Keynote: Madhusree Dutta

On 7 July 2024, filmmaker and film curator Madhusree Dutta delivered the final keynote of the Cinema of Commoning Symposium. Below is an edited transcript of her presentation.

Madhusree Dutta: I come from a country in South Asia that produces almost as many films annually as Hollywood. I say “almost” because sometimes it’s more, sometimes it’s less, but it’s always a significant number. Indian cinema is produced in many languages and accents, yet in this part of the world, Indian mainstream cinema is often referred to, somewhat patronizingly, as “Bollywood.” The term “Bolly” was coined because many Indian films are produced in the city of Bombay, where I live. In some sense, I reside in the heart of popular cinema of the Global South. 

In many countries of the Global South, this generic “Bollywood” cinema is watched with greater fervor than Hollywood flicks. Film studies scholars all over the world have named this a post-colonial phenomenon, a form of cultural resistance. Personally, I find that notion a bit too romantic—but that’s a debate for another time. Since Bombay produces so many films and hosts numerous ancillary cultural industries— from music, to fashion, beauty, event and grooming industries—the popular perception of my home city is shaped by the images it produces of itself. 

In 2012, I was part of a project called Citizens of Cinema City, which sought to explore what cinema does to the city and its people when produced on an industrial scale.  We understand the effects of cities that produce steel, textiles, chemicals, or coal. But what happens to the citizens of a city that produces images on an industrial scale?

As part of this project, I interviewed Sushila, a domestic worker who was 35 years old at the time. She belonged to what I call the third generation cinegoers, born after the advent of narrative cinema. Sushila was an ardent fan of “curtain cinema,” a ritualistic form of open-air community viewing popular in many countries. A white curtain would be hung in the street, and people would sit on both sides to watch the movie. This community event occurred every weekend and during religious festivals. 

Sushila, a native of Bombay, grew up watching three feature films a night at these open-air screenings with her entire neighborhood. No film festival in the world can boast of such an achievement! Across the year, every weekend, three films are viewed collectively by an entire community. I don’t know whether these cinegoers could be called cinephiles or not, but they undoubtedly watched more moving images than I could dream of watching in my lifetime. 

When I asked Sushila about the idea of a “Cinema City,”  she said: “Oh, I have visited them all. The wide roads, the seaside, the tall buildings. Bombay is exactly like cinema!” For her, the iconic images of the city, magnified on the cinema screen, shaped her personal experience of the world. The real-life locations she encountered daily were mediated through her memories of communal viewing and common perceptions. Through this lens, the Alps of Europe and the Arabian Sea in Bombay were equally familiar and equally distant. Cinema, in a way, generates familiarity without proximity. 

I argue that this phenomenon makes cinema a public culture, a culture that is non-domestic in nature and inherently inclusive. Cinema, as a culture rooted in reproducibility and repetition rather than originality, fosters a public that shares a common perception. These perceptions may not always be evidential, but neither are they entirely fictitious. As such, cinema has the potential to create a sense of commonality across class, ethnicity and even political borders. 

The larger the screen, the greater the public it attracts, binding them through shared experiences and memories. By “public,” I refer to groups of people who together, form an overarching entity. These cinema viewers may not personally know one another or share a common language, livelihood, practice, food, clothing, custom, social and cultural heritage and so on. Yet, for a brief period, popular cinema binds many shades of otherness into a shared experience. Film festivals, on a smaller scale, achieve something similar. 

Here, I would like to distinguish between popular culture and public culture. Popular culture, such as cinema, involves significant financial stakes and can lean towards populism by homogenizing diverse people. Public culture, however, can evolve locally around simple infrastructure: a square, a prominent park, a single-screen cinema, wherever you can hang a curtain. For me, the public culture of the commons is at stake here, because popular cinema no longer needs a public. It is no longer about “one print, many eyeballs.” Now, it’s “one file or one link,” distributed across a fragmented audience.

To understand this phenomenon, about a decade ago, a group of around 100 filmmakers, visual artists, cultural scholars, architects and urban planners launched Project Cinema City. Our focus was less on cultural or film studies and more on urban planning—studying the history of cinema spaces rather than (the history of) filming locations. These are distinct: the sites where films are produced and where they are consumed, are two clearly differentiated spaces, and this distinction is important to make.  When a city produces cinema on an industrial scale, it leaves imprints—not necessarily in the narratives of the films but on the city itself.

