Obsolescence

Abstract

Planned obsolescence as a model for manufacturing ensures repetitive consumption by artificially limiting the lifespan of a product and forcing the customer to purchase upgraded versions frequently. In South Asia, the resistance to obsolescence found its expression most noticeably in film exhibition, exemplified in the persistence of traveling cinemas in South Asia well into the post-independence period, often with the aid of vintage and retrofitted movie projectors. These traveling cinemas allowed exhibitors with limited resources to take the cinema to audiences in rural areas. Vestigial optical devices from the 19th century, variants of the zoopraxinoscope, survive in the peepshow device of the ‘Bioscope’, in both non-mechanical and retrofitted forms that incorporate DVD and VHS players and loudspeakers. The lifecycles of ‘junk’ or damaged and worn film prints are extended as slum film exhibitors rescue every scrap of exposed footage discarded by studios or film theatres and revivify them as part of their screening programmes. Obsolescence is mitigated at the level of machinic assemblages (projector–film–projectionist), interfaces (projectionist–screen–audience) and infrastructures (tent–projector–screen–seating) that constitute the experience of the cinema (Mahadevan, 2015). To be sure, tent cinemas or bioscope shows have always been ‘minor’ practices, in the sense of being scaled down analogues, as well as disseminators in more modest circumstances, of theatrical, cinematic mass entertainment. But they point to challenges, such as sufficient access to capital to establish a more permanent footing in the film business, that were encountered by most South Asia film entrepreneurs. These challenges persist today. Contemporary film-makers in Lahore, ethnographer Gwendolyn Kirk discovered, use vintage 35mm cameras from the 1940s, reel-to-reel tape players from the 1960s and handwritten rather than typed scripts for their shoots because PCs and digital cameras remain unaffordable (Kirk, 2016). Second, the absence of local manufacture of film technologies ensured the persistence and survival of older models of film cameras and projectors, alongside newer ones. This is especially true for photography as ‘antique’ wet-plate processes from the mid-19th century could be found as late as the 1910s in the bazaars of Calcutta, and manual exposure cameras dating to the 1870s were being used in fairgrounds well into the 1990s. Third, the infrastructures for minor practices can be generated from below and from above, by the state and by pirate forces. By the 1980s, video editing devices found their way from the Indian state-run TV network Doordarshan, to wedding videographers via Delhi’s grey markets, who in turn remediated the aesthetics of cinema as well as the photo-album in their videos (Tiwary, 2018). The story of the mitigation of obsolescence in South