Megastar: Chiranjeevi and Telugu Cinema After NT Ramo
1 Whistling Fans and Conditional Loyalty hat can cinema tell us about the politics of our time? There can of Wcourse be little doubt that studies of the cinema, from Siegfried Kracauer's magnum opus on German cinema (2004) to M.S.S. Pandian's (1992) study of MGR, have attempted to answer precisely this question. The obscene intimacy between film and politics in southern India provides an opportunity for students of cinema to ask the question in a manner that those in the business of studying politics would have to take seriously. This chapter argues that this intimacy has much to do with the fan-star relationship. Chiranjeevi's career foregrounds the manner in which this relationship becomes one of the important distinguishing features of Telugu cinema, as also a key constituent of the blockage that it encounters. Earlier accounts of random by social scientists (Hardgrave Jr. 1979, Hardgrave Jr. and Niedhart 1975, and Dickey 1993: 148-72) do not ponder long enough upon this basic question of how it is a response to the cinema. As a consequence, their work gives the impression that the fan is a product of everything (that is, religion, caste, language, political movements) but the cinema. I will argue instead that the engagement with cinema's materiality—or what is specific to die cinema: filmic texts, stars and everything else that constitutes thjs industrial-aesthetic form—is crucial for comprehending random. STUDYING FANS Fans' associations (FAs) are limited to south Indian states.1 Historically speaking, however, some of the earliest academic studies of Indian 4 Megastar Whistling Fans and Conditional Loyalty 5 popular cinema were provoked, at least in part, by the south Indian occasion to discuss (mis) readings of audiences at some length in the star-politician and his fans (for example, Hardgrave Jr.
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