Place, Emotion, and Regional Identity

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Abstract

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.