After the single screen: performing publics at large

In the twentieth century, the cinema hall was a key facilitator of social mixing in India where there were few spaces that were accessible to Indians across caste, gender and religious differences. Film researchers argue that cinema’s audience was something of a microcosm of the Indian nation itself. In the twenty-first century, due to a number of factors including the closure of single screen cinema halls, unaffordable pricing in multiplexes, and proliferation of mobile devices more recently, theatrical viewing was on the decline. This chapter focusses on what the space of the cinema hall facilitates in the digital present when we are more likely to watch a film on a small screen – television, laptop or mobile screen – than in a movie theatre. Drawing on widely circulated videos of happenings within movie theatres, the chapter argues that these videos offer ethnographic evidence of the evolution of the movie theatre as the site performances by audiences. The activities of viewers, which range from sloganeering to dancing, underscore the continued relevance of the movie theatre as a public space, albeit of a public that is neither formed by the cinema nor bound by it.