Hindi Films : Power of Ignorance and Ambiguity - Tejaswini Ganti
Columbia Global Center, Mumbai invited Tejaswini Ganti, Associate Professor at New York University to talk on Bollywood. Ganti has done research over two decades of research on the Mumbai film industry, she reflected on some of the insights and lessons she has gained over time and the methodologies necessary for studying media industries, especially commercial film production. She demonstrated the value of embracing the element of uncertainty and critically examined statistical records and market data to arrive at a more holistic understanding of the Mumbai film industry.
The talk is being organized as part of the Center's Mumbai as a City of Knowledge initiative.
Tejaswini has to her credit 'Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry and Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema.
She talks about on what has been characterized as a perennial problem for the Hindi film industry—the inability to accurately measure commercial outcome. While commentators and industry personnel criticize and lament this inability as an impediment to the rational functioning of the Hindi film industry, she argues that rather than hindering the industry, the lack of accurate information is integral to its functioning. Relying on economic theory's definition of “ambiguity,” which refers to missing information that could be known, She reveals how the Hindi film industry's inability to accurately measure box-office outcome produces an ambiguity about commercial transactions that is actually generative and productive, enabling the industry to function and reproduce itself. In large-scale media industries like Bollywood, She contend, the presence of ambiguity is necessary and actually critical for the long-term existence of such industries.
She also feels that recent transformations have reduced the economic precarity that typified Hindi filmmaking for much of the industry’s history. Flexibility, fragmentation, decentralization, and their associated occupational/employment insecurities, which are cited as characteristics of a global late-capitalist order, have actually been defining features of the Hindi film industry since the end of World War II. Dramatic changes in the structure of the Hindi film industry were initiated after the Government of India recognized filmmaking as a legitimate industrial activity in 2000. Official designation as an industry paved the way for a greater variety of financing for filmmaking, including loans from banks and other financial institutions to certain extant, and initiated a number of structural changes commonly characterized as “corporatization,” where high-profile Indian conglomerates established new production-distribution companies or existing production, distribution, or exhibition concerns became public limited companies listed and traded on the Indian stock market. These new regimes of finance and organization in the film industry transformed it from a very undercapitalized enterprise with accompanying high rates of attrition and stalled films to one where raising capital was no longer an obstacle. However, these very conditions have produced a scenario where Hindi has become marginalized within the Hindi film industry.
One of the biggest changes in the political economy of the Hindi film industry since the advent of multiplexes and corporate production and distribution companies is the diminished significance of the “universal hit”—films that do well all over India and across all demographics. This is due to the structural transformations in filmmaking caused by the entry of corporate production companies and multiplexes, which have altered ideas of commercial success in the industry. Multiplexes, with their high ticket rates, revenue-sharing arrangements, and financial transparency, have managed to transform even low to moderate audience attendance or ticket sales into a sign of success. The entry of the Indian organized industrial sector into film production and the ability of established producers to raise money from the Indian stock market have diminished the role of traditional territorial distributors, who were always perceived by filmmakers as averse to cinematic experimentation. Many corporate producers have ventured into both all-India and overseas distribution and possess a much higher threshold for financial risk. These corporate distributors can either rely on profits from some territories to offset losses from others or profit from their investment by reselling distribution rights to individual territorial distributors. A universal hit is simply not as necessary within this new financing and distribution scenario. Thus there is less anxiety on the part of the financing side of the industry if a film appears limited in its appeal.
Over the period language has also seen a sea-change. The fact that some filmmakers are able to utilize language in a way that would have been regarded in an earlier era of filmmaking as limiting or alienating one’s audience has to do with changing structures of finance, production, distribution, and exhibition that have reshaped the Hindi film industry’s audience imaginaries. For example, Tigmanshu Dhulia, referring to his 2012 film Paan Singh Tomar, a biopic about a celebrated and medaled Indian steeplechase runner who is forced by circumstances to become a bandit, stated, “The language was Bundelhi; it was not even Hindi and I was scared that... I thought the audience would not even understand the language, but they did! So now cinema has changed, and it has changed for the better.”
She says that she feel vindicated about is in the type of films that are being made, the kind of money being made from such films. Her argument plays out in the whole desire within the industry to capitalize on the idea of new and opportunities. The nature of distribution has changed and has opened up the scene for people like Anurag kayshap, Vishal Bharadwaj, Imtiaz Ali—the ability to take risks is now possible through the structures of the industry. They are successful despite being different, it is because of creating different economic values. And ofcourse, the guys who want to make the big commercial-type films are also there, of course.