Since the turn of the millennium, changing priorities in cinema technology and altered policies around the use of urban land have contributed to the collapse of large public theaters around the world. With this decline, cinema has ceased to function as a public culture. Popular cinema still exists, but the public spaces where different identities come together/ intermingle to consume it are vanishing. So what emerges instead? Niche spaces appear, but these are not the open, inclusive public spaces that once facilitated broad communal interactions.

There are many niche spaces where cinema thrives in unexpected ways, but I’d like to focus on one such example which we came across in our research. It is not an avant-garde or subcultural space, nor a site of substantial resistance by Berlin standards. Yet, it is subversive, precarious and deeply political. Informally called “slum cinema,” these spaces reflect the realities of Bombay’s migrant workers, whose numbers have continued to grow in the 21st century. India’s linguistic diversity— the country has 32 official languages and thousands more are unrecognized—means that migrants arrive in Bombay from vastly different cultural contexts. In Bombay, multiple languages are spoken simultaneously, but linguistic differences often expose these workers as outsiders, especially during periods of heightened racial tension. To navigate these challenges, many migrants adopt strategies of silence to avoid drawing attention to themselves.

Migrant workers typically live in language-based clusters across the city’s suburban districts. Around these areas, makeshift cinemas emerge amid rows of lottery kiosks, tobacco shops, coconut stalls, tea vendor’s carts, and mobile repair stalls. These camouflaged cinema exhibition centers remain illegible, if not invisible, to the wider public. They are often demolished by the municipality, only to reappear a few meters away. The transient nature of these cinemas mirrors the precarious lives of their patrons, whose access to work depends on external factors such as weather, monetary flow, supply chains, economic policies. Their accommodations are usually limited to a mat for eight hours of sleep, leaving them to spend the remaining 16 hours on the streets, often seeking refuge in these cinemas. These places function as entertainment houses, temporary shelters, waiting zones, and also as community centers for people speaking the same language. So in Bombay, if you need a plumber at a cheap price, then you know where to go. You go to the cinema houses, and you say that you’re looking for two plumbers and an electrician, for instance, and somebody will go inside and send the workers out. They will go home with you, get the work done and then return back to the cinema to bide their time until they can go home to sleep. This is the safe place for these migrant workers in the city. The irony is that the space that provides this safety is itself unauthorized and precarious.

Despite their rudimentary setup—cheap projectors or even a single TV—the cinemas are vibrant spaces animated by blaring, culturally-specific soundtracks. For many patrons, the familiar audio becomes a symbol of longing. It is these audio tracks spilling out of the shanties and filling up the street outside that betray the camouflaged existence of these illegal entertainment shops. Unlike the neighborhood theaters of the past, these cinemas cater exclusively to single-class audiences, organized around linguistic communities.  In this way, cinema, though still a dominant form of popular culture, ceases to be public culture, becoming instead a concealed, cult-like activity. 

To illustrate a contrasting scenario, I would like to share an excerpt from Fried Fish, Chicken Soup and a Premiere Show. This documentary follows the production of a feature film in Manipur, a Himalayan borderland that resists the hegemonic rule of mainland India and of global cinema. In Manipur, there has been a strong political campaign to boycott Bollywood and Hollywood movies, so instead, the youth are being encouraged to watch pirated Korean flicks. Manipuri young people have even begun sending each other messages in Korean so they can hide what they’re saying from their parents. They began incorporating Korean culture, because it has nothing to do with Hollywood and Bollywood.

Public culture is essential for the people of Manipur. Public spaces, such as open markets run by women, religious rituals, street performances, screening in public squares and public protests are all very common things. But for the last couple of decades, the Indian Army has banned all public and communal activity, even large assemblies of people in Manipur. Yet, life still flows, people still make films, and the public still watches cinema. Against this backdrop, the film documents a local cinema movement that persists despite political and social challenges, championing a distinct cinematic identity free from mainland India’s influence.

When we first began to discuss the theme of this keynote with Can Sungu from SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA, I mentioned the “right to opacity,” a concept that acknowledges why certain communities might resist being archived, represented or even historicized. However, given the Symposium’s focus on cinema spaces and archives, I chose instead to address public cinema and its precarious spaces. 

