Synopses & Reviews
Reel World explores what happens to life when everything begins to look and feel like film. Drawing on years of fieldwork with Tamil filmmakers, artists, musicians, and writers in the south Indian movie studios of andquot;Kollywood,andquot; Anand Pandian examines the nature of cinematic experience in the contemporary world. With inventive, experimental, and sometimes comical zeal, Pandian pursues the sensory texture of media production, from improvised scripts to choreographed songs, between rickety sets and digital labs. Grappling with cinema as a medium of thought and sensation, his stories also broach deeply philosophical themes such as wonder, time, fate, and imagination. As he trails Tamil films through the turbulence and uncertainty of their emergence, Pandian brings into focus an ecology of creation: the forces, feelings, images, and things that invest human endeavors with creative potential.
Review
andquot;Anand Pandian is a gifted writer. And the sounds, spaces, rhythms, and colors that these creative directors draw together provide rich tapestries. The result is a spiritual work that illuminates life today.andquot;and#160;
Review
andquot;Of the many unique things about Reel World, the most ambitious is Pandianandrsquo;s attempt to capture this moment of creation, in writing, composing, directing: the moment that the spark of inspiration connects the individual artist to the numinous forces around him.andquot;and#160;
Review
andquot;Reel World thinks in and through the media of cinema and experience as things of the world. They are like fireflies whose paths flash and cut out. A chance encounter, a glance, or a gesture activates experiments in rhythm and voice, light and sound, a feeling of movement. Streets, migrants, flowers, bullets, childrenandrsquo;s textbooks, and bottlefuls of pills form ecologies of incipience. Ontological curiosity laps like an infinity wave in the craving for wonders now.andquot;and#160;
Review
andquot;An original, thoughtful, and daring anthropologist, Anand Pandian has written a book ostensibly about the fierce intensities of Tamil cinema and the great cultural themes that pervade it:and#160; hope, color, space, love, desire, light, dream, time. It might, however, be more apt to describe this work as a rich, experimental meditation about the elusive momentum of creativity, the shift in perception when something unexpected happens. This meditation is set in the Tamil country, mainly in its cinema capital, Chennai, whose streets, tea stalls, beaches and offices are beautifully evoked. It is often difficult to decide if the emerging text is driven more by the inner landscapes of Tamil villagers (such as those discussed in Pandianandrsquo;s superb first book, Crooked Stalks), or by resonant voices from the modernist canon (Bohumil Hrabal, Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, Lefebvre, Joyce, Deleuze). The lyrical interweaving of these worlds along with lively vignettes of many of the great names of south Indian cinema as they struggle to define themselves and their work offer us a context-sensitive understanding of andlsquo;cinema as a medium of thought, a way of thinking with the visceral force of moving images.andrsquo;andrdquo;
Synopsis
With an adventurous writing style, Anand Pandian explores the transformative potential of cinema, following Tamil films from the spark of artistic impulse through their production, marketing, and reception to show how cinema recasts the ordinary experience of everyday life.
About the Author
Anand Pandian teaches anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. His books include
Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India, also published by Duke University Press.
Walter Murch is an Academy Awardandndash;winning film editor and sound designer, and the author of In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing.and#160;
and#160;
Table of Contents
Foreword / Walter Murchand#160; ix
Note to the Reader, also a Listener and Seerand#160; xvii
1. Reel Worldand#160; 1
2. Dreamsand#160; 21
3. Hopeand#160; 37
4. Spaceand#160; 53
5. Artand#160; 69
6. Loveand#160; 85
7. Desireand#160; 99
8. Lightand#160; 107
9. Colorand#160; 121
10. Timeand#160; 135
11. Imaginationand#160; 151
12. Pleasureand#160; 167
13. Soundand#160; 181
14. Voiceand#160; 199
15. Rhythmand#160; 205
16.and#160; Speed 219
17. Wonderand#160; 237
18.and#160; Fateand#160; 251
19. An Anthropology of Creationand#160; 267
Acknowledgmentsand#160; 285
Notesand#160; 289
Bibliographyand#160; 313
Indexand#160; 329