive review of the literature on these four approaches to affect, Thrift writes, “Four different notions of affect, then. Each of them depends on a sense of push in the world but the sense of push is subtly different in each case. In the case of embodied knowledge, that push is provided by the expressive armoury of the human body. In the case of affect theory it is provided by biologically differentiated positive and negative affects rather than the drives of Freudian theory. In the world of Spinoza and Deleuze, affect is the capacity of interaction that is akin to a natural force of emergence. In the neo-Darwinian universe, affect is a deep-seated physiological change involuntarily written on the face.” 10
Although affect—as general tendencies and lines of force—is a widespread and crucial element of urban life, Thrift argues that the affective register has been largely neglected in the study of cities. Defining urban life through the concept of “affective cities,” Thrift argues that affects like anger, fear, joy, and hope manifest themselves in “the mundane emotional labor of the workplace, the frustrated shouts and gestures of road rage, the delighted laughter of children as they tour a theme park or the tears of a suspected felon undergoing police interrogation.” 11 Equally, for Thrift, affect in urban life is evident in the “mass hysteria” surrounding major media events like the spectacular life or the death of a global superstar or the roar of a crowd celebrating a point scored by their team in a sports stadium. To Thrift’s descriptions of the affective registers in urban culture, one could add, in the Indian context, the many ways Bollywood culture permeates the everyday lives of Indians in terms of fashion, clothing, style, song and dance, rituals, and so on. One can also point to the affective domain of “mass worship” of Bollywood stars and Bollywood culture along with the “mass fanaticism” of fans who flock to see their favorite film star at a shooting location or in a film city, or the masses of cinemagoers who insist on catching a new release in a cinema hall on the first day in cities and towns across India.
As Amit Rai’s brilliant work on affect in India’s new media assemblage demonstrates, film (in the traditional sense of movie-making and movie-going) is now only one of the many elements in a highly diffuse agglomeration of material and immaterial practices of production, distribution, and consumption in Bollywood. 12 Therefore, filmmakers have to make creative decisions about the filmmaking process in relation to a range of immaterial practices taking place—or which have already taken place—in diverse locations, such as malls, multiplexes, homes, and local marketplaces, and on multiple platforms, such as movie theaters, television channels, FM radio, online media, and cell phones. Foregrounding the affective connectivities between cinema and other media technologies along with the sensations generated among bodies, populations, and various graphical interfaces at locations such as the single-screen cinema hall, the multiplex, the mall, the television screen at home, and the mobile phone in public places, Rai redefines Bollywood as a new media assemblage that is “necessarily constellated, remediated and multiply overlapping.” 13 Rai argues that through remediation of old and new media connectivities and sensations in and through Bollywood, affect plays a crucial role in the transformation of technologies, labor, and aesthetics in production and consumption practices of everyday life in India.
In many ways, affect has always been a central concern in Indian cinema and in the production of creativity in India more generally. In Bombay before Bollywood , Rosie Thomas argues that the spectator-subject of mainstream Hindi cinema has always been addressed and moved through film primarily by affect. Tracing the genealogy of Bollywood through the history of Bombay cinema, Thomas finds that in commercial Hindi films, the emphasis was—and still is—more on emotion and spectacle and less on the tightness of a linear narrative. Or, as Thomas puts it, the emphasis was more “on how things would happen rather than what would happen next, on a succession of modes rather than linear denouement, on familiarity and repeated viewings rather than ‘originality’ and novelty, on a moral disordering to be (temporarily) resolved rather than an enigma to be solved.” 14 The pleasure value of repeat viewing, for instance, was recognized by filmmakers early on, and was built into film narratives by foregrounding the affective power of stars, music, spectacle, emotion, and dialogue. Thomas argues that affect was thus “structured and contained by narratives whose power and insistence derived from their very familiarity, coupled with the fact that they were deeply rooted (in the psyche and in traditional mythology).” 15
Thomas claims that “all Indian classical drama, dance and music draw on this aesthetic,” and argues that the traditions of rasa theory deeply inform the production practices of Indian cinema. However, she also finds that most filmmakers do not make any conscious reference to this cultural heritage. Similarly, Thomas wonders whether or not the emergence of the spectator-subject of Indian cinema—who is primarily addressed and moved by aesthetic modes of affect (rasa) in film narratives—can be related in any useful way to a more general history of the evolution of the “social audience” in India. Arguing that traditions of Bollywood cannot be used to provide neat, causal explanations of contemporary Indian cinema and culture, Thomas suggests that traditions (such as rasa theory) must be seen “as a framework of terms of reference within which certain developments have been stifled, others allowed to evolve unproblematically, and which can be used to throw light on the different possibilities of forms of address which might be expected or tolerated by an Indian audience.” 17
As Rajinder Dudrah and Amit Rai remind us, the role of affect (or rasa) in Indian cinema cannot be understood simply through critiques of the political economy of the Hindi film industry (to make money, filmmakers have to produce emotional melodramas with song and dance to reach a “mass audience”) or through cultural studies of the textual pleasures of moviegoing for spectator-subjects of Indian cinema (Indians like Bollywood films because emotional melodramas are part of their essential cultural traditions). 18 Highlighting the risks of reading rasa as the “essence” of Indian culture and cautioning against the dangers of embracing elitist or high-brahminical ideologies of rasa as the pinnacle of Hindu philosophy or aesthetics, Dudrah and Rai examine rasa in Bollywood as a “contact zone” of affect. In this zone of affective contagion, Bollywood is a new media assemblage “through and in which bodies, sensations, capital, sexualities, races, technologies and desires rub up against each other, producing differing and differential rhythms, speeds, juices (or rasas), intensities, technologies, combinations, codes, possibilities, and even languages.”
Bollywood’s affect (or rasa) thus functions as “a framework of terms of reference” at the infrastructural level of cinema and urban life for the creation of new architectures of cities and film cities in India. In the next section, I discuss how the affective value of Bollywood circulates at the infrastructural level in the immaterial production and management of mass creativity through the concept of the film city in urban India.