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All original writing and translations are Copyright Framework 1986. Views expressed in these articles represent those of their authors. We welcome contributions, articles, letters, but cannot be responsible for returning MSS. The editors reserve the right to shorten any letters for publication

INDIAN CINEMA

Bombay Our City: Interview with Anand Patwardhan

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everything is made to advertise another world: that other world of advertisements in the West might seem to be an imaginary Utopia, but in India the Utopia is the West. And the music is part of that, the jazz and the classical music. And how everyone in the upper class speaks English, but the slum-dwellers speak Hindi? "I feel that people should use the film wherever there are housing problems, and where there are people organising to protect and defend themselves and their homes, or wherever there are landlords. It is an anticolonialist film, but one that can be used by the working class in the imperialist nations." When I reviewed Bombay Our City for City Limits during the London Film Festival, I said it was the best documentary I had seen. In a way I regret that: it makes it sound as if you should go into the cinema and come out completely transformed by the experience of the film. That is not what it is about. It is a film that, for this white westerner otherwise unconscious of the struggles in India, refuses to stay on the screen. I began to wonder how and where to screen it - with Edgar Anstey's Housing Problems and contemporary tenants' rights tapes? How to tie it in with London's appalling housing shortages, with the community groups of Tower Hamlets and Ealing? Unlike so many documentaries, it refuses to be appreciated or loved. I feel no especial warmth for the people whose struggle briefly emerges on the screen. But perhaps a shared anger, and a sense renewed of the value of film as a politicising medium. To the maker the last word: "They cannot take away my anger." Bombay Our City is to be shown in Spring 1986 on Channel Four in the Eleventh Hour slot. It is distributed in the UK by The Other Cinema; in the USA by Icarus of New York; in Canada by DEC and in India by the People's Union for Civil Liberties and Samvaad.
(London, November 1985.)

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Ashish Rajadhyaksha
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Introduction to Kumar ShahanVs Essays

KUMAR SHAHANI'S WRITINGS on film, and on several areas around that central interest, have been a relatively unknown aspect of his work. Written mainly in the period 1974-77 - the years immediately preceding and during the Emergency - they are at once extremely personal statements, expressions of a deeply felt anger and hurt, and very much part of a larger political and artistic context.1 They permit us a valuable glimpse into his cinema, and into the cinematic tradition he supports in India and internationally. Film-making for Shahani has been difficult, but in those years writing had come to be a ---------------------------------------------------------------------kind of substitute. From expressing his own torments they went on to a ---------------------------polemic about the position of the artist, aesthetic issues and those involving tradition and history. This material is enormously relevant to the entire question of a "Third ---------World" aesthetic, a regrettable term that may have to do until a better one -------------------------has been coined, and concentrates on the more general aspects of Shahani's thinking, as a valuable introduction to his films which, unfortunately, have not yet been made available to general British audiences ( one hopes this will soon be rectified). But it should be made clear that these essays are to be seen in the context of Shahani's film-making. Ultimately, this material can be understood only in the way it extends into the cinema: that of Shahani himself, of his teacher Ritwik Ghatak and of his colleagues. Perhaps one central idea, giving us an insight into the way his ----------formal and political concerns come together, is the idea he outlines in his Notes -------------------------------------------------------------Towards An Aesthetic of Cinema Sound. Linking the continuous scale of Indian classical music, a scale that has defied efforts to enclose it in notation form, and extending this into film, he writes: "It seems clearer than ever before that notations are a mere approximation. "Since shrutis (the microtones defining the continuous scale) have to be heard, we should strive only to name approximations, not absolutes. "Yet it is heartening to find that it is the search for precision that yields to flexibility. And vice versa, that it is the flexible language structure which is meaningful. "Heartening for every artist who wishes to place himself in a tradition and yet to innovate, to individuate." 68

The possibility that one could speak in a clearly contemporary political -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------context, and yet find means to do it through a language, a narrative, that --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------echoed social ties going back into several centuries was crucial for Shahani. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------It meant that one could relate to the present ( and thus the past and future) but not be tied down to the limited discourses bound to the present "today". In the late 1950s and '60s the historian D. D. Kosambi had depended on a --------------------------------------------------------material present all around him, in the languages, the rituals, the cults, of ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------people to analyse changes in modes of production from ancient India --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------onwards. The politics of a cultural unification, of people sharing ancient ties -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------going beyond artificial political divides, was central to Ritwik Ghatak's ------------------------------------------------------------------cinema. In Shahani this moves into a concern for the epic - working out the -------------------------------flexibilities of an epic tradition, its history of a synthesis of ethics, politics, -----------------------------------------------technology, material experience, by re-configurating the relations between the sensate universal and classical traditions such as Indian music, into the material universals of lived experience. With the epic comes the struggle to re-place into the artistic experience its ethical aspect. As he points out, the bourgeois view, displacing ethics into the moral, proliferating art into decorativeness and regionality, extending art into pure organisation, has always held the lyrical to be the highest form of artistic experience. But the great artists of this century that explicitly fought the bourgeois notions of art, like Eisenstein, Picasso and Brecht, replaced the primacy of the epic. And in doing this they also went back to the great traditions of synthesis that have been central to the cultural pinnacles of civilisations, whether Indian, European or "Western". Shahani's first film, Maya Darpan (1972), used the rigid rhythm of the lyric to encapsulate the daily experience of his central figure, the woman Taran, caught in a feudal family, amid a universe of change. The rhythm itself defining colour, gesture and the editing, suggested a freer epic flow in changes that she perceives and, later, experiences. Tarang (1984) is much vaster in its scale, locating several layers of discourse - involving technology, class-antagonisms, relations between male and female, and finally the universe itself beyond the realm of the "known" which, in the bourgeois world, equates with what can be "possessed". In his work it has been consistently the way in which certain kinds of experience themselves open out myths or suggest correspondences between the way people see and the way they live, which permits a new kind of synthesis between the various ways we encounter our environment and nature. The following essays are designed - and reprinted in Framework - to suggest similar concerns to the reader. They were written at different times and in differing contexts, but would have this in common: the effort to _ 69

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SHAHAN1 relate the "now" with that history providing us with our material traditions, our identity, intervening in our perceptions of our world. Shahani believes -------------------------that this perceived world must today be global, in material and not merely in ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------romantic terms. At times, as in Invocation (written in 1976 during the ------------------------Emergency but never published) this becomes only a personal cry in the wilderness. Shahani's has been, then and now, a lone voice. Footnote:
1. Myths for Sale, Seminar Dec. 1974. Violence And Responsibility, written for a Ritwik Ghatak Retrospective, 1975. Invocation, 1976, unpublished. Ideological Ironies, paper written for a seminar on Arts & the People, sponsored by United Education Foundation, 1976. The Media Police, International film festival of India, 1978. Notes Towards An Aesthetic of Cinema Sound, journal of Arts & Ideas, No. V, 1983.

