Anthropology professor 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. Informed by behind-the-scenes fieldwork in the Tamil film industry, Pandian seeks to observe those fugitive moments when human intention, technical expertise, and everyday accident coil into the spark of creative agency that ends up as performances, music, cinematography, etc. That he never exactly captures the how, what, and why of human creativity isn't the point; what The Reel World (Duke University Press) provides is a thoughtful exploration of the political and epistemological possibilities and implications of creative labor.
Posted in Politics+Society
