Nitrate Cities: Spectatorial exertions and film experience in urban South Asia

Nitrate Cities investigates urban futurities in South Asia through embodied spectatorial practices and politics around cinema. Here the affect of cinema is examined in the way spectators alter their lived urban environment through peaceful as well as agitational activities. The nitrate base of celluloid, which once made film stock highly unstable and combustible, is a metaphor for local sensitivities. Liable to hurt and offense, these sensitivities are predominantly connected to religious beliefs, caste-class identities and historically constituted inter-community dynamics. Identifying cinema as the foremost representative space of negotiating social mobilities and future identities, Nitrate Cities builds on scholarship on cinema and the city (Mazumdar 2007, Bruno 2001) film preservation (Hediger 2011, Cherchi Usai 2009), and embodied spectatorship (Sobchack 1991, Marks 1999). The key objective is to conceptualize spectatorship in terms of attachments – old and new – that cinema sustains, offends and spawns. The project identifies spectatorial activity as an ‘exertion’ and not engagement or work, to underline the creative labor, affective energy and bodily force (rioting, squatting, burning, picketing) involved in the phenomena of spectatorial attachments. With city as the arena of spectatorial exertion, the study will situate the urban spectator as the linkage-site between historical grievances and contemporary marginalization. It will also seek to reduce the indeterminacy of the spectator by identifying the various roles they assume as preservationists, collectors, cult members, and political pressure groups. The role of new aesthetic infrastructures in architecture and archives, which rework cinematic forms and religious formations in crystallizing new attachments and collectivities will also be central to the research. Through a translocal comparative approach, the project seeks to investigate film publics constituted from a constant exchange between the two ends of the spectatorial spectrum - that of an ultra-spectator (fans, kinetomaniacs) and an anti-spectator (cinephobes). As the illustrative cases of the project reveal, the role played by emergent masculinities in precipitating spectatorial labour is significant even though these networks are informed by traditional notions of kinship and collective honour. It is this complex matrix of class, community and gender through which factions make their urban presence and political claims visible, primarily as film spectators.