This post continues the ongoing “From Nottingham and Beyond” series, with contributions from faculty and alumni of the University of Nottingham’s Department of Culture, Film and Media. This week’s contributor, Sripana Ray, completed her PhD in the department in 2014.

As part of my current job, I recently did an ethnographic study, looking at how young, urban, middle-class Indians—the target audience group for the entertainment portal The Telegraph is about to launch—engage with online spaces. The two key conclusions that we drew from the several interviews we conducted in cities such as Delhi, Bombay and Bangalore were that India’s young, urban media consumers only look for instant information and that they use that information to realize their aspirations for a better lifestyle. As several of the respondents stated, that information—whether on politics, sports or films—is chiefly consumed on laptops, tablets and smartphones. There is no denying that with the proliferation of media technologies, this is the age of instant gratification–instant download, instant messaging, an Instagrammed world that needs to be made instagood.

The producers of contemporary Hindi commercial cinema have accommodated this generation’s immediate needs by reaching out through various online channels, especially social networks. Online discourses, particularly the ones conducted by film stars, give consumers of Hindi films a sense of belonging to the carefully constructed “real world” of these stars, feeding and fostering consumers’ aspirations.

Promotions of Hindi films routinely occur on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social platforms. Strangely enough, in the promotion exercise, there is a sense of fragmented gratification. The process has several stages, starting with the unveiling of the first look, usually a poster, followed by the release of the soundtrack and trailers. For some films, as was the case with Piku (Shootjit Sircar, 2015), a trailer is produced for the trailer—both of which were released on social media first. Thus, the Hindi commercial film becomes, to modify Tom Gunning’s term slightly, a cinema of staggered attractions.  (To view the clip below, click on the link to YouTube that appears after hitting the play button.)

The prefigurative route of assigning meaning to films, diverting from a strictly textual approach, has been a subject of growing interest among scholars. Martin Barker, in his article “News, Reviews, Clues, Interviews and Other Ancillary Materials,” notes that prefigurative materials or secondary texts, which include posters, trailers, reviews and interviews, “shape in advance the conditions under which interpretations of films are formed”[1]. These materials can give the audience a preview of what they would see and thus generate “expectations of pleasures,” or they might help form opinions about a particular film. These expectations and opinions, in turn, contribute to the construction of meaning of cinematic texts. The teaser of Piku, which shows the protagonists bantering about the quality of the upcoming trailer, gives viewers a hint about the characters’ personalities and the relationship they share, which is the premise of the film.

A central factor in the promotion of a Hindi commercial film is the star. In India, a film is labelled a blockbuster even “before the camera rolls,”[2] according to Andrew Willis. This means that the expectation of success determines the blockbuster status of a film. The elements that inspire such expectation include the director, the producer and the music composer, but most importantly the actors. The use of stars as a vehicle for promotion has evolved with time, primarily because of the public exposure stars get on television and online. The traditional methods of marketing a film, which included publishing and broadcasting sketchy information and gossip about film stars, have given way to a proper and more personal dialogue between actors and their audiences, abetted by the stars themselves. Through their Facebook and Twitter profiles, they talk about the films in which they star and give details about their personal relationships. In this sense, stars’ role in film prefiguration and promotion has now become much more direct. It is as if the stars have stepped out of the big screens to form an alternate narrative through an online discourse with fans that offers a glimpse of their “real” lives—the “reality” that these stars choose to reveal. It is a virtual transmission of projected reality.

Another strand of the promotional machinery becoming increasingly evident is the enmeshing of film stars’ virtual and real lives. Stars change their Twitter handles to the names of their characters in films–for example in Bombay Velvet (Anurag Kashyap, 2015) and Dil Dhadakne Do (Zoya Akhtar, 2015).

Anushka Sharma tweets about Bombay Velvet and displays her film character’s name prominently.

The Bombay Velvet trailer was released on Twitter, as was the soundtrack. As displayed in the image above, the film’s lead actress, Anushka Sharma, put the name of her character, Rosie Noronha, above her Twitter handle. The lead actor, Ranbir Kapoor, does not have a Twitter account. But his father, Rishi Kapoor (also an actor though not part of Bombay Velvet), ensured Ranbir Kapoor’s presence on the social network by continuously tweeting about him.

Actor Rishi Kapoor tweets about his film-star son.

For viewers, the public preview of stars’ private lives stimulates what Barker calls “expectations of pleasures.” However, the process of generating these pleasures is almost exclusively geared towards English-speaking audiences in urban India, especially with the Internet’s rising importance in this process. While the Internet can increase direct, close contact with the audiences, the interaction is meant for a particular section of the audience. Blogs, social networking and online gaming are all designed for urban audiences with Internet access and a requisite knowledge of English, since the web discourse is conducted solely in English.

The increasing use of English in discourses surrounding Hindi commercial cinema appeals to its consumers’ global aspirations. English proficiency constitutes symbolic capital that aids in the exhibition of urban, middle-class status and in gaining access to it. The cultural currency of education in, or at least knowledge of, the English language has emerged as a primary tool shaping middle-class identities and aspirations. It is also one that the Hindi commercial film industry increasingly uses as an essential mode of signification as it actively tries to draw the urban middle classes.

According to Janet Staiger, “the reception of the film by the spectator is determined by the object, not the spectator.”[3] But how does the object function at a particular time and for particular people? Staiger argues that a specific object, in this case a film, cannot be consumed in the same way by a group of viewers since “individuals have multiple (albeit socially constructed) identities.” But these self-identities are shaped by certain historical and social agencies such as nationality, class and gender that homogenize certain facets of identity, which in turn creates a collective consciousness. In developing India, the way secondary texts affect processes of viewing and the collective consciousness of Hindi commercial-cinema audiences is being recast through a continuous modernization exercise.

