Reel World

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 Award–winning film editor and sound designer, and the author of In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing.

"[A]  delightful combination of thought and description is a unique ethnographic account that is both autobiographical and participant-observational. ... In this book, we are made privy to this enigmatic and elusive interface between the creator and the nothingness that confronts him/her in the act of creation."   - C.S. Venkiteswaran (Frontline) "Decoding the phantasmagoria on-screen while navigating the labyrinthine networks of India’s Tamil cinema calls for inspired writing. Thankfully, the cicerone who takes us through these oneiric protean worlds can reconcile the recondite with the banal, the sublime with the quotidian, and the real with the mythological… The taut prose, the espial documentation, and cogitations make Reel World a work of superfluous quality.” - Kumuthan Maderya (PopMatters) "Reel World is probably unlike any book on cinema production you have read. It takes seriously the felt reality of the myriad of writers, directors, producers, assistants, art directors, painters, ADR artists, lyricists-name the craftsperson-that collectively bring to the screen 800 or so films annually out of 'Kollywood.' . . . The book sifts expertly and enigmatically across all three levels: daily life, cinematic life and life in the universal. Reel World is actually Pandian’s anthropological paean to creation." - Ritesh Mehta (MovieMaker) "Pandian delivers an adventurous and boldly written pursuit of how ideas become the sights, sounds, stories, emotions, and realities that flicker onscreen in a movie.”  - Bret McCabe (Johns Hopkins Magazine) "In this book, which follows the various paths through which Tamil films are made, another kind of dream emerges-one that allows us to re-envision the anthropological (by which I mean the human) project as one concerned with learning to open oneself to the wild world beyond what we think we can control.”  - Eduardo Kohn (Somatosphere) "Pandian interweaves the insights of an exceptional variety of thinkers, from medieval Indian poets, European philosophers, and anthropologists to South Asianists, film scholars, and critics.... [O]ne of the book’s delights remains the frolic across time, genre, discipline, field, and emotions that these many references gather and synthesize." - Sara Dickey (American Ethnologist) "Pandian’s writing simulates the formal properties of cinema, conjuring the sounds and sights of films many of us may never see, but feel as though we have seen through his writing, while intimating that much of our apprehension of the world is already irrevocably cinematic.”   - Stephanie Spray (Somatosphere) "[A]n engaging text that introduces the reader to the film industry of a distinct cultural landscape in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu." - Aparna Sharma (Critical Inquiry)

• Foreword / Walter Murch  ixNote to the Reader, also a Listener and Seer  xvii1. Reel World  12. Dreams  213. Hope  374. Space  535. Art  696. Love  857. Desire  998. Light  1079. Color  12110. Time  13511. Imagination  15112. Pleasure  16713. Sound  18114. Voice  19915. Rhythm  20516. Speed 21917. Wonder  23718. Fate  25119. An Anthropology of Creation  267Acknowledgments  285Notes  289Bibliography  313Index  329