Dr. Anand Pandian, of Johns Hopkins University, will investigate questions of political regionalism and identity through a systematic examination of the use of place in Indian commercial cinema. India has the largest film industry in the world, and its films have had a profound impact on public culture. Indian commercial films make deliberate use of location to provoke affective responses among projected audiences. The project focuses on the Tamil-language regional cinema of south India, where filmmakers have sought since the late 1970s to project cultural identity as an artifact of regional custom and local cultural practice. However, in the 1990s, localism began to yield to broader currents of cultural globalization, with film crews traveling thousands of miles to shoot scenes in far-flung European, Asian, and African localities. With this spatial shift in mind, the project examines why and how filmmakers in contemporary south India connect with the emotions of their audiences by working on their spatial imaginations and what consequences these tactics have regional, national, and international identity.

The research will be carried out through an intensive ethnographic study of filmmakers and film production practices in south India: the social worlds and daily practices through which filmic spaces are manufactured and charged with feeling. Research methods will include interviews, archival research, participant observation with working film units, and text analysis.

The research is important because it will contribute to social scientific understanding of media production and the role that media plays in cultural identity. The project also will contribute to a deeper public understanding of three phenomena: the cultural forces propelling contemporary globalization; the powerful emotional effects that media have upon everyday life throughout the world; and the means by which ordinary experience has itself become mediated by technologies like cinema and television.

Project Report

This grant has supported ethnographic research on questions of affect, place, and creative expression in the the Tamil-language popular film industry of south India. The project was anchored in an ethnography of filmmaking practices, as I worked with diverse film technicians on location in studio sets and outdoor environments, as well as in production offices and post-production studios. Despite sustained ethnographic attention to the popular consumption and reception of cinema, the production of film has been relatively neglected in anthropological and media scholarship. The monograph growing from this research comprises one of the first ethnographies of the daily practices, social relations, material forces, idiosyncratic imaginations, and unpredictable circumstances through which cinemas are made in any global film industry. The forthcoming book shows how Tamil filmmakers engage in a process of production best described as an improvisational engagement with felicitous accidents of circumstance. I argue that the emotional course of film fully depends upon the emotional life of those most responsible for its emergence: a practical immersion of filmmakers themselves in cinematic worlds of experience. By focusing on the cultural forces, practices, imaginations, understandings, and circumstances through which media artifacts assume their most powerful and desirable forms, the project has also contributed toward understandings of emotion and identity, engaging the mediated production of emotion through diverse artifacts of visual culture. Lastly, the project has taken ethnography as ground for both conceptual and methodological intervention into the study of contemporary media. In sum, the forthcoming monograph will contribute toward a greater understanding of the powerful emotional effects that contemporary media have upon everyday life. The remaking of the world as an image of itself, as always and already a media spectacle, is pervasive in diverse arenas of contemporary life. The results of this research take up this crucial subject from the vantage point of the production of such mediated experience: the affects and practices through which cinema works itself into the fine grain of contemporary existence.

Agency
National Science Foundation (NSF)
Institute
Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences (BCS)
Application #
0850723
Program Officer
Jeffrey Mantz
Project Start
Project End
Budget Start
2009-05-01
Budget End
2012-04-30
Support Year
Fiscal Year
2008
Total Cost
$89,128
Indirect Cost
Name
Johns Hopkins University
Department
Type
DUNS #
City
Baltimore
State
MD
Country
United States
Zip Code
21218