To honor the theme of opacity, I’ll end with a clip from Malegaon, a town 200 kilometers from Bombay. Known for its textile industry and small-scale cinema productions, Malegaon films parody Hollywood and Bollywood blockbusters with titles like Superman of Malegaon or Titanic of Khandesh.  Yet the making of Malegaon films involves substantial transgression, in terms of production process and narrative structure, from the originals to which they claim an attachment. This is a local cinema, and their stories revolve around local narratives. But the strategy of attaching their works to the superpowers, Bollywood and Hollywood, gives the Malegaon filmmakers immunity from state surveillance, as well as providing market viability. Nobody will come to see a random film made in Malegaon, but as soon as you use Superman, people are interested. By producing films which riff on Hollywood titles, they firmly erase the footprints of their own works, and in turn, insist on their existence in the periphery, from where they can vanish at any time. They will not let you document or archive them. They can vanish by wearing the veil of a copy. It’s a form of protection. Malegaon Cinema creates an opacity around itself. We are only a copy, merely a copy. It is an anti-history, anti-evidence stance, a refusal to be pinned down, that underscores the community’s resilience. 

Audience Question: Earlier, you mentioned that you weren’t sure if some of these audiences you were talking about could be considered cinephiles. Could you elaborate on this?

Madhusree: I’m hesitant to use the term because cinephilia suggests a particular kind of attachment to cinema. When we talk about cinema and access to it, we usually focus on avant-garde productions, which brings me some discomfort. I know that in these theaters, my own films would never be shown. This is not an audience that will watch avant-garde films. They watch a lot of films—far more than so-called cinema aficionados—but their engagement is different. 

We’ve tried to screen some classic, critical films in these alternative migrant cinema spaces, and it is possible, but gmit requires staying for a long time and gradually introducing these works. My concern is that if we insist on maintaining these special niche spaces, privileging what we personally enjoy consuming, that becomes a kind of colonialism in itself. 

During the pandemic, I started reflecting on this more deeply and felt that the avant-garde has, in some ways, failed us. We shouldn’t always try to get ahead. How do we stay with people—stay in the middle, or maybe even fall behind? I feel a slight discomfort with my own breed, the “avant garde breed.” There is always this contradiction between myself as a filmmaker and the curatorial projects that I do, where I actually undermine my own work as a filmmaker. So, in one sense, I’m a cinephile, but in another, I’m very impatient with cinephiles.

Audience Questions: I really appreciated how you explore the ways in which cinema takes over space—not just in terms of people’s imaginations or how they imagine cinema, and how they see themselves in Bombay, but also in the physical presence of billboards, posters and film memorabilia everywhere. Could speak a little bit about working on the Project Cinema City book and where you stand with this research now? 

Madhusree: Now that I’m in Berlin, I’m not as closely involved anymore. Berlin’s public or popular culture isn’t centered on cinema. Berlin is not a Cinema City—perhaps other European cities are, but Europe’s public culture generally is not cinema-focused. It might be more about music or other forms of art. 

In the Global South, however, cinema is public culture. Living in Europe now has distanced me from this kind of research, which dealt with the ways cinema permeates every aspect of life.  In cities like Bombay, cinema isn’t just a two or three hour experience; it’s part of the production and consumption processes that people live with daily. For example, in a coal mining city, even if not everyone is a miner, they are connected to the industry’s culture. Similarly, in Bombay, not everyone works in the film industry, but they live with the images the city produces. 

Bombay, once an industrial city, has transformed over the past fifty years into a hub for the service and image industries. The city is enormous—a country in itself, with 25 million people, more than some nations. Its main production culture is now focused on images, creating a unique phenomenon. I came to Bombay as a migrant and aspiring filmmaker to learn my craft. Though I’m neither an urban studies nor film studies scholar, I dedicated nearly a decade of my life to this project. I became so deeply involved that the only way I could escape being consumed by it was to move to Germany. That’s the stage I’m at now.

Still, this work has inspired many other projects. People from other cities in India, as well as from Tehran and Cairo, have told me that the Cinema City project motivated them to start similar initiatives. It’s not being replicated exactly, but the idea of connecting images to the spaces they’re produced in is spreading. That’s the discipline I hope to push forward. 

Madhusree Dutta is a filmmaker, author, and curator of interdisciplinary art practices based in Mumbai and Berlin. She was the artistic director of Akademie der Künste der Welt, Cologne (2018-2021), and executive director of Majlis, a center for rights discourse and inter-disciplinary art initiatives in Mumbai (1998-2016). In 2019, she was awarded the Cultural Manager of the Year by the Cologne Cultural Council and was the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award at International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala. Her non-fiction films on urbanology, identity politics and contemporary culturescapes have been widely screened, and awarded nationally and internationally. She has been jury to several international film festivals, including Berlinale Shorts 2015. She has authored and edited books on cultural economy and citizenship. Her most recent book How to Make Female Action Heroes, 2023 is published by Arsenal in collaboration with Kayfa ta. Her curatorial works focus on urban public cultures, memory practices, and cultural hybridity.