Abstract: Ontological Politics of the Image1 The complex linkages that I discuss in this book between ontological politics and the modes of being they presuppose and entail are pervasive far beyond the Tamil cinema.We can see them similarly evinced in medieval and (post)colonial Indic debates over Hindu idols and other godly representations (Davis 1999:44-9; Rajagopal 2001; Pinney 2004; Jain 2007), Byzantine contestations of religious icons (Belting 1994[1990]; Mondzain 2005), nineteenth-century European debates over theatrical representation and the presence of the stage (Power 2006:19, 47-8; see also Vega 1986[1607-08]; Evreinov 1927, 1973; Schechner 1988), debates about the permissibility of film images in (post)colonial Pakistan (Cooper 2018) and northern Nigeria (Larkin 2008:135-8, 209-13, 253), (anti)modernism in the plastic arts in Europe (Levaco 1974; Rancière 2007), the institutionalization of fictional narrative film in early twentieth-century Hollywood (Gun- ning 1991; Hansen 1991; Gaudreault 2009 Gaudreault [1999]]:101-12), and mid-century American pornography (Williams 1989), among many more examples, including André Bazin's own realist project, as I discuss in the main text below and in Chapter 1.Like weeds in the garden, when one begins to look for the ontological politics of images and the multiple ontologies and modes of being they engage and engender, they are all one finds, their leaves above and their roots below the fertile soil.A garden, after all, is a labour, and an aesthetic and political one at that, which is tenuous and unending, no matter how neat and clean it appears at the moment of well-cultivated and carefully curated exhibition and experience. 2 These questions are not meant to exhaust the wide and complex range of ways in which the being of the image has underwritten film studies.On some classic examples of how these questions have been articulated in film studies, see