There are certain protagonists and topics that have come up that weren’t there—such as looking at people of more modest socio-economic means. Everything is not high gloss—you see more socio-economic diversity, there is more variety in the subject matter. Some things have changed, but others have stayed the same—it is still a very male-dominated cinema.
Are audiences telling film-makers what they want to watch, or are film-makers shaping taste or is it a bit of both?
What people don’t talk about is the universal hit. “Hundred crore” doesn’t quite have the same resonance, it communicates that there was a saturated release, higher ticket prices, and lots of people watched it. But there are lots of people who also distance themselves from such films.
In fact Ganti worked as an assistant director on a couple of movies in order to research . That transformed her view of the trade.
She came to understand how people worked and how they made decisions also learnt to appreciate the complexities of film-making, and not just fall into the trap of replicating people’s representation of themselves. People were constantly complaining about how inefficient and disorganized everything was, but she was also able to see how flexible film-making is in Bollywood, how nothing is written down. It was amazing to see at what an oral and aural culture is very much different from Hollywood where every thing go by the rule. It was an opportunity for her to appreciate improvisation and not fall into the trap of lamentation.
The talk is being organized as part of the Center's Mumbai as a City of Knowledge initiative.
Tejaswini has to her credit 'Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry and Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema.
She talks about on what has been characterized as a perennial problem for the Hindi film industry—the inability to accurately measure commercial outcome. While commentators and industry personnel criticize and lament this inability as an impediment to the rational functioning of the Hindi film industry, she argues that rather than hindering the industry, the lack of accurate information is integral to its functioning. Relying on economic theory's definition of “ambiguity,” which refers to missing information that could be known, She reveals how the Hindi film industry's inability to accurately measure box-office outcome produces an ambiguity about commercial transactions that is actually generative and productive, enabling the industry to function and reproduce itself. In large-scale media industries like Bollywood, She contend, the presence of ambiguity is necessary and actually critical for the long-term existence of such industries.
She also feels that recent transformations have reduced the economic precarity that typified Hindi filmmaking for much of the industry’s history. Flexibility, fragmentation, decentralization, and their associated occupational/employment insecurities, which are cited as characteristics of a global late-capitalist order, have actually been defining features of the Hindi film industry since the end of World War II. Dramatic changes in the structure of the Hindi film industry were initiated after the Government of India recognized filmmaking as a legitimate industrial activity in 2000. Official designation as an industry paved the way for a greater variety of financing for filmmaking, including loans from banks and other financial institutions to certain extant, and initiated a number of structural changes commonly characterized as “corporatization,” where high-profile Indian conglomerates established new production-distribution companies or existing production, distribution, or exhibition concerns became public limited companies listed and traded on the Indian stock market. These new regimes of finance and organization in the film industry transformed it from a very undercapitalized enterprise with accompanying high rates of attrition and stalled films to one where raising capital was no longer an obstacle. However, these very conditions have produced a scenario where Hindi has become marginalized within the Hindi film industry.
One of the biggest changes in the political economy of the Hindi film industry since the advent of multiplexes and corporate production and distribution companies is the diminished significance of the “universal hit”—films that do well all over India and across all demographics. This is due to the structural transformations in filmmaking caused by the entry of corporate production companies and multiplexes, which have altered ideas of commercial success in the industry. Multiplexes, with their high ticket rates, revenue-sharing arrangements, and financial transparency, have managed to transform even low to moderate audience attendance or ticket sales into a sign of success. The entry of the Indian organized industrial sector into film production and the ability of established producers to raise money from the Indian stock market have diminished the role of traditional territorial distributors, who were always perceived by filmmakers as averse to cinematic experimentation. Many corporate producers have ventured into both all-India and overseas distribution and possess a much higher threshold for financial risk. These corporate distributors can either rely on profits from some territories to offset losses from others or profit from their investment by reselling distribution rights to individual territorial distributors. A universal hit is simply not as necessary within this new financing and distribution scenario. Thus there is less anxiety on the part of the financing side of the industry if a film appears limited in its appeal.
Over the period language has also seen a sea-change. The fact that some filmmakers are able to utilize language in a way that would have been regarded in an earlier era of filmmaking as limiting or alienating one’s audience has to do with changing structures of finance, production, distribution, and exhibition that have reshaped the Hindi film industry’s audience imaginaries. For example, Tigmanshu Dhulia, referring to his 2012 film Paan Singh Tomar, a biopic about a celebrated and medaled Indian steeplechase runner who is forced by circumstances to become a bandit, stated, “The language was Bundelhi; it was not even Hindi and I was scared that... I thought the audience would not even understand the language, but they did! So now cinema has changed, and it has changed for the better.”