Myths for S ale

THE CINEMA for us is the most important of all the arts. The mechanical reproduction of physical reality - after centuries of frustrated tentatives should have, once and for all, freed us from both its narrow fixed perspective and from the nebulous other-worldliness of art. Instead, here, as elsewhere, it has delivered the twin enemies of the people: a barely -----------masked elitism and the naked force of an under-developed market. Hitler -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------and Leni Reifenstahl discovered that the triumph of the will could be engineered through the lie of the camera. Here, we have made of photographic verisimilitude the medium of lumpen fantasy. The logic of "mass communication" and its opposite, "elitist withdrawal", both borrowed from a country which controls 70% of the world's resources, is supposed to extend across a nation that has yet to electrify more than 60% of its villages. We want to communicate with a "mass" after having cut off all contact with the people - confirm the audiences in their repressed consciousness, continue to use the language developed through centuries of oppression, made more powerful by technology. A local monopolist, and others who envy him - including coffee-house militants - ask grandiloquently, for whom does one make commodities ( films)? The answer should be obvious, especially since those who ask the question seem to amass the fortunes themselves. A surplus is extracted from the masses with whom they claim to communicate. Innocently, left intellectuals join the chorus, demand instant messages - the plan of a struggle without the prolonged process of arming the people with consciousness and weapons. On the other hand, artists engaged in the moral pursuit of the "finer" things, with obvious access to the country's resources, condemn the committed to heroic suicide. People who did not know that the CPI(M-L) existed consistently held up the examples of so-called "Naxalites". The distortions of the bourgeois press are unblushingly used by those who wish to produce objects of mass consumption or objects d'art. We seem to be moving to the mystery of the commodity form before establishing the relations of production that produce it. When we look at ourselves in the image of the West, we associate Indianness with products of feudal hands and feudal minds. The western man's notion of India is derived from handloom fabrics, the sitar and "transcendence" in various forms. The object d'art and the "mass-movie" alike alienate men from themselves - to invest their creativity in a totality outside.

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For good reasons, therefore, we continue to congratulate ourselves on our myth-making capacity. Our ancients often chose to disguise their knowledge in religious myths. Today, as religion is replaced by other forms of culture, new myths are made so palpable that they can replace actuality itself. The basic contradiction of the cinematographic form arises from its capacity of replacing the object of its "contemplation" by its image. The commercial cinema has used it to create not only dreams that substitute reality, but its commodity gods known as stars. Even montage has, with the best of intentions, led to the necessary juxtaposition of icons or signs which totally replace reality instead of evoking or analysing it, thus creating a structure close to myth with all its falsehood. The avant garde experiments, borrowing a syntax from the other arts, have merely been attempts at achieving a kind of respectability for the cinema. Well intentioned as these experiments may be, they are a repetition of failures demonstrated earlier on in Europe, particularly towards the end of the silent era. But in our country, literariness or painterliness and, surprisingly, even theatricality, when compared to the normal orgies of the vulgar imagination, still pass for good cinema. The cinema has indeed incorporated into its language elements from all the parallel arts but only after having transformed them into its specific means (of spatializing time and temporalizing space). In fact, after neo-realism, it had gone through a complete phase of rejecting all syntax - as a reaction, undoubtedly - to achieve a kind of savage lyricism. Onomatopoeia was not a cinematic device for the French New Wave. It was its vocabulary. Its syntax - where it had articulated any - was that of the American "B" film. The theory that there exists a Cartesian polarity between arbitrary (aesthetic) signs and total realism necessarily led to quantitative conclusions and meaningless oppositions: the proliferation of detail as against metaphysical truth (where quality cannot be seized), the fluidity of miseen-scene as against the metre of montage, the existential tension of suspense (Hitchcock) as against the tragic release from pity and fear. The terms of reference were purely idealist: the human being unsocialized and nature untransformed. Or, when socialized and transformed, superficially so. This attitude necessarily tended either to exclude syntax progressively (realism) or to impose it as totally arbitrary structures, which could therefore yield only transcendental or socially insignificant meaning. If in practice some of the East European avant-garde adopted the same methods, it may not necessarily be a reflection of their societies but the apathy into which materialists are driven by the 72 _ _

bombardment of questions posed ahistorically. The "dialectic of pure reason" necessarily led to the belief that in the cinema, nature would imitate art (Andre Bazin). The intervention of the artist had to be asocial and, therefore, there is the intervention of God (derived from Bresson) or revealed by minimising the intervention ( derived from Rossellini). What started as a healthy reaction against facism ( particularly in Italy), because it spoke in terms of abstract morality, had to degenerate into a passive acceptance of the evil by proposing metaphysical solutions. Here is proof of the fact that fascism is but a logical extension of the bourgeois ethic. Morality, linked to the abstract rights of man rather than the concretizations of specific historical freedoms, has to lead to notions of natural superiority ( of a race, caste or a class ) and can, at best, be benevolently merciful to lower beings who have, however, to continue to perform their original functions! When, however, montage - or the juxtaposition of "linguistic" (arbitrary ) elements - was discovered to be inevitable at every stage of filmmaking, an attempt was made to reconcile the materialist dialectic of Eisenstein to the anarchic flux of nature. This resulted in fruitful changes, gradually ripening into a break with passivity. But, so long as it remained rooted in philosophical speculation, it could at best express impotent moral indignation and, in the absence of any concrete solution, offer suicide or undirected violence as an escape from the human condition. Godard's trolley shots, as he claimed, were acts of morality as they exposed characters in the process of living, or of tragic lyricism as they went past landscapes ( Vivre sa Vie). To explore essence through existence. It is only after he had stopped "clowning for the bourgeoisie" (said in an interview to Le Monde) that he discovered the significantly commentative use of movement - the dehumanization in a large, impersonal department store, (Tout va Bien). Formal considerations have to be linked not merely to immutable, perennial ideation or subject matter nor to naturalistic detail, but to specific historic circumstance. Otherwise it will have no content. It will be a narrative of events (with some rhetoric thrown in for appearing "left", if found necessary) or a juxtaposition of empty abstractions, meaningful in a period gone by. It is not surprising that even directors with predominantly "spiritualist" pre-occupations should abandon them for a more material life. Rossellini moves towards the didactic and shows how the bourgeoisie collaborated with the monarch to imprison the aristocracy ( La prise du pouvoir de Louis XIV). Bresson admits sociology not only into human relations (les blousons noirs in Au Hasard Balthasar) but into form itself (the scene at th Museum of Modern Art in line Femme Douce). Godard makes a complete 73

