With the expanse of the cinema audience for directors in mainstream and off-stream (often called parallel also) cinema, it is often challenging to make a movie for one particular audience. The fate of the movies these days does not only depend on the film and its cast, but also on where it is released, how it is marketed and promoted. With viral marketing often deciding the fate of films often, it is often questionable whether the moviemakers need to understand the audience at all in the first place. The role of the film critic has been diminishing of late. The fate of the movies films seems to be lying lie in the hands of the protagonist. A movie featuring an actor, who does a movie only once a year, is bound to garner attention, and so as is the movie with a famous actor who is taking has undertaken a complete image makeover. So that brings Which begs about the question, “Is the understanding of the audience absolutely un-necessary for the film maker?”

Many would say that no, it is the film stars who sell the film and hence the director should focus energy hereon that. However the group of cinephiles would argue against it.this. Cinephiles possess a thorough understanding of their audience, and are cognisent of They would understand not only what to project, using which actor, but also a thorough understanding of their audience. More often than not it is this group who end up launching fresh faces and an offbeat cinema that promises delivers on its essence, rather, rather than banking on the stars in it.

So let us try to understand why this understanding the audience is important and also difficult for the filmmaker. This notion of knowing the audience has been prevalent in arts since its inception and has also been adopted in other disciplines, like design. The whole new philosophy of designing for the user resulted in the User-Centered Design and broader understanding of experiencinge design. If we understand that the This was a direct relation to the inspirations that of the audience (user – in the case of the design) is of prime importance, the artist will and if the artist is able to understand that, they would succeed no matter what they produced.

There has been little in the way of studying As such there has been very less studies that are done on the cinema going audience, in particular . This is even lesser for the Indian cinema going audience in particular. Recently, Only recently there is been an attempt in this regard, with Adlabs Cinema and IMRB launcheding a cinema audience behavior study. The parameters that they are looking at are advertising exposure, cinema habits and exposure to media. The IMRB study will be focused on understanding the moviegoer in terms of movie viewing habits, behavior and the attitudes and preferences towards movie viewing and cinema viewing metrics like reach and frequency, understanding the in-theatre experience and evaluate the efficacy of the advertising options (at Adlabs screens), and monitoring / auditing the various advertising properties in the Adlabs properties.

While the intent may be right and the results not yet known still, it is interesting to understand the obstacles that the study could face. First and foremost, it is the reach of the cinema, which ranges from the metropolitans to the small towns in the country. When thinking about this aspect, one is forced to ask the more basic question, of. “Why does a person go to see a movie?”.” and surprisingly, it has aThe answer is different when we look closely at different answer if we look at the different audience personas. Being a culturally diverse country that India is, it this becomes all the more challenging. While the overall need would be that to see the movie, the audiences in the bigger cities often go for the “experience”. This experience is composed not only of the things in the movie seeing the film, but also in the factors that lead up to the that experience: right from selecting the company with whom to go to the movie to the point of discussing the movie after the movie film afterwards.

It therefore becomes necessary to understand what are the units of analysis the cinema audience has while len looking at the experiences that the cinema audience has. Now we know that this is primarily because Uunderstanding film is highly phenomenological. No two persons people have the same experience while watching a film. Identifying the parameters on which the experience cancould be measured is important.

But one may ask, why is it so difficult to understand audiences in the first place? In one empirical study that was done by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly and his team, they tried attempted to understand the experiences of museumgoer to an exhibition. However, empirical analysis of "experiences" is difficult as each experiencesexperience areis extremely subjective. It is simply not possible to put together measure anthe experience out there in a likert scale. Experience cannot be measured in numbers. It isThey are always qualitative in nature and these experiences are influenced by a gamut of parameters. Variables includeThings like the mood in which the audience goes to a movie, the person they go with, the theater that they go into. , start to play in a lot on the overall experience of the movie.

In one of his essays Christian Metz, mentions, "The good thing is that it (what is it??) is easy to understand. The bad thing about a film is that it is easy to understand." The above sentence is easy to read, but in reality, it’s an indication of a larger messier problem that cinephiles are constantly facingfaced day in and day out. So the larger question that one needs to ask is, what is the meaning of understanding to the audience?. And as mentioned, this depends on the different classes of the audience. This understanding of films between the audiences is equally important as the understanding to the makers of the movie. (Not sure what this last sentence means?)

Often tThere are certain misconceptions that surround the relationship that is built between the filmmaker and the audiences. Some of the most common ones are listed here. These include:

1) If one thing works, making a similar films stuff will work also. This has to be the mostis a common factor in Indian cinema ( common thing that prevailed and defined the image of the Indian Cinema. Rrich girl-poor boy love stories, angry young man, rags to riches story and so on). 2) If the old original movie was a hit, the remake will be a hit too. Well we all know how good or bad certain sequels or remakes were. Or do we have to go to Ramgadh to see if the rocks inspire a good movie?

