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This paper explores Fans Associations (FAs), especially of Andhra Pradesh, as a
phenomenon deriving from socio-political transformations and industrial aesthetics.
Here, I seek to carry on an ongoing critique of text-centered film studies by outlining ways films and audiences need to be analyzed together in order to develop a substantial sense of the meaning of cinema. While developing approaches for analyzing cinema which exceed the hermeticism of textual analysis, I argue that we must hold onto the centrality of cinema as text and industrial form with its own specific political significance. Approaches to the study of fans and stars deriving from social science disciplines have tended to be rather innocent of the cinema as an industrial-aesthetic form. They tend to give the impression that the fan is a product of everything—religion, caste, language, political movements—but the cinema.1 I will argue that the cinema’s history and materiality are crucial for comprehending fandom, and that a study of fans is necessarily a study of the cinema. In the process, I hope to open a discussion about how to theorize a public culture which is not primarily reliant on the print-based communication or public sphere theory that remains inextricably linked to print-derived notions of publicness, but derives from audience engagement with a regime of spectacle. Here I want to complicate models of viewership and audience engagement that presume a passive consumer as well as those that attribute oppositional politics (resistance) to the viewer. The spectator I deal with is an excessive figure who is highly active, public, and interventionist, especially at the site of exhibition and in a host of allied social, political and cultural activities centered on the power and allure of the star.
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