House Full: Indian Cinema and the Active Audience by Lakshmi Srinivas

Abstract

Reviewed by: House Full: Indian Cinema and the Active Audience by Lakshmi Srinivas Jasmine Nadua Trice (bio) House Full: Indian Cinema and the Active Audience by Lakshmi Srinivas. University of Chicago Press. 2016. $112.50 hardcover; $37.50 paper; also available in e-book. 312 pages. The title of Lakshmi Srinivas's provocative 2016 book, House Full: Indian Cinema and the Active Audience, positions the work as a revision of one of cinema and media studies' most critiqued analytical categories. The "active audience" is most commonly associated with audience studies research that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s amid heated debates about the nature of structure and agency, the political stakes of research, and the perceived overreach of postmodernism in media studies. Such debates reflected a bifurcated field, divided into cultural studies and political economy approaches. The former located the power of meaning at the point of reception—audiences were no longer "passive" receptacles of media texts but "active" interpreters and producers of textual meaning. Emerging as a corrective to the textually driven theories of spectatorship that had ruled the field during the heyday of screen theory, models of the active audience deprioritized state policy and industrial structure, deploying a variety of empirical research methods to investigate the ways that audiences might read "against the grain" of mainstream media texts.1 In response, critics deemed this approach indulgent, irrelevant, and even dangerous in its populism, inordinately focused on the vagaries of individual interpretation. Over time, such critiques would seem to have won out, making House Full's revision of the much-maligned label "active audience" an interesting choice. More recent trends in the field have not so much [End Page 184] rejected the audience as turned toward the audience's interaction with industry, working at the interstices of structural and agential approaches to media studies.2 Much recent research in Indian, primarily Hindi-language, cinema has taken an industrial approach as well, parsing the industry's transformation from a putatively national enterprise to a transnational, multimedia business.3 By comparison, House Full is highly localized, focusing on industrial protocols only as a means of understanding their implications for social practices. It uses the term "active" to "describe the voluble cinema hall audience and an in-theater experience marked by spontaneity, improvisation and performance that is far removed from the silent absorption of film associated with mainstream audiences in Anglo-American and Western European (multiplex) settings."4 Srinivas describes these practices as "an active aesthetic," a "mainstream aesthetic of engaging with cinema," positioning this attention to audience as a means of embodying the abstract spectator of gaze theory.5 In this way, the research adds considerably to the growing scholarship on film exhibition in India, where single-screen cinemas have decreased dramatically due to growing middle-class affluence and the parallel emergence of multiplex cinemas.6 Unlike these other works, however, House Full is not as concerned with institutions of production or industry, although filmmakers, theater managers, and distributors are key informants in its analysis. Rather, drawing from the work of anthropologists Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge, Srinivas describes her objects of study as located in the social. As she writes, "the 'field,' then, includes Indian cinema's 'public culture,' defined … as a 'zone' or 'arena' of 'cultural debate,' a 'partially organized space' where various cultural forms encounter one another."7 Her interest is not just in cinema per se but also in the social meanings, forms of collectivity, and negotiations of class and gender identity that emerge in the sites where film culture interacts with public culture. Srinivas's research is organized around a specific field site, the city of Bangalore, the capital of the South Indian state of Karnataka. Consequently, the work is at once highly localized in its setting and extremely porous in its approach to what constitutes the cinema. The space of the theater is contiguous with the space of the city, and this local context—based on spaces and social networks that exist outside the theater itself—becomes the grounds for shaping the cinema experience. Locating her study in [End Page 185] this cosmopolitan, urban setting, Srinivas describes her "active reception aesthetic" as a subdued variation...