Preminda Jacob's book Celluloid Deities has been a long time coming. She conducted the majority of her interviews and research on the vibrant hand-painted banner and (plywood) cutout industry in Madras in 1990 and 1991. Her book was published in 2009, by which time the city had changed its name to Chennai and the exciting artistic tradition that dominated and continuously transformed public space from the 1980s until 2000 had been all but replaced by digitally printed vinyl banners. This anthropological study has turned historical, but it is still incredibly valuable on many levels, and scholars in the fields of film studies, political science, art history, popular culture, and South Asian studies can all benefit from the thorough research and captivating narrative that Jacob presents here.

The extended time span of this project means that Jacob interviewed artists both during the peak of their practice and at its demise. As participants in a popular culture industry, producing paintings meant to be displayed only for a short time, the artists, for most of whom this was a vocation as well as a livelihood, had to negotiate the commercial and artistic aspects of their work. While the banners at first give the impression of being mechanically reproduced, artists evaluate their own and each other's work on specific artistic criteria. Many members of the public whom Jacob spoke with could identify and name their favorite banner company.

Jacob is clearly saddened to see the collapse of the industry and her informants' obsoleteness, but her historical contextualizing of their practice offers some explanations of both why these banners and cutouts were so popular for a time, and why the industry collapsed so quickly in the early 2000s. While the vinyl banners are still more expensive than the hand-painted ones, they are also more durable, quicker and more efficient to produce (which is important in the time-sensitive film industry), and less likely to collapse, and they can be effectively lit at night, are indexed as modern (not traditional handicraft), and do not tend to draw the protests and censorship associated with the hand-painted variety.

Many scholars have noted the affinities between politics and film in Tamilnadu, but Preminda Jacob is one of the first to approach the topic from the extracinematic sphere, examining a space in which the connections between cinema and politics allow for transfers of power and influence between the two fields. Film producers and distributors and political publicity directors used these gigantic (12–25 meters high and 3–30 meters long) advertisements to create and maintain charismatic celebrity images, sharing this part of the star-system machinery along with publicity firms, artistic design companies, and fan clubs. These advertisements also functioned to visualize and reinforce connections between the Tamil-language film industry and Tamil-nationalist political parties and to transfer “images that signify ‘screen stardom’ to the extra-cinematic realm of urban streets” (p. 118).

Studies of Indian film have thus far focused almost exclusively on the Hindi-language Bollywood industry, and Jacob offers a cogent reminder of why it is so important to look at the regional industries. These cinemas are able to cater to local tastes and tolerances and refer to specific insider issues, often through visual signifiers. Jacob's work is one of the few to consider the regional peculiarities of Tamil cinema, an established industry that has been producing around 160 films per year since the 1980s. Tamil films are increasing in popularity nationwide, and this industry, Jacob points out, is currently in its heyday “in monetary terms and in the currencies of innovation and accomplishment” (p. 103), with the most advanced film studios in the country and more employees than the Bombay-based industry.

A primary contribution of Celluloid Deities is its analysis of the different types of spectatorship involved in consuming films and banners and cutouts, and the way in which “image managers” work to control the information contained in them. That is, what viewers perceive from symbolic content, juxtaposition with other imagery, references to ideology, mythology, local history, and contemporary events is carefully managed to blur boundaries between the filmic and personal lives of celebrities.

One of the most exciting things about Jacob's study of the hand-painted banner and cutout industry is that it is gratifyingly comprehensive. She combines close, art history–style readings of individual banners and advertising campaigns (for both films and elections) with historical and ethnographic accounts of the industry from the perspectives of artists; financiers such as S. S. Vasan, the “king of publicity,” whose Gemini Pictures set the trend for spectacular advertising that characterizes the Tamil film industry; and the public. Her careful consideration of the history, content, and contextual significance of the banner industry's cinematic and political imagery offers a complex and nuanced insight into the social, political, and religious contexts of the images that will prove valuable to a wide variety of scholars.