Movie magic: An ethnography of the cinematic experience

Audiences of popular cinema in India adopt an extreme mode of participatory and interactive viewing. In movie theaters, viewers not only whistle and cheer but routinely shout out to characters and stars as they repeat on-screen dialogue or improvise dialogue in response to on-screen events. As all Indian films are musicals where the narrative is punctuated at regular intervals by operatic song and dance sequences, viewers frequently sing along with the soundtrack and may dance standing up in their seats or below the screen. Audience members throw coins at the screen in appreciative display or may rip up upholstery in the seating with razor blades and knives to critique the film or the viewing conditions.;Cinema is elaborated by such activities and its meanings are transformed. Indian audiences are seen to make visible aspects of media reception and meaning-making which have remained inaccessible to researchers who have exclusively studied mainstream media audiences in the west. The comparatively quieter, more disciplined and atomised viewing styles of western audiences have prevented a look inside the 'black box' of media reception. The study of Indian audiences becomes strategic as it allows an unpacking of the reception experience and provides a model for trans-cultural media studies.;This dissertation is a sociological study of the cinematic experience. Using ethnographic methods of participant observation and in-depth interviews, I investigate the ways in which movie-going, constituted on the one hand by those within the film industry, is made meaningful by audiences who actively construct the event. Following the movie-going experiences of habituated audiences reveals that cinema is made meaningful not simply through "decoding" film content, but through the social relations attendant to movie-going. I offer a social relations or interactionist model of cinematic reception which allows an understanding of cinema as a social world. In this conceptualisation, cinema itself maybe understood as a series of interactions between those recognised as its producers and others categorised as consumers or recipients. However ethnographic study throws such distinctions into question and reveals consumers engaged in production and in shaping the effects of media products on themselves.