Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. xv, 339 pp. (Illustrations.) US$26.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-6000-1.
This book turns an ethnographic light towards an unexplored terrain, the creative processes that go into the making of a contemporary Tamil film. Notwithstanding the dominant characteristic of any cinema, the “tyranny of repetition,” as Anand demonstrates this process is always a passionately absorbing moment with the unknown, producing something new and unforeseen. True, but what is the primary objective of this kind of study?
Describing our contemporary anthropocene epoch with its disturbing images of all encompassing catastrophe as the appearance of the gigantic everywhere in a Heideggerian fashion, Anand reminds us that when unmanageable chaos is knocking at our door, our only hope remains in generating new ways of seeing that could take us beyond the vanities of human agency and its disastrous effects. For that kind of shift to occur in our perspectives, it is necessary to cross the confines of our familiar sociocultural worlds and its modes of thought and perceptions.
Invoking Deleuze, he argues, therefore, that cinema can do this by rattling our unshakeable habits of thinking, by “carrying perception into things.” The primary objective of this book is then “to put the medium back into the world, back into the environment from which it arises, the web of relations through which it grows”(18). Towards this task, looking at “cinema as something more than an archive of finished forms and tales” (18) becomes a methodological requirement. Within this ecological frame, the moment of creation is then more a speculative confrontation with becoming than being; “a series of wagers made on the redemptive potential of the world at hand” (18) by cinematic means. Thus, this book is daring and vaster in its philosophical scope than any usual discussion of creativity.
It deploys a tangible strategy by following several film crews at different stages of filmmaking, instead of pursuing a sample from start to finish. Moving from the social experience of Tamil cinema, which often blurs the distinction between the reel world and the real world, Anand dives headlong into its manifold registers, abandoning any pretentions of being a detached observer. His American accent surprisingly turns him into a participant, as he is compelled to dub for Barack Obama in Tamil Padam, a hilarious spoof on the figuration of the mass hero. Simultaneously with his accounts of the medium, to pin point where he is coming from, he narrates his personal ethnography both as a diasporic viewer of Tamil Cinema and as a professional anthropologist engaged in the process of unraveling its magic. Chapter to chapter, the creative process in the cinematic world runs in tandem with the author’s moments of hope and anxiety in shaping this book, while his keen observations bring alive a wide range of people, with the distinct and varying atmospheres in which they labour.
With Reel World at its opening and An Anthropology of Creation at its conclusion, as an academic enterprise, this book is unconventional in its form and style; naming as it does the seventeen chapters that fall within these two extremes as Dreams, Hope, Space, Art, Love, Desire, Light, Color, Time, Imagination, Pleasure, Sound, Voice, Rhythm, Speed, Wonder, and Fate. Written in delectable prose, with a series of juxtapositions drawn from poets, philosophers, and film theorists, it captures the profound resonances at play in each of them. The most telling self-reflexive moment is the chapter on Pleasure where as an ethnographer he had to confront his own embarrassing voyeurism during the shoot of an item number, when a skimpily clothed female dancer had to perform her sexually provocative act for this song and dance routine, amidst a predominantly male crew. At the same time, Anand maintains a constant vigil from making any quick politically-correct judgments, but without eliminating critical remarks when necessary.
In the final analysis, the creative moment could be explained only in a retrospective manner after the act, when it brings forth something new that did not exist before. Anand, however, carefully notes in this context that such a process can never be ex nihilio. If that is the case, then the question arises what if we can describe this moment simply in prosaic theoretical terms as film practice. It may lack the poetic resonance of a word like “creative,” but would it be inaccurate? Is dealing with cinema as more than an “unfinished form” the sole virtue of an ethnographic framework? Surely, theoretical exercises which take history or shifts in mode of production as the ultimate horizon of film theory can identify generic mutations and the rupturing of a narrative regime that not only produces something new but indicate changes in film practice and film form that did not exist before; provided, the underlying conditions of production have changed. Can this not serve the same objectives and contribute to the creation of a better world?
Much has changed in Tamil Cinema with the advent of globalization. Although Anand describes its impact on a CGI outfit, his description of a producer like G. Dhananjayan does not register the very presence of this corporate agent as a novelty that could be accounted for only by the transformations that have taken place in the mode of production. His emergence is unlike that of any entrenched producer like A.V.M. Saravanan or Kalaipuli S. Dhanu in an industry that was until recent times an unorganized sector of the economy. Not contextualized thereby in large historical terms, this book is actually full of exciting data that can support a contrary thesis. However, Anand can still maintain within his ecological concerns that such novelties could be bracketed, as his attempt is delimited to what emerges during the creation of a film and the way it unfolds in the registers of the perception-image, action-image, affection-image, or time-image in the auditorium. In that sense, there is much that is redemptive in this book, making it a significant contribution towards the on-going debates in South Asian film studies.
Venkatesh Chakravarthy
L.V. Prasad Film & TV Academy, Chennai, India
pp. 395-397