Breaking Bollywood: Moving pictures on mobile screens

This paper examines the exhibition and consumption of popular Hindi films in the mobile phone landscape in India. Discourse on watching media on cellphones has focused on the lack of immersion as a shortcoming of the cellphone as a screen. This criticism is rooted in the most traditional aspects of Apparatus Theory. I argue that immersion as a category is inadequate to understand the massive changes in visual culture that are enabled by the cellphone as a screening device. In India, the film and the mobile phone industries have a thriving pirate underbelly that co-exists with and constantly undermines the ‘official’ industry. In studying the intersections between cinema, mobility, and piracy, I hope to illustrate how the cellphone has shaped a viewing culture that is marked by poor quality images, pirated media, and failure, leading to a fragmentation of the film object that is not mourned but rather celebrated for the possibilities of access that it opens up.