ABSTRACT
Introduction Carl Plantinga argues that psychological film studies have so circumscribed the terms “pleasures”, “desires” and “fantasy” that it has become imperative to expand the understanding of the pleasures of viewing films and the functions of fantasy and desire within narrative. Plantinga also interrogates the notion of pleasure as defined in screen studies and maintains that “the spectator’s pleasure in viewing mainstream films is more complex and contradictory than screen theory allowed” (Plantinga 2009, 19). Using a “cognitive-perceptual approach” to the moviegoing experience (Plantinga 2009, 39), he identifies five sources of audience pleasure in mainstream films, namely: (i) cognitive play, (ii) visceral experience, (iii) sympathy and parasocial engagement, (iv) satisfying emotional trajectories rooted in narrative scenarios, and (v) various reflexive and social activities associated with film viewing such as criticism and appreciation (Plantinga 1995). He also regards the intratextual experience of viewing films to be as important as the intertextual and extratextual. In an earlier essay, Plantinga and Tan engaged in an exchange about the global nature of film affect and concluded that “the study of affect is best initially approached at the local level, as the attempt to isolate and describe individual affects or affect trajectories, and the structures that elicit them” (Plantinga and Tan 2007, 16). They proposed that “at the global level, we can best approach a film as an intentional orchestration of multiple affects, rather than as a text that generates a single, overarching affective or emotional state” (Plantinga and Tan 2007, 16). Overarching theories of film affect fail to elucidate the multiple affects of Hindi films for South Asian viewers, particularly diasporic viewers, for whom the pleasures of the cinematic text are invariably imbricated in the extratextual pleasures of the sensuous geographies they evoke. viewing cinema as an event, this chapter traces the history of film exhibition in Singapore to unpack the meanings of going to the movies for Singapore’s diverse ethnicities. It begins by providing a brief overview of the history of cinematic exhibition in Singapore and the social centrality Indian films have traditionally performed among Singapore’s diverse ethnic groups, before focussing on a cineplex exclusively dedicated to the screening of Hindi films. The description of this experience is based on personal observation, open-ended interviews with cinemagoers
in July 2009, 2010 and October 2011 as well as on information obtained from internet chats and blogs.
