The other day I was watching Bhoot Bangla, and had some thoughts about the relationship between International cinema (i.e. films not made in India), and certain Indian films. For instance, I noticed that Bhoot Bangla reminded me at times of Hitchcock as well as Gaslight. The question I asked myself is not whether the Indian film had copied from these or not, but rather how the imagining of audiences, and the possibilities of affecting them through a particular medium, were imagined in similar ways. These days, there is - to my non film-theory eyes - a dovetailing of audience imaginings in popular Bollywood and popular Hollywood. Is this because the cinematic audience is globally imagined in similar ways? Or is it because one of the definitions of faux universality is that there is, instead, a very particular universality which responds to particular affects. Or, perhaps, the audience is trained to respond with bums on seats to particular forms only because other forms do not demand bums on seats? This last question throws up, for me, as always, questions of interpellation and the creation of a global cinematic subject-consumer.
Clearly something is working, because Spiderman 3 is kicking ass in the Indian box office. A recent post by Sanjay Lafont at Remains of the Desi says

Cinema is about the exploration of possibilities. The creation of a cinematic work is about opening up the field of possibilities as wide as possible, not about restricting it to a perceived permutation of elements and running the work through the formula machine. Paris is a film that exemplifies the philosophy of a Cinema of Possibilities, regardless of whatever flaws there might be in the work. Bollywood, ironically, often rips off entire foreign films or full sequences within and ‘Indianises’ them. Doesn’t that already smack of ‘un-Indian’ influences? Numerous young talents I know have stories to tell that are dismissed as “non-commercial” or “un-Indian” by ‘those who know better’, and find themselves forced to re-shape them into “commercial, pan-Indian, marketable” stories. These stories are original, and come from their India, the India they know and live, and maybe that’s what some producers don’t want to recognise in their quest for the elusive hit. Bollywood’s attempts to force a pan-Indian definition on an India that is increasingly and healthily growing into a sum of equal parts is as gross as its prevailing cinematic philosophy of making the maximum amount of money with the minimum amount of (original) work, of bending the structures of a medium that is fundamentally artistic to a raw and unsympathetic business model.

Cinema of possibility - I like this phrase. I am sure some of our heavy duty film theory people (UM, Kishore, Meenu, Som) will disagree with the expression. Every situation has non actualized potentials running parallel to it - things that could have happened, things that could happen, things that should have happened. I am quite interested in the way’s in which, in other contexts, any belief in these non actualized potentials is dismissed as Utopian rhetoric - we have what we have, any thing else is mere fantasy. But, the sense I got from Sanjay’s post is that the primary mode of engagement that all his colleagues (i.e. starving Mumbai DV film makers, not gleefully employed art directors at Yash Raj) have is one of possibility. The crucial point for me is that this is imagined as parallel and impossible by the people dolling out the money precisely because non actualized (i.e. virtual) possibility can only exist within a very particular frame of reference - and that is the global consumer. So, how does one become this global consumer? Quite simply, as Pascal suggests apropos belief, kneel down, pray and the belief will come to you itself. In other words, sit on the seat, watch the film, and you will reteroactively assume that you have done that because you are, in fact, the global masses. Perhaps this is the accident with which their big audiences who make films earn billions of dollars enter a cinema. Not “cool, another film with SpiderMan!” but “Oh dear, another film. Let’s see what the fuss is all about…” BANG. You are the audience.