Book Review: Anand Pandian,Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation

If cinema is, in Anand Pandian’s terms, “more than an archive of finished forms and tales,” (p. 18), then ethnography offers one way in which to investigate what else it might be. To anthropologists, lengthy, immersive ventures into the culture of filmmaking offer a unique opportunity to theorize making and performance. To film scholars and South Asianists, these kinds of inquiry crack open a new window onto the very processes through which films come into being. In the past decade and a half, the first texts have emerged to demonstrate the potential of an anthropology of cinema in South Asia, with two monographs on Hindi film production by Emmanuel Grimaud (2003) and Tejaswini Ganti (2012), as well as ethnographically based inquiries into subjects as diverse as music (Booth, 2012; Morcom, 2017), costume (Wilkinson-Weber, 2014), audiences for Tamil film (Hughes, 2011), the operations of the Bhojpuri film industry (Hardy, 2015), and the making of pornographic “cut pieces” to splice into Bangladeshi film screenings (Hoek, 2013). All of these examples model anthropology’s long-standing interests in the minutiae of social life and the evocation of cultural context. Pandian’s Reel World, however, covers new ground in its inquiry into questions of creativity and the workings of the imagination. Between 2001 and 2012, Pandian immersed himself in a wide variety of productive contexts in the Tamil film industry, in and around Chennai. The book that has emerged out of these experiences overlaps comparatively little with the theoretical ground on which most South Asian film studies is situated. Instead, it introduces fresh and unexpected philosophies and literatures as Pandian approaches film as a kind of “world-making” exercise.

To bring this perspective vividly to life, Pandian borrows from the film form itself, giving us a scene-by-scene narrative of the sequence of activities that filmmaking entails, all the way from conception to screening. Every chapter, or “scene,” is then populated with film personnel “characters” plus the particular film (or more rarely, films) upon which their efforts converged at the time Pandian did his research. Piece by piece, the text is put together, until the film in the abstract that the book describes comes to its conclusion, and the actual films cited have their public screenings. Readers should understand though that this book is not about films so much as it is about struggling to capture the dispositions and contingencies that actually make Tamil filmmaking what it is.

There are 22 chapters in all, each drawing us into the sometimes dull, sometimes thrilling, sometimes frantic events through which films are imagined and brought into being. Before cutting from one chapter to another, Pandian lingers just long enough to tease out the logic and the “feel” of the practice at issue—designing, lighting, shooting, editing, all the way to digital special effects, and finally distribution. Like the films he describes, the book has a distinct pace and rhythm, and never bogs down in dull exposition or overly dense analysis. Instead, succinct and incisive references to anthropologists and philosophers serve to contextualize and enrich his observations. Perhaps counterintuitively, the storylines of the films that are being stitched together behind and inside the text are starkly (and somewhat depressingly) repetitive, brutal, and prurient. For the anthropologist, though, a film’s banality is no self-evident reason to dismiss it. In any case, the point that Pandian wishes to stress is that even the crudest films’ makers never merely execute a set of tasks, but rather attempt to coax shapes and forms out of the repeated encounter of acts and materials, or what he terms “wagers on the creative reach of experience” (p. 279).

Pandian is not the first, and will certainly not be the last anthropologist to grapple with the problem of trying to convey the field experience in all its complexity. But in cinema, Pandian has found both a thing to be known and a framework within which to make sense of it. In focusing on the flow of everyday life in the making of a film, he accomplishes several things at once: an uncanny rendering of the tactile and improvisatory nature of film craft and creative activities; a guide to the ethos, the tasks, and the skills of practitioners; and a glimpse, to outsiders, of the idiosyncratic paths that people follow to land in the section of the filmmaking world that they occupy. To many To the many critics that disdain Indian film, this last characteristic—the refusal to rationalize and systematize practice—is the most exasperating. Seen from the position of a participant observer, however, a paucity of formal discipline is more than compensated by well-formed habits of the manipulation of malleable substances—time, flow, unexpected convergences—out of which Tamil films are made.

