This article tracks the exhibition of a single Bangladeshi action film through the cinema halls of different provincial towns in Bangladesh. The ethnographic case shows that film projection undermines the narrative coherence of a film by changing its form from one screening to the next. Unstable celluloid refers to such practices of including, excising or re-editing during the screening of a film. Audiences can urge such changes and once changed, a single film can gather many different audience responses, effectively creating unstable celluloid, or a de-standarized film product. On the basis of this case, I argue that the study of cinema audiences and film reception in South Asia needs to pay closer attention to the relationship between empirical audience and practices of exhibition.
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