Onscreen/Offscreen is an ethnographic study of the ontological politics of cinema in South India.
Based on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Onscreen/Offscreen is an exploration of the politics and being of filmic images. The book examines contestations inside and outside the Tamil film industry over the question "what is an image?" Answers to this question may be found in the ontological politics that take place on film sets, in theatre halls, and in the social fabric of everyday life in South India, from populist electoral politics and the gendering of social space to caste uplift and domination.
Bridging and synthesizing linguistic anthropology, film studies, visual studies, and media anthropology, Onscreen/Offscreen rethinks key issues across a number of fields concerned with the semiotic constitution of social life, from the performativity and ontology of images to questions of spectatorship, realism, and presence. In doing so, it offers both a challenge to any approach that would separate image from social context and a new vision for linguistic anthropology beyond the question of "language."
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration, Quotation, Names, and Transcripts
Introduction: Ontological Politics of the Image
Introduction
From Ontologies to Ontological Politics
Toward a Linguistic Anthropology of Cinema
A Brief History of Tamil Cinema
For a "Tamil" Cinema
Realism and the Mass Hero
Overview of the Chapters
Part I: Presence/Representation
1. The Hero’s Mass
Introduction
Presence of the Film Image
Gravity of the Hero’s Mass
Presence of Mass
Image-Act of the Slaps
Sociological Realism of the Mass Hero’s Image
Aesthetic Realism and the Event of the Slaps
Ambivalent Realisms
Authorizing the Slaps, or the Principal of Animation
Conclusion
2. The Heroine’s Stigma
Introduction
Item’s Interruption
Item’s Titillation
Item’s Spectacle
Ontological Politics of Sexual Difference
Actness of the Image
Politics of Vision
Explicitness of Performativity
Voyeurism and Exhibitionism in 7/G Rainbow Colony
Kinship Chronotopes and Sociological Traces of the Performativity of Presence
Marriage and Not-to-be-looked-at-ness
An Alien Presence
Conclusion
Epilogue
Part II: Representation/Presence
3. The Politics of Parody
Introduction
Anti-Cine-Politics of Thamizh Padam
A Politics of (Im/possible) Worlds
Chronopolitics
For Another Kind of Image
For a Less Serious Industry
A Politics of Production
The Politics for an Image
Conclusion
4. The Politics of the Real
Introduction
Questions of Realism
Register of Realism
Enregistering Realism in Tamil Cinema
Kaadhal ("Love")
Realism’s Heroism
This Is a True Story
Representing Taboo
Caste and Sexuality in Kaadhal
Frustrated Textuality and Sexual Reference
Production Format of Realism
New Faces and the Director’s Image
Realism’s Illiberal Extimacy and the Suspension of Belief
Conclusion
Conclusions
An End of an Era
Killing the Mass Hero
Performativity
Representation and the Method
Theory of a Linguistic Anthropology of Cinema
For a Linguistic Anthropology of …
Notes
Interviews and Works Cited
Index
About the Author :
Constantine V. Nakassis is an associate professor of anthropology and of social sciences in the College, resource faculty in Cinema and Media Studies, faculty associate in Comparative Human Development, and core faculty on the Committee for International Relations at the University of Chicago.
Review :
"When is a movie not 'just a movie'? Onscreen/Offscreen explores the permeable boundaries between fiction film and real politics in Tamil culture, where movie stars become party leaders, and mass movements struggle to define themselves in a cine-politics of spectatorship amid struggles for power and identity. Constantine Nakassis brilliantly explores a complex field of images that are simultaneously representations and real presences, fictive and actual, pictures and performative actions. A crucial contribution to film studies and to contemporary anthropology."
--W.J.T. Mitchell, author of Image Science and What Do Pictures Want?
"By using the tools of semiotic anthropology to examine Tamil cinema, Onscreen/Offscreen models an incredibly innovativemethodology for understanding the cinematic image more broadly and in radically processual terms. Nakassis pursues the question of how images happen and for whom they happen across events, and in doing so he reaches brilliant insights into the gender politics of cinema and the potentials of realism when the power of the image always exceeds what has been recorded and what is projected onto the screen."
--Francis Cody, Associate Professor of Anthropology and in the Asian Institute, University of Toronto
"How can a slap onscreen threaten the life of an actor offscreen? This book is not only a passionate and detailed portrait of Tamil cinema and filmgoing, but also a theoretical meditation about images and their power. Thanks to vibrant analyses and striking case studies, superb ethnographic research becomes a crucial contribution to the current debate about visual media and their political implications."
--Francesco Casetti, Sterling Professor of Humanities and Film and Media Studies, Yale University
"Applying the analytic strategies and methods of linguistic anthropology to film, Constantine Nakassis presents a comprehensive look at cinema as un fait social total. Far more than a deep dive into Tamil film history, Onscreen/Offscreen is a major contribution to cinema studies and the anthropology of images."
--Steven Feld, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology Emeritus, University of New Mexico