[1] Martin Barker, “News, Reviews, Clues, Interviews and Other Ancillary Materials — A Critique and Research Proposal,” Scope, February 2004 (http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/article.php?issue=feb2004&id=246).

[2] Andrew Willis, “Notes on the Hindi Blockbuster, 1975 to the Present,” in Movie Blockbusters, ed. Julian Stringer (New York: Routledge, 2003), 257.

[3] Janet Staiger, Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 51.

The parameters of the campaign suggest that it is no longer enough to simply promote one’s music through the channels offered and preferred by big industry players (i.e. Arcade Fire’s aforementioned NBC special that starred celebrities like Bono and James Franco and the SNL performance), nor to only draw upon avenues in line (philosophically and practically) with more independent means for circulating and promoting music. We are in the midst of a messy, conflicted, yet exciting moment when new promotional practices are being tested against big industry methods for producing, circulating, and performing music. And thus we get the conflation of an unknown band, The Reflektors, and the Grammy award-winning Arcade Fire.

Arcade Fire’s Reflektor campaign overwhelms all channels of communication and ensures a presence on multiple platforms through which today’s music fan interacts with music on a daily basis, both in-person or locally and online. But the campaign also emphasizes local sites of production and exhibition in popular music-making. And more importantly, the campaign has been centered on cosmopolitan cities with rich and diverse cultural and musical histories, namely Montreal and New York. The cosmopolitan city is reflected in both the campaign and the band’s current musical sound and style, and it is the new location in a series of Arcade Fire albums that foreground place – a Montreal borough on Funeral, a church-turned-studio on Neon Bible, and, of course, the alienating Houston suburbs on Suburbs.

While other cities have been integrated into the campaign, Montreal and New York have been particularly central, each doubling as a significant site of production for the band.

A poster for Arcade Fire’s “not-so-secret” secret show as The Reflektors at Salsatheque in Montreal.

Montreal, the band’s home, served as the site for the first show by The Reflektors. A review of the “not-so-secret show” at Salsathèque (a salsa club, not so much a rock venue) was described as “the (local) climax of an elaborate viral marketing campaign for their new single ‘Reflektor.’” The show would become the basis of the late-night NBC special, Here Comes the Night Time (the cosmopolitan city doesn’t sleep), as well as for a number of teaser trailers for the album. Reviewer Lorraine Carpenter points to the Haitian influences that have been added to the band’s look and sound. The band and the city of Montreal are both connected to Haiti. Montreal’s Haitian community is the largest in Canada and band member Régine Chassagne, whose parents emigrated from Haiti, has advocated the country’s need for aid following the 2010 earthquake. The sounds of the diasporas are the sounds of the cosmopolitan city.

Next, The Reflektors headed to Brooklyn, New York, to play two back-to-back events that would, amongst other things, carry the campaign into satellite radio through heavy promotion by Sirius XMU. New York is one of the cities where the album was recorded, with production by New York-based James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem (whose synths and drum beats are very much palpable on not just the single “Reflektor” but throughout the whole album). Artists who have been cited in reviews as standout influences on Reflektor (Talking Heads, for one, a comparison made ad nauseum) evoke a New York as heard through the coming together of sounds and styles both distant and local at key moments in the city’s musical history, namely proto-punk in the mid-1960s to mid-1970s (Bowie’s backing vocals on “Reflektor” are key here) and disco (Studio 54) of the late 1970s.

Following the Montreal and Brooklyn shows, The Reflektors continued the series of secret shows in other cities including Los Angeles and Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood, with funds donated to Partners in Health and the neighborhood’s cultural center. Only these subsequent shows were not as integral to the campaign itself.

It is important to consider what it means to evoke the cosmopolitan city through sound. Cultural capital is required for navigating and traversing the global and weaving it through the local and this is a privilege attainable through a successful career. Arcade Fire’s cultural accolades and accomplishments (The Suburbs won the Polaris, the Juno, and the Grammy for best album of 2011) are instrumental in this transition from the suburbs to the cultural and musical diversity evoked by the cosmopolitan city. Trips to Haiti, specifically the Carnival in Jacmel, become components of the campaign.

Also connecting the campaign to the cosmopolitan city is a notion of excess, evidenced by the recurring theme of the carnival and Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque. The campaign saturates a wide range of media outlets just as the city’s carnival overwhelms the senses. A multi-platform, intermedia campaign is a modern carnival steeped in excess; chaos and humor unfolding in reviews, reader comments, internet trolls, tweets, and blog posts. In person at the secret shows, concert-goers were required to be costumed and masked.

Rodin’s Orpheus sculpture on the Reflektor album cover.

To further drive the point home is the myth of Orpheus that recurs throughout the campaign. Auguste Rodin’s sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice is the album’s cover, there is a song titled “It’s Never Over (Oh Orpheus),” and the album leak was paired with Black Orpheus, Marcel Camus’ 1959 film that takes place during Brazil’s Carnaval. Many reviews of the album have pointed to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice as it pertains to the theme of reflection, but what is also of significance is that Orpheus is killed by the mythic agents of the carnivalesque, torn apart by Dionysus’ maenads. And here we can locate an important message that the band communicates through the campaign: to be wary of the ways in which the self is cut and chopped into fragments online and in contemporary culture. Our reflections, of our reflections, of our reflections.