Filmmaking is labor, of course, but Pandian insists that it is not simply to be seen as the prosaic cause of beguiling cinematic encounters. Making has a magic of its own, whether it is designers and cinematographers sculpting an imagined landscape in space and light; or the composer employing music as a “transducer” (p. 192) of the emotions stamped in the narrative; or the editor dexterously propelling the action to dizzying speeds on a computer. Contingencies and work-arounds are part of the industry by necessity, but the many gaps and false starts, and dream-like insights that propel a film forward are, in Pandian’s view, providential, taking the work of creation in directions that no one can entirely anticipate. Writing about a film crew’s scouting of locations for a prospective film, Pandian explains,

[I]t isn’t a matter of giving an outward form to an inward space, of finding a physical replica of an image or backdrop that the director has already composed in his head. Instead they are looking for someplace more active, immersive—a geography of sympathetic elements, a space to sustain the thinking-out of the film, its open-ended movement of expression. (p. 61)

Pandian’s approach is unconventional and arguably risky. There are few deep or sustained dives into theory, and he rarely detours from describing the work of putting a film together into more conventional academic territory. For example, he does not sketch out any sociological facts about film personnel beyond pointing out how the industry’s essential collaborators crop up repeatedly in different milieux. We know how the persons described in the chapters came to be in their position within the industry; but we are left uncertain as to how generalizable their habits and practices are. As a result, those anticipating an account along traditional social scientific lines may well find this a challenging text, specifically the rapid-fire succession of chapters that lack the familiar kinds of scholarly connective tissue (reminders of where the argument has come from and where it will go, how the descriptions of the previous chapter lead into the current one and so on).

Aside from its value in laying out the particulars of Tamil film production, Reel World contributes vitally to debates on the nature of authorship in cultural production. Attending carefully and seriously to specialists involved in, say, visualizing the film, fabricating the sets and props, choreographing the dances, and dubbing the voices, Pandian shows us that each kind of making contains its own techniques and impetus that the director taps into rather than controls. The case of the music director is exemplary (and not surprising, given the enormous sentimental and commercial importance of film song). Reflecting on the composition of a song by an innovative and enigmatic music director, Pandian is

… struck by how quickly it’s taken shape. ‘You just have to be really loose in your head willing to try anything,’ Yuvan tells me. The script, the characters, the film—he was thinking about none of these things. For a long time, he’d been wanting to mix together hip-hop and trance. ‘I was doing this song, and I got the hip-hop beat. Okay let’s do a trance backing for it.’ (p. 193, emphasis mine)

That the music director, of all the contributors to the film’s final form, feels at liberty to ignore what would seem to be elemental film ingredients, accentuates how powerful this figure is in the Indian cinematic landscape. Film songs have a rich cultural and commercial life apart from the films to which they are attached, a singular characteristic of the Indian mediascape that means that music directors are afforded unprecedented respect and autonomy. But the chapter on music does not only underscore this fact; it reveals, in addition, how creation roots itself in the hyper-aware body, and even pulls on forces that lie outside the human capacity to describe them. To quote Yuvan, once again, in answer to a question of how a song came to him (or how he “got” it): “I’m sort of a messenger. It just flows through me. Nobody can create something like this. It just comes, flowing through me” (p. 193).

In other chapters as well, Pandian is intent on making sense of the alchemic aspects of working in film, in ways that open up film research to current anthropological literature on craft and making that not only query conventions of authorship but disrupt familiar assumptions about the interaction of bodies, technologies, and materials. In lighting upon an unpacking of “process” as a possible key to all this, Pandian hearkens back even further to Benjamin Lee Whorf (1997), and the Hopi language’s imagining of time as intensification, and action as emergence. At the same time, in addition to the potential this book contains for the analysis of filmmaking in other places, and other times, it sensitively and convincingly hones in on the cultural particulars that set Indian filmmaking apart, and Tamil filmmaking apart from its sub-continental brethren.

With the ethnography of feature filmmaking so new and comparatively rare, one can safely say that readers will find this a fresh and invigorating take within cinema studies literature. It sets a very high standard for anyone and everyone who wants not just to dissect Indian filmmaking but to convey something of the protean vitality that characterizes its day-to-day activities. And on top of that, there is the larger, more audacious claim that underpins the work as a whole: that making film is (to borrow from Clifford Geertz [1966]) both a model of and a model for the transformative potential of quotidian action to “make human beings other than what they are” (p. 270). Very few of us will ever make films, in other words; but all of us can attempt to create new realities with the same dedication and inventiveness that filmmakers display.