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Framework n. 30/31 Censorship policies which have tied down the members of the Board to seemingly absurd irrationalities help, in fact, to sustain this obscenely unreal world. An anti-communal film could easily be denied a certificate for fear of arousing religious passions among the majority. Allusions to the caste system are permitted only if the lower castes are not mentioned by their generic name. Even if you wish to condemn the orthodox reactionary bigot who can only refer to the lower castes as "shudras", you will not be allowed to use the pejorative word. You may, however, use the appellation "brahmin", taken from the same hierarchical structure! Such contradictions can only exist in a "secular democracy" which allows you to swear by the
Koran, the Bible or the Geela.

break with his "clowning" and almost with the visual image. With his newly found commitment, he wants to learn the cinema all over again and is as awkward as a child taking his first steps. Have we made our first steps, one wonders, towards a cinema that could lift itself from the morass of underdevelopment. One can say with some pride that there have been instances where one has glimpsed far, open horizons. But, by and large, the stranglehold of the commercial cinema still has a suffocating grip. Even on those of us for whom "economic viability" is not a primary condition. Those who speak in terms of compromise - or its denial - are being cynical or choosing not to recognise the objective situation. Individualism always requires the support of false idealism and morality. If freedom is the recognition of necessity, to speak of "absolute" truths, dialectics reduced to formal principles, or a perennial humanity is to fetter oneself with the same ideology that the ruling classes use in their more savagely naked forms - the artistic objects of mass consumption. The Dara Singh mythological may be reserved for the rural and semi-urban markets. But the other classes need their own icons to worship. We have already observed how a set of cinematographic signs, even in far more developed societies, can degenerate into mythical constructions in which the container of content takes the place of what it contains (the thing signified). Thereby it becomes sufficient unto itself, content becomes transcendental, the argument tautological, the action ritualistic. Such forms are needed for upper-class consumption, the classes who are most at home when they speculate - at the stock market or on the universe. The less sophisticated myths of sentimental alleviation are designed for the consumption of the working and lower middle-classes. Since they most need the cinema as a substitute for life - their conditions of work being the most dehumanising - the bulk of investment goes into films that can successfully distort their fantasies of sex and violence. One is almost certain that, if left alone to their real fantasies, they could be far healthier. Perhaps they would recognize the actuality of the violence daily practised on them and the constant denial of human contact to which they are subject inclusive of the emotional, of the sexual and of the increasing possibility of collective co-operation. But the fight sequence is as necessary to divert one from the fundamental nature of violence in society as is the voyeuristic cabaret to degrade at least half of humanity. Combine this with a rebellion against authority which ends up in the humanising of the parent-villain or the employer-villain without changing the nature of the exploitative relationships. 74

"That the song divine is sung for the upper-classes by the brahmins and only through them for others, is clear. We hear from the mouth of Krsna himself (G. 9.32): 'For those who take refuge in Me, be they even of the sinful breeds such as woman, vaisyas, and sudras.' That is, all women and all men of the working- and producing classes are defiled by their very birth though they may in after-life be freed by their faith in the god who degrades them so casually in this one. Not only that, the god himself had created such differences (G. 4.13): 'The four-caste (-class) division has been created by Me'; this is proclaimed in the list of great achievements." (From Myth and Reality by D. D. Kosambi.) These texts may indeed be worthy of study. As are Pericles' "Funeral Oration" or Aristotle's "Politics". But to revere them is to suggest deviously that democracy will be achieved through slave labour or that a modern society could realise its goals through inequality. The children of God (not shudras) will inherit the earth so long as their masters inherit its wealth. Censorship confirms the extension of assigned social roles not only along caste and class lines but along the lines of family functions and sex as well. The heights of feminine heroism are still found in a bovine version of motherhood. Even as the country starves. It is far removed from the vitality of Kali or the other fertility goddess images. The docile heroine must look like a whore but must neither bare her body in its raw splendour nor show her human desire. The censorship laws allow cabarets which fragment the female body into cut-out objects for male acquisitiveness. The nude, however, is dangerous, for she can be a whole person with her own subjectivity. When will we learn, once again, to take pride in ourselves as human beings? If not like the athletes of the city-state, can we not restore the graceful line reserved for our goddesses of Elephanta and Bahrut to the humans in whose image they were made? Before we can do that, we will have to change our ideology transmitted through myth. 75

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Because ideas of masculinity and femininity in these metonymical constructs are also worked out in irreconcilable opposites. Contradiction without a possibility of actual synthesis, since it denies change, movement. According to the mythical system, the female has to prepare everything for consumption, including food and herself. And the male has to produce. Men have to project and women withdraw. Right down to the last detail where masculinity may allow smoking and femininity forbid it. When such detail - or in the more sophisticated films, formal elements stand irreversibly for concepts - replace meaning itself, one does not have to wait for ideas to degenerate into ritual rather than praxis. The language of myth by its very nature of replacing the symbol for its content spreads false consciousness: the more vulgarly sensate form in the commercial cinema and the more abstract ahistorical form in the "art" cinema. The dichotomy between commercial and art cinema is as spuriously created by the exploitative system as is the one between public and private money. One feeds the masses with opium and then one complains that art is inaccessible to them. One extracts the surplus value of labour and then divides it arbitrarily into public and private money. Recently some "socially committed" critics have called the few worthwhile experiments sponsored by the F.F.C. a waste of public money. Radicals in this country often do not seem to recognise how capital is amassed or profits made. They seem to be concerned more about the taxpayer's money than about how he made his money in the first place! The government itself has been sufficiently pressurized into believing that the F.F.C. is behaving like Oliver Twist. In recent times, it had dared to ask for more. The F.F.C. and its Board of Directors may not resemble the emaciated Oliver. But if the present stagnation continues (it has financed one film in the last 11 months and may well be in the process of rejecting scripts which have potential artistic merit without being "safe", commercial propositions), the hopes that it had raised by its courage may fall. The reasons for its short-lived dynamism may be found in the half-hearted reformism of our ruling classes. Pushed back from this reformatory, therefore, the cineastes will go back into the underworld of smuggling Fagins who have built India's comprador cinema upon its major port towns. A confirmed plagiarist speaks of some of F.F.C.'s significant products as third-rate copies of third-rate foreign films. A globe-trotting socialite whose sole claim to be a critic is her access to people and places (and who ecstasizes over Manoj Kumar's "Shor") aids the big sharks by her learned associations. A self-confessed amateur, applauded for his bold themes, speaks of films as "formal exercises" when they are not in his own
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blundering idiom. Others disguise their concern for financial return (on both "public" and "private" money!) in terms of mass communication. Yet another old hand at bringing humanism to the box office in outrageous costumes advises the government to nationalise cinema houses before it finances films which make an attempt at speaking a radical language. Utopian ideas always subvert their own declared purpose. Even in the unlikely event of nationalisation, given the honesty of our bureaucrats and the socialism of our system, one can visualise what new monsters will emerge. Some of these suggestions and comments may, indeed, be wellintentioned, made by "innocents" who believe in the image that they project, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to sift out the cinema's enemies from its friends. The atmosphere is ridden with opportunism. Gossip and facile opinionating, not analytical criticism, is the order of the day. Theoretical debate is possible only in organized forums free of fear and personalised mud-slinging. We have not even begun to come together to solve our practical problems. The State governments have yet to exempt films of artistic merit or the cinema houses that screen them from entertainment tax. A film-maker who conceives in colour has to sign bonds of over a lakh of rupees with the Ministry of Trade and Commerce to be able to make prints. In this regard, I. K. Gujral has made an encouraging statement of policy. When it will be implemented is anyone's guess. In the meantime, a wage freeze is expected to bring down prices while black money circulates freely. A Marxist film-maker speaks of poverty being the same through the ages and depicts an antagonistic contradiction between the lumpen proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie! We pass from gimmick to gesture. Red is the favourite colour of rhetoric. Nostalgia for unity, albeit heirarchical in form and matter, is the over-riding content. We move from long shot to close-up around stars or other idols and mandalas. Cezanne may have dreamt of the cinema when he shifted view-points or wished that his canvas could reach humbler folk. Eisenstein may have realised his dream among the Soviets. While we move ahead and up the Himalayas from our tryst with destiny. Like Yudhishthir, anxious to know and preserve the truth, we may ask why Arjuna had to suffer so much even after the great battle. Krishna's answer was as usual evasive and capable of all kinds of imaginative interpretation: the hero's cheek bones were too high. Draupadi resented this slighting reference to the beauty of her loved one. But she and the other heroes and heroines are falling by the way-side out of exhaustion and starvation or shot in the back for desperate acts of courage. And we will continue to pursue the truth with our faithful dogs: 77

