Onscreen/Offscreen

Onscreen/Offscreen is an ethnographic study of the ontological politics of cinema in South India.

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 on International Relations at the University of Chicago.

"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."

Francesco Casetti, Sterling Professor of Humanities and Film and Media Studies, Yale University:

"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."

Francis Cody, Associate Professor of Anthropology and in the Asian Institute, University of Toronto:

"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."

W.J.T. Mitchell, author of Image Science and What Do Pictures Want?:

"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."