She says that she feel vindicated about is in the type of films that are being made, the kind of money being made from such films. Her argument plays out in the whole desire within the industry to capitalize on the idea of new and opportunities. The nature of distribution has changed and has opened up the scene for people like Anurag kayshap, Vishal Bharadwaj, Imtiaz Ali—the ability to take risks is now possible through the structures of the industry. They are successful despite being different, it is because of creating different economic values. And ofcourse, the guys who want to make the big commercial-type films are also there, of course.
There are certain protagonists and topics that have come up that weren’t there—such as looking at people of more modest socio-economic means. Everything is not high gloss—you see more socio-economic diversity, there is more variety in the subject matter. Some things have changed, but others have stayed the same—it is still a very male-dominated cinema.
Are audiences telling film-makers what they want to watch, or are film-makers shaping taste or is it a bit of both?
She answers this question in slightly different way. She feels that
audiences are unknowable. There is no such thing as an audience—there are just people who watch films. An audience has meaning only to media industries like film, advertising and television, which require the notion of a collective that has an impact on how things happen—television ratings, for instance. The box office is their way of saying that they know their audience. All the box office tells them is that someone bought a ticket. Most of the time it’s about the film-makers’ own projections and imaginations. This is not unique to India, but happens everywhere. It happens whenever you are trying to make media for large numbers—the producers are never going to have some kind of face-to-face contact. How we relate to films and why we like something is highly complicated.
What does she make of the Rs.100-crore movie, which seems to be a new benchmark for the industry?
She goes through the trade magazine, so I keep up with the trade and actually struck by how the figures are being trotted about—she remembers a time when every other film seemed to be flopping, when you would never share those figures. Now these figures are being trumpeted with every paper, so the first reaction was that something must have changed in the taxation codes, or the mafia situation, which is why they were not scared to share these reactions, rather than, something has changed in the business for them to be comfortable with sharing the figures.
No one really knows how much a film has made—it is a kind of creative math, in a sense. The notion of the hit is very important, which is why you are constantly announcing that the film has made so much money. Earlier, you would say that tickets for a movie were going in black, now you say, Rs.100 crore. It’s a way to promote the film and attract audiences.
audiences are unknowable. There is no such thing as an audience—there are just people who watch films. An audience has meaning only to media industries like film, advertising and television, which require the notion of a collective that has an impact on how things happen—television ratings, for instance. The box office is their way of saying that they know their audience. All the box office tells them is that someone bought a ticket. Most of the time it’s about the film-makers’ own projections and imaginations. This is not unique to India, but happens everywhere. It happens whenever you are trying to make media for large numbers—the producers are never going to have some kind of face-to-face contact. How we relate to films and why we like something is highly complicated.
What does she make of the Rs.100-crore movie, which seems to be a new benchmark for the industry?
She goes through the trade magazine, so I keep up with the trade and actually struck by how the figures are being trotted about—she remembers a time when every other film seemed to be flopping, when you would never share those figures. Now these figures are being trumpeted with every paper, so the first reaction was that something must have changed in the taxation codes, or the mafia situation, which is why they were not scared to share these reactions, rather than, something has changed in the business for them to be comfortable with sharing the figures.
No one really knows how much a film has made—it is a kind of creative math, in a sense. The notion of the hit is very important, which is why you are constantly announcing that the film has made so much money. Earlier, you would say that tickets for a movie were going in black, now you say, Rs.100 crore. It’s a way to promote the film and attract audiences.
What people don’t talk about is the universal hit. “Hundred crore” doesn’t quite have the same resonance, it communicates that there was a saturated release, higher ticket prices, and lots of people watched it. But there are lots of people who also distance themselves from such films.
In fact Ganti worked as an assistant director on a couple of movies in order to research . That transformed her view of the trade.
She came to understand how people worked and how they made decisions also learnt to appreciate the complexities of film-making, and not just fall into the trap of replicating people’s representation of themselves. People were constantly complaining about how inefficient and disorganized everything was, but she was also able to see how flexible film-making is in Bollywood, how nothing is written down. It was amazing to see at what an oral and aural culture is very much different from Hollywood where every thing go by the rule. It was an opportunity for her to appreciate improvisation and not fall into the trap of lamentation.
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