3) Just because I have a good reputation, my films would will be a success. Haven’t we heard similar stories of directors losing their magic touch and being unable to make the same type of classic movie again?

4) If my movie has a high budget, it will succeed. A bugger budget often This directly meant means shooting the films in a foreign overseasland and the budget shot up invariably. I was surprised to see a very familiar location in a song sequence in a movie that was shot sometime in the late 1990s. The reason? Well I had just visited that location in San Francisco a day before!

What the directors and filmmakers should need to understand that with changing times, the audience has changed. Being able to accept that the audience will be able to distinguish between what is fed to them and what is accepted, is important. (Again, not sure what this last sentence means?)

The current audience is in a state like never before. With every website and paper offering reviews for the work of art, often the audience ends up in a state of is in danger of reading too much. The exposure to world cinema, Hollywood in particular and globalization has not made life easier for the filmmaker. The desire to follow the west and make a movie on those grounds is often played down by the audience who consider it a misfit within the domain of Indian culture.

The filmmaker can go and feed the audience with the same tried and tested formula of success, but there is will come a time when the current audience says enough of it and cannot take it further. So inIn these instances, this case it becomes imperative for the moviemaker to get out of the syntagm and try out something different. But as mentioned this is a highly risky thing to do. The stakes involved in doing something out of the box, is often high and not all cinephiles can take. The notion of creative tension has been widely been used in cinema.

It is making a choice between giving the audience that extra bit of emotional attachment with a movie and just having the entertainment value. With changing times in cinema, I believe that cinephiles need to bring in that emotional value to films all the more than before.

In an essay in his book Film Language, Metz mentions that one of the many problems in film theory is that of the “impression of reality” experienced by the spectator. Films give us the feeling that we are witnessing an almost real spectacle. Thus there is this constant hope and a parallel comparison between the audience’s lives and the events that are unfolding real time on the screen in a temporal framework. These points can be debated upon when looking into the case of the Indian audience in particular.

So now here I present the other side of the argument.

With a major large section portion of the Indian population living in the middle class and a considerable amount in the lower class, it is not proper realistic to generalize anything about the film cinema and its relation to reality. One can assume that if a villager is asked to pay cannot ask a villager to pay 20 Rupees to see their own lives on inscreen, they will be disappointed. and at the end they are disappointed because they saw their real life on cinema. The understanding and comparison to the true reality would perhaps be best suited only for the higher class of cinema going audience who aim to understand from a critical viewpoint. For the majority of the audience, the sole purpose of the going to the cinemas is to have some form of entertainment. Perhaps this could justify the This is best exemplified with whistles in the theaters at the arrival of the hero of the film, or every fight sequence being cheered.

One could also put the forward the point that this the notion of having have songs/ unrealistic action scenes and happy endings to add a little extra happiness in their life. It is an attempt to showcase a fantasy like world, which are not accessible to many within this the audience. So one can argue whether the filmmaker is wrong in trying to bring that extra joy in the lives of these people by shooting in exotic locations.

This Uunderstanding of reality happens in different mediums namely photography, film and theater. In terms of the entertainment value, audiences have been exposed to theatrical performances for a long timeart since a long time. There are performers in practically every festival, in every village, town or city across India. Indian commercial cinema is therefore a lot about the emotional value that it evokes. It is often a window to a world never seen before. Often the challenge for the filmmaker is between to show what they want to show to the audience, or to show what the audience wants to see. A cinematic vision and a style of direction like the shots in theas used in the film Irreversible would be the case an example of the former, and something like the notion of item numbers often would be a case of the later. It is therefore important to understand the commercial success, the critical success and the emotional level on which the film touches the audience. A fanatical movie-goer says, “Last week, I watched a couple of movies and realized that movies have a lot of power embedded in them. They can make my joy-filled heart cry; they can bring a smile on my sad face; make me realize things and change my thinking; and entertain and engage me completely.”

Some Film critics might would argue that films should be made for the believable factors and made to be as close a representation of the reality as closely as possible. But we need to discuss this from the point of view of the audience as well. With a widely varied audience that India boasts of, it becomes all the more necessary. (What is ‘it’?)

I would like to end with this quote from Metz, “The reason why cinema can bridge the gap between true art and the general public, in large part anyway, and why film makers are able to speak for others, and not just their friends, is that films have the appeal of a presence and of a proximity that strikes the masses and fills movie theaters.”

The role of the audience in a true sense,sense is a good point for discussion and we should be doing it here.

References: 1) Christian Metz, On the Impressions of Reality, in book Film Language – a semiotics of the cinema, Oxford University Press, 1974.