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mass communication, perennial subjects, medieval Indian aesthetics, unchanging poverty. Or the more sensate forms of myth: Eurasian rubber dolls in ballets of violence, orgies of fragmented sexuality, the magical change of heart in the prodigal son, or authoritarian father; the change of image in the sex object into a lactating machine.

Violence & Responsibility

PEOPLE OFTEN ASK what we, his students, have inherited from Ritwik Ghatak. The problem, here, is that they have not realised what it means to work in a continuous line of tradition. Our elders prefer imitation to development. They would prefer that learning still be restricted to the feudal mode. The hereditary principle may be removed but the young must copy what they have picked up from the master-craftsman. It is the most certain method of retaining the status quo; of endorsing the work of opportunistic mediocrity. In an atmosphere where our cultural attitudes and artefacts have been identified with the objectification of effete feudal Brahminism and European humanism inflicted on us by the colonials, Ritwikda's work is the violent assertion of our identity. It is the cry of the dying girl in Meghe Dhhaka Tara which echoes through the hills, our right to live. The division of Bengal which was responsible for her tragedy was only the immediate symptom of a broader division. The impetus, not only to the obvious narrative content to his films, but to their very language, was given by the tremendous splintering of the social system, of its values, while a facade of a hoary culture was still being maintained. The contradictions of a society that could have modernized itself after attaining formal independence are the prime cause of a deeper division. The middle-class is seen at the unsteady apex of the inverted triangle, brought about by the three-way division central to the structure of Meghe Dhhaka Tara. The feminine principle, borrowed from our earlier lower level of materialist culture, also suffers the split into the three principal women characters - the cruel mother, the sensual daughter and the preserving and nurturing heroine. The triangular compositions and the multiple allusions to Durga on the rich sound-track reinforce the pattern. To those critics who are indifferent to this method of structuring, Ritwikda's work may appear melodramatic. It is true that he has combined elements of tragedy such as "the chorus" and the rigorously worked out -----------------------------------inevitability of the scenario, to make his statement. However, he has freed ---------------------------------------------the form from the classical supernatural and the later romantic individualistic concepts by replacing Hamlet's "particular fault" by socio-historical forces. The pessimism of "fatalism" is countered by the last shot to restore hope. This could only be done in its powerful manner because class -------generalisation is present right through the film. --------------------The hope obtains an objective reality precisely because the "melo79

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Framework n. 30/31 yet changes its meaning and arms us with new consciousness. ---------------------------------------------------Thus, for example, Ritwik Ghatak uses what were earlier merely religious symbols. But he secularises them through juxtaposition - for example the Bahurupia in Subarnarekha and even the deserted airport are both "archetypes". In a society which is only now trying to break away from feudal relations it is inevitable that secularisation be one of the foremost -----------------------------------------------------------functions of the artist. The European Renaissance clearly demonstrated this ---------------------------------principle. "Pamos" is reduced, passion is replaced by perspective. Nature is objectified. Even the creatures and characters of Christian religion and mythology are sensualised. In our own country when mercantile capital evolved through commodity production for a brief while after the Buddhist revolution, art along the trade routes (e.g., in the caves) demonstrated its rationality and its serene sensuousness. Unfortunately, the low-level of technology could not sustain the Mauryan centralisation necessary for the ------------------------------------protection of trade-routes against warring chieftains. The logic of the selfsufficient villages led to their domination by narrow, local un-productive astrologers and samantas to take over power. Thought no longer led to material change but hair-splitting argument. Our sensuousness no longer retained the security and satisfaction of activity. Instead it substituted the frenetic orgiastic ritual. Reality became over-burdened. Form did not --------------------> materialise into a lively means of exchange, a language, but was an end in itself. Structure was decomposed into the proliferation of detail. It is therefore frightening to see how the total realism invented by -------------------------------------------------------world capitalism's last ideologists is being combined with our medieval ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------tastes for detail or hair-splitting formalism. This should have been a period -------------------------------------------------------------------------------for construction in every sense of the word. But even some self-styled --------------------------committed critics are content with the crass distortions of the commercial cinema. They have forgotten the fundamental meaning of montage, i.e., that construction, not isolated passages, shots, dialogue or the like, makes for content. They seem to believe that progressive art should be bought like soap. They are therefore willing to endorse the humanism which dilutes -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------> class contradiction in "eternal" moral sentimental relations to exploit not only the labour of the working-class but to wash away their residual violence and creativity in tears, blood, or the humours of refined sentiment. Ritwik Ghatak had proceeded to draw attention to the real problems by the very violence of his audio-visual structure; the nature of symbolisation, the wide-angled lens, the whip-lash on the sound-track. His ruggedness emanates from his personality. We have, of course, to find means that are derived directly from our environment and individuated from our temperament. And, hopefully, to carry forward from where he leaves off. I 81

dramatic" techniques are inverted from their basically petty-bourgeois position to that of a strong, vigorous explosion of life assertion. The "melodrama" is clearly identified as a form by the expressionist use of the wide-angle lens in close-ups at important points of transition or through the clearly obvious division of dramatic and visual planes. There is no tendency ------------------------------------------------------------either to render the physical reality itself "pathetic" as our school of pettybourgeois "realism" does or to make that reality more palatable through decorative and sentimental composition. The sound-track as well is -------------------------------------------------unashamedly commentative. It is not there merely to enhance the illusion of ---------------------------------------------reality and thereby to present a false catharsis through unthinking identification. In fact, in Ritwikda's films, no shots are more eloquent than the circular panoramics which speak of the indifference of nature to human --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------suffering and conflict. -----------------------------------The characters may invest the landscape with their feelings. The young lover in Subarnarekha finds the landscape beautiful because the discovery of his desire makes him feel so, and he is too shy to confess it directly. The heroine of Meghe Dhhaka Tara may dream of freedom in the expanse of the hills but these very images are turned objectively against the subjective feeling of pathos. The subjectivity and the lyricism of poetry is retained without the most pernicious form of falsification achieved by directors who manipulate minds through cathartic realism. Whenever, indeed, the -------------------------landscape is made to reinforce the feeling, it is done with such violence - the platform scene in Subarnarekha - that it can only be seen as the intervention of the director, not reality as it is. There are no lamps flickering "realistically" in symbolic sympathy with a dying girl. Nor are there characters "storming" one's life with elaborately detailed sound and fury. The falsification of such symbolisation is often justified on grounds of "communication". In other words, because the feelings of the characters or their formalisation by a large section of our audiences is still struggling to find a genuine method of meeting present-day reality, the"communicators" unhesitatingly exploit this regression. Thereby they negate the function of the artist, who living and performing in a technological society and a collective medium, deliberately avoids bringing this new consciousness to his audience for fear of affecting the sale of his commodity. For these symbolisations not only violate the medium but are in stark contradiction for one who has experienced the partial conquest of nature. A man who has travelled by an aeroplane, in other words a man who has taken advantage of modern meteorological techniques, is being dishones when he signifies >>> pathos or sentiment through a storm. On the other hand, let us examine the symbolisation which transforms tradition by maintaining a close link and 80

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Framework n. 3 0/31 return and to move forward in uncertain areas in the spirit of the pioneer that Ritwikda has been. The others faltered after the first few steps, having mimicked reality they mimicked themselves.
This (Jukti, Takko ar Gappo ) is a film of arguments, the story element being incidental... Those of us who are interested in visual cinema will find this one frightfully boring. This film is conversational andl have tried to disallow romanticism as the only point in the art of creation. It is an attack against me and also against others who are also a part of this life.

remember that my introduction to his work was through Suharnarekha. By then he had broken up the "melodramatic" narrative sufficiently to approach the epic form. The epic was implicit even in his earlier films, ------------------------------------> specially Meghe Dhhaka Tara and Komal Gandhar. Already the narrative was interspersed with song, with elements of structure which were allusive, not -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------affective. Predominantly, however, they had been made in the dramatic -------------mode with the abstraction of music, poetry and didactic reference freeing them from being the extended organic metaphor that drama implies. In -------------------------------------------------------------------------------Subarnarekha, the dramatic element disintegrates, its cliches are turned against itself; the traumatic prostitution of our culture is exemplified as Sanskrit becomes part of La Dolce Vi/sinoneof the world's poorest cities. We are made to face our self-destructive incestuous longings which are otherwise so -----------------------------------------------------------delicately camouflaged by both our sophisticated and vulgar film-makers. The sophisticate camouflages by presenting a formally created void, through signs that negate each other or, at the other extreme, by recourse to a superabundant realism. Both deny the active intervention (even its possibility) of the artist and the audience in reality. They lull him into the acceptance of a reality which is apparently objective but which can never be so, precisely because it is dissociated from the very creator of that objectivity - social man. The creator in the vulgar film is, quite literally, God or his surrogates, natural law, human nature - external, immutable, omnipresent, transcending history. But the collapse of Ritwikda's hero is also the breaking up of the values created by our world. If he could see the golden bank of the river, it is because he could once again be responsible, see the significance of his acts. The primary role of cinema is also to signify, to develop a language which leads to rational action, not to fascist incitement nor the emasculation of abstract -----------"moral" or metaphysical individual salvation. In the early '60s, when I had -----------------------------------------------------------------------first come into serious contact with the cinema, I had naively asked Ritwikda how he reconciled significant form with photographic realism. He had ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------merely smiled in acknowledgement of the problem. Its parametres were not then specified, even in the cinema of the more advanced countries. Today these problems of language are more clearly defined. We are making a beginning in cinema. If Ritwik Ghatak's films are individually incomplete accomplishments as some critics feel, it is precisely because as a body of work they are the most complete, the most generative. He has never cared ---------------much to show-off his technical accomplishment, and I understand that in his latest film, he is totally indifferent to it. But one can be relatively certain that his work will always serve as a landmark to the young whom he loves so well and continues to relate to his work, even to break away from it; to 82

Ritwik Ghatak

Notes
I. Samantas: Feudal chieftains.

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Invocation
THE CINEMA IS ON ITS DEATH-BED. All its high priests have gathered around to chant its safe pa?sage to heaven. Death is a ceremonial occasion. In its own way, festive. The brahmins have to be fed. The relatives forget, for a while, their frivolous pre-occupations and wear compassionate faces. Once they have all gone the family's disparate members will seek the dead, each in his own corner. The cinema will survive, resurrected in the minds of the young and the not-so-young who seek liberty. But will they be able to act or applaud in freedom? While violence and sex are more and more expressly forbidden, fantasised fight-sequences and cabarets of dismembered women proliferate. The Film Finance Corporation, denied promised funds, has a recent annual average of two-and-a-half films. The tyranny of the market is said to provide a natural freedom. At least we learn who cannot make films here. The workers' right to strike is compensated by the duty of the nation to them, or vice versa. How lucky, I hear children say, echoing the liberals of our generation, for Kista Gowd and Bhoomaiah to be tried before they were executed. If children embarrass us, we have only ourselves to blame. Civil liberties were an abstraction for the many, gossip columns for the few. Absolutist, "total" revolutionary movements as unreal as the spectre of a national liberation movement being conducted by mighty foreign powers. The rubble of destabilisation has collected into a pyramid. Social relevance is measured by the profit and loss, entered into account books. The procurer of Roti, Kapda aur Makan for our unfed, unclothed, unsheltered masses ushers in Naya Bharat. In this promised land, what will film-makers do? Someone suggests that their fate will be that of the poets in Plato's Republic. But we already have "traditions" in our society, faithfully reflected, for all the distortions of detail, emphatically realistic or outrageously melodramatic, that have banished truth from poetry. The sentimentalisation of poverty, anarchist rebellion or, better still, the majesty of fate, transformed into images that deny action. Even if the heroic image has changed from the self-lacerating Devdas, the newly-found, other-directed aggression of the middle-class turns upon itself. The dynamic still conjures up the criminal. Revolutionary violence is still explained away in psychological terms or purged through the balletic fight-sequences. The ultimate aim is collaboration, as in Lang's Metropolis, even of those who protest against the dehumanisation of the machine. Political order emerges from progressive social entropy. It is in 84

these conditions that one may seek the supernatural in as many forms as possible. Metaphysical anguish, at a popular level, expresses itself in miracles. At higher levels, perhaps unable to bear what a critic friend has called the grittiness of existence, it looks beyond reality. The imitative realists, because of the poverty of their structure, make the ugly personify evil and the beautiful, good. One would have thought that by the very quality with which realism allows processes to reveal nature, such idealisations would automatically be avoided. But perhaps we are at the end of this Oriental quiescence. We may yet discover amongst us Lenin's Tolstoy: a Utopian "with critical elements capable of providing valuable material for the enlightenment of the advanced classes." Or, soon enough, access to an Open City; open from within. The cinema in our country, and those who shape it, have neither faced a crisis nor fostered the togetherness of diversity. Instead it has meant to them and their confreres of the other arts "instant recognition, money and popularity". Durga Bhagwat has spoken of how even men of letters distort their social role when confronted with a so-called mass media. A free (and somewhat clumsy) translation from her presidential address to the 51st Akhil Bharatiya Marathi Sahitya Samelan reads: "Those who wanted to enrich the mass media have ultimately become their slaves ... They [ the authors ] forget their traditional craft of pure writing, do not go deep into the framework of mass media and accept their limitations of theme and content as extensive. Crisp language, a little bit of pathos, a little humour, titbits of incomplete information are strung together to create a colourful form, to entertain people... An author is no longer a thinker or an artist but becomes an entertainer... So long as there are voices that ring as true as hers, even the exiles will take heart. Forced to be mute, they will forge links where once they were voyeurs. Voyeurs of the present, delighting in detail and fragmented visions. Voyeurs of an imaginary past, positing order alienated from reality. Voyeurs of the future, rushing towards suicide or spontaneous Utopia. In a sense, you cannot remain on this side of the lens any longer. You may not speak, you may know. Not the word or the icon. Nor the immediate sensuous experience. For the observer in his act may soon find himself changed. Like nature in primordial man, suddenly conscious of itself. This, then, is our identity. This, our home. Here is where we work and sleep. Five hundred and fifty million people or more. Yes, we were among 85

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the first to count without the aid of the abacus. You, as delegate or visitor, are most welcome, specially if we forget to send you an invitation. Bring us the pride and impatience of your youth. At the moment, you may find us neither wise nor playful. We are a little pre-occupied. Ganga has washed away her sons. The child, proficient in arms, is yet to be born.

The Media Police

THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION facing us today is, surely, the promise of freedom. The autonomisation of all the government corporations, the reconstitution of the Censor Board and its colonial regulations should not be mere formal exercises. But, no government, however democratic its manner of coming into power, will cede to its people rights that it has not learnt to value itself. The promise of freedom is one that we pride ourselves upon, of having given it to ourselves. Or is it likely that we will forget the torture practised on our friends, our own fearful, muted voices as easily as the previous generation forgot the homespun to develop teeth of gold? There are signs that we are on our way to a meek new world of make believe. The press has settled back into the comfort of its armchair, furnished by the monopoly houses, discussing the diet and manners of the new men in power and reserving its investigations for the horrors of the past. Political prisoners are being asked to abjure violence without any corresponding pledge that the police or para-military forces would not intervene in strikes or provoke demonstrators and students to violence. The universities are still open to uniformed men and, worse, to administrators who relay authority. The broadcasting media continue to act as vendors of cultural opiates. The Films Division is still paralysed by its 20-point paralyses. The feature films divert all social and political compassion into erotica and criminal heroics. Far more than mere legislative action would be necessary to give content to the freedom acquired through institutional change. In the first place, all forms of censorship have to be aimed at the removal of these very constraints. The position taken to formulate the guidelines should, therefore, not be one of abstract moral principles nor of such primitive quantification as the amount of blows given per fight sequence or the extent of exposure of the human anatomy. The main guidelines can make sense only if sufficient discretion is given to the people who constitute the Board in deciding whether a particular sequence encourages the people to think freely or leads them to a passive acceptance of social, political, religious and economic institutions that enslave them. It may, indeed, sound Utopian to suggest a policy which would be difficult to implement, given the extraordinary influence of commercial cinema on those very gentlemen who are likely to constitute the Board. However, any other formulation would defeat the purpose of any institution meant to defend the people against the violation of their freedom and their culture. 87

Notes 1. Kishta Gowd and Bhoomaiah: Members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)
who were sentenced to death and hung during the Emergency. 2. 3. 4. 5. Roti Kapda Aur Makaan, literally translating as food, clothing and shelter, is also a reference to a Hindi commercial film of that name, selling a vulgarised nationalism. Naya Bharat, translating as "new India", also a film by the same film-maker, Manoj Kumar, in a way embodying the vulgar, exploitative idea of "Indianness". Devdas, a character from a Bengali novel by Saratchandra Chatterjee, later filmed and suddenly elevated into a "type" characteristic of its age: a suffering, self-destructive romantic hero. 51st Akhil Bharatiya Marathi Sahitya Sammelan: 51st All India Marathi Literary Conference.

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So far, the Censor Board and its sister institution, the Film Advisory Board (which certifies short films for compulsory exhibition ) have played a role in complete opposition to their original purpose. The Film Advisory Board was meant to protect the viewers from wrong and misleading information. Instead, it killed the documentary in India by allowing only the tendentious to pass through its clutches. What is more, it took upon itself an aesthetic burden. In a recent film, they are said to have remarked that the close-ups, showing the corrosive effects of a disease should be eliminated, having found them too horrifying. And the poor film-maker was meant to motivate his audience against precisely the causes that produced such disfigurement! They are said to force a change of pace and rhythm of almost every film that goes to seek their approval. Yet they did not demur when a portion of a newsreel suddenly burst into colour to cover the rising political star who has now burnt himself out. The censors have, over the years, covered themselves with glory from their imperial origins, the British having first imposed this draconian measure. Thus, the police and the administration remain the most dedicated servants of our society even in the most "realistic" of our films. National "leaders" are idealised beyond human recognition. Violence against the evil in one's own class is balletised through fight sequences, with the kind eye of the censors allowing slum children to fancy themselves as brave and handsome as Amitabh, growing more heroic from one lumpen scrap to another. But, if you happen to suggest that there exists violence between classes or castes, you would be accused of conspiracy against the state and society. Here, even the word has turned too violent. You may refer to the upper castes by their generic names - Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Banias. But even the most orthodox fanatic may not utter the word, Sudra - in the censor's version of India. All authority, religious, political, economic and, above every other, that of kinship, is revealed to have a heart of gold after it has rid you and itself of the evil force of circumstance. Social destiny, it would seem, has its own logic. If you have any fight in you, take it out on the evil within yourself or your class. Never direct at the institutions that perpetuate exploitation, the violence generated by them. Individuals may be transformed but let the family, property and state alone. Is it, perhaps, a way of admitting that nothing has changed since we declared ourselves free? The new Minister for Information and Broadcasting has promised to make the necessary changes in the governmental organisations. So far, as far as the press is concerned, he has scrupulously kept his word. But the press itself and the reading public remains hesitant, unable to make much of 88 -

its status. The fear is that the controls of the market will now take over from the controls of a state subservient to the dictates of international agencies. Recently, a journalist candidly admitted that, during the Emergency, only those newspapers whose proprietors permitted it, could stand up and speak freely. Few journals have men like Romesh Thaper of the Seminar at their head. Or a trust, like the one that controls the Economic and Political Weekly, which would allow policies to be boldly decided by its editors. It is clear that the mode of ownership and control in journalism must change. This can happen only at the initiative of the intelligentsia and the journalists themselves. But the question itself is not being raised. If the leading information channels are controlled by the monopolies, the most effective of all the arts, the cinema, is in the hands of a bewildering class of "operators". The cinema has become, in our country, an extension of the flesh trade. It has been allowed to produce a culture of unabashed voyeurism. The cabaret is only one aspect of this perversion. Just as it degrades women and makes genuine sexual contact impossible, the proliferation of mother goddesses after Santosho Maa alienates people from their own creativity, to wait upon superstition and miracle. It is not surprising that a population forced into a destitute existence from childhood should accept such spiritual deprivation. On the other hand, our elite still sticks to several curious versions of Brahmanic non-duality, denying all contradiction through the Perennial and the Static, proclaiming their psychological "need" as the original Indian metaphysics. Their insecurity makes them take the postures of omnipotence and omnipresence. Born out of the incapacity to change reality, the culture that they produce reduces truth and beauty to a matter of proportion, of profit and loss or of technological servitude. From the Hindu revival, we have inherited a moral code which justifies its own violation at every opportune instant. The basis of all authoritarian societies has been the denial of conflict, of problems. Here, our censors, our film-makers and our text books are all in accord: deny the existence of strife and replace it by the idyllic or the empty tautologies of formalist arrangements, claiming philosophical ancestries. We can make a tradition come alive only by negating it. Not by axial opposites nor by raising standards of different colours. But by example. By living openly, freely and in simple, everyday confrontations with our hallowed institutions of the family, the class, the state. After all, we meet their manifestations everywhere - at home, on the street and in the lecture room and factory. One can enjoy the fact of not reading a book or seeing a film which makes one into a spiritual, political and sexual voyeur. From this refusal, we can move to the direct celebration of our faculties. Voyeurs 89

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replace the act by a fragmented image. We could replace the image by the act. At that stage, we will need no censors. There will be neither spectators nor a spectacle. The precipice between pornography and art could become a runway to a flight of lively imagination.

Notes for an A esthetic of Cinema Sound

As life slowly climbed Ihe ladder of evolution, one sense after another arrived and developed. Hearing was the last to arrive, and the last to attain a state bordering on perfection. We have acquired the habit of giving the greater part of our attention to what we see, leaving a mere fraction to what we hear.

Notes
1. 2. This essay was written very soon after Indira Gandhi's government collapsed after the Emergency and the new Janata Party had come into power. T w e n t y Point paralyses: during the Emergency the Films Division had started a system of short propaganda featurettes involving well-known film-makers. These were to be mainly around Mrs Gandhi's Twenty Point Programme. S u d r a - untouchable, the lowest caste. Santoshi Maa: a film made in the early '70s about an obscure Mother Goddess suddenly became one of the most successful Indian films ever made. Going to the film became a ritual, and the actress who played the goddess was herself treated like a goddess incarnate. Even when the film was shown on television, the ritual of breaking coconuts before the deity was commonly done before TV sets.

James Jeans (1937) BOTH THE SENSES of sight and sound, it may be noted, arose out of the need to perceive movement; to locate an object, and one's own relationship to it; to gauge the pressures at work; to achieve points of equilibrium and to move in a controlled manner not only from static point to static point, as we seemed to imagine in our classical civilisations, but to find in these different vibrations, and differences of pressure, the vitality of being itself. "When does one say that a piece of material lives. When it continuously does something, moves . . . " The atomic physicist, Erwin Schrodinger, quoted by Fritz Winckel. Winckel goes on to add that " . . . impulses to movement are, for example, electrical or chemical potential differences. When they are equalised, the tendency to form a chemical bond ceases: temperatures become equalised through heat transfer. Thermodynamic equilibrium results in a condition of constant rest (of maximum entropy), a condition which is precisely: death. From the physical standpoint, disorder is continuously created out of a condition of order. Nature strived for a condition of ideal disorder... And again Schrodinger "The trick by which an organisation can keep its place on a rather high level of order consists in reality of a continuous absorption of order out of the surrounding world." Thus Music; Music is perhaps the most highly developed sensate function of human understanding. 91

3. 4.

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Framework n. 30/31 who has worked in the cinema - I include those who actively see the cinema -that there is a great deal of overlap between all our categories. In the development of almost all traditions of music, at any rate, the speech and the recitative has always been closely related to changes of frequency, if not the motive force. Many of the classical languages - and perhaps some modern languages - had developed meters from pitch and frequency variations rather than stress. In fact the Khayalgayaki, a system of music we are all familiar with, may be recognised as the highest form of the speech-music continuum. The absence of rigid notations, experienced by us today as a near impossibility, along with the apparent semantic poverty of its words, has perhaps made it possible for us to come nearer to what James Jeans conjectures to be the music of the future: " . . . a continuous scale in which every interval can be made perfect." The simplest example can come from the infinite variations upon the Bhairavi. But closer examination may reveal that we approach it even in pentatonic ragas like the Bhoop. For Helmholtz (1877) from whom all modern studies of the sensation of the tone, and the theory of music, begin, a continuous scale was unimaginable - at least its understanding was impossible. For Winckel (1939 ), it is only in the context of disorderly sound movement that order arises. And music already begins for him to link itself with indeterminacy. It seems clearer than ever before that notations are a mere approximation. Since shrutis have to be heard, we should only strive to name approximations, not absolutes. Yet it is heartening to find that it is the search for precision that yields to flexibility. And vice versa, that it is the flexible language structure which is meaningful. Heartening for every artist who wishes to place himself in a tradition and yet to innovate, to individuate. It seems to me that in the use of sound, the cinema has only opened up great possibilities without realising them. When Bresson speaks of the evocation achieved by sound, he is often still speaking of the visual images it can conjure up as against the visual images that are concretely present. When Godard speaks of the destruction of the images, his form becomes anarchic - subservient to speech. And yet 93

One can begin to speak of the aesthetics of sound only in relation to music, because it is this that provides the most fundamental expression of the states of being and of acting in a continuously impinging disorder. It is possible to read speech, to make sense of words one has never heard, as signs that refer to a content for a state of being or of action. As for incidental and atmospheric sounds in the cinema, they lie -----------------------------------------------------------between The organised sounds (music) drifting into entropy and Contextual Sounds, (speech) The rest is silence. Yet silence, from which everything was originally supposed to begin, does not exist in an absolute sense. "The soundtrack invented silence" says ----------------------------------------------------Robert Bresson, and this is perhaps true in a far deeper sense than even he meant it. On the most obvious level, silence in music relates to space indirectly. In the cinema, on the other hand, it relates to space in movement. In music, it relates to the sustaining of a note, to reverberation, to absorption by the spatial enclosures, producing, transmitting, reflecting, and receiving the sound. In the cinema all this and more. In fact, cinema may or may not relate to the spaces which produce and receive sound. It is the arbitrariness of silence, created both by the sounds, the music, the speech and its juxtaposition with the visual imagery, changing in tone, line and colour that articulates silence further. For this perhaps a referencepoint could be the discontinuities of sound in the scene where the heroine of Subarnarekha kills herself off-screen. Neither the spoken word nor music can work in such discontinuity. The smallest unit of the spoken word in any language is the allophone. ------------In specific languages, it is the specific manner of continuously linking of allophones that constitutes a word or even a nonsense syllable. An isolated note cannot be perceived as music. If it is held for very long it may not be perceived at all. An isolated note is no different in meaning and perception than what we have just cited as an example of discrete sounds in silence. The silence of John Cage, or the pure frequency of the computer, if it is music, is so in a special sense which corresponds more closely with the function of speech, of context. Yet I am sure that it does seem to you, as it seems to me or to anyone 92

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they, including Ghatak, have gone about the furthest so far in the juxtaposition and superposition of text, sound and music. When Bresson asserts that the eye is less attentive than the ear, he is speaking of a condition when the spectator is attentive at all! For in the West, the twin enemies of the development of sound in cinema have been realism (note the unnecessary, unimaginative, recourse to music in the best of neo-realistic work of Rossellini, De Sica) and the theatre (the privileged, synchronous word). Even today despite the most sophisticated mixing equipment available, you can see the dips that take place the moment characters project dialogue. In India it is this same expressionist realist theatrical tradition that has deafened our ears to sound in films. Our epic theatre not only used music as part of its narration, but had linked itself to what we clearly find as a correspondence with music in the gesture and the use of verbal imagery. In koodiyettom, Draupadi's lotus eyes, touched by kajal, could find a myriad means of expression through the employment of a few basic modes. The curvatures of sculpture find a unity in our aesthetic with the melodic lines that lead to a point of rest {nyasa). It is this epic unity that we seek today, which would include in it the theories of causation and of history that have shaken us from our refined slumber... It is chronology, not narrative, that we have to abandon.

Ideological Ironies
IT IS IRONICAL, to say the least, that the cinema should continue to find its place along with radio and television among the so-called mass media. It speaks of a widespread ignorance, if you will pardon my saying so, that a highly developed language should be confused with media which are primarily means of transmission. Secondly, in India, at any rate, only the radio can claim for itself the appelation of a mass medium. Because of the advantages the radio has in its relatively cheap and ready availability, specially after transistorization, it has been the most efficient instrument of -------------------------information and a means of transmission, which has made even classical music, once the preserve of the temple and court culture, available to a large audience. Television has had much too short a history in our country and may play a significant role only in the future. The cinema, on the other hand, has a long tradition in our country, however perverted, and has been beset with problems which are totally dissimilar to the problems of the socalled mass media. These problems cover the full range from the system of finance available to the possibility of actual and spurious mass participation and, therefore, of a sociologically based aesthetic. In fact, unless we wish deliberately to distort matters or to practise an ideology of confused rhetoric, I propose that we drop terms like the "mass media" and "mass communication", much abused as they are not only in relation to the cinema but to the radio and TV transmission systems. We would thereby avoid spurious generalization and come to terms with problems of aesthetics and sociology which are relevant to the practice of the arts and to the active participation in them of individuals and classes. At the centre of a valid socio-aesthetic investigation would be the qualitative and historical changes brought about by the interaction of language with reality. By language is meant the juxtaposition of thematic and formal elements, arising out of a society moving towards a higher stage of organization. The cineaste, unlike other artists, is doubly alienated. The direct transformation of nature is now superceded by technological intervention. His participation in commodity production is of necessity far more complete than a painter's or a musician's. The participation of the audience in his work also takes place through the system of commodity distribution. With the result that people are often forced to consume films as they would consume Coca Cola. It is by recognizing these constraints on his work and in a sense, using them against themselves, that he can create the "liveliest art". 95

Notes 1. Khayal Gayaki: a form of classical music born from the earlier religious dhrupad and taking in several traditions from folk to Sufi traditions; it emphasised the primacy of synthesis, between rhythm, raag (the configuration of notes) and the poetic content. Bhairavi: a raga employing the continuous complete scale. Bhoop: a pentatonic raga, involving the fewest notes possible from the scale. Shrutis, the microtones evoked through a certain kind of movement between notes. Theoretically the overtones in between the two notes, there are by one version 22 shrutis between two notes, but practice demonstrates actually a continuous scale.
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His direct contact with society and its means of production accounts for its vitality. However, he is often driven to the most unabashed compromises which are then regularly justified in rhetorical terms of "mass communication", "economic viability", etc. Melodrama, the child of tragedy and opera, and catharsis, become in his hands the tools of overwhelming the audiences with an ideology manufactured by his financiers. Worse still, with the capacity of the cinema to make life more life-like (what Kracauer calls "the redemption of physical reality") it increases the catharsis by giving a total ---------------------------------------------illusion of reality. The cinema can lie so "truthfully", because it makes its statements through juxtaposition, of formal elements of which the audience is largely unaware while it appears to be a continuous succession of "realistic" images. Thus the realism of detail, when combined with catharsis, alienates the people from reality and involves them, instead, in a ready-made dream: the more fantastic is its content, the more it is realistic in its detail. David Wark Griffith, the first great film-maker of America and the world, perfected the art of illusion through the introduction of the closeup and a meticulous imitation of reality. He was also the first to make a tentative gesture to break away from it, to make a cinema capable of higher generalization. (Intolerance.) The Indian cinema has, by and large, worked without an attempt at that higher generalization which took the other cinemas and specially the early Soviet cinema of Eisenstein, to discover the great intellectual possibilities of this new art. But I would like to mention the fact that both Eisenstein in the cinema and Brecht in the theatre drew upon sources of Oriental theatre to introduce and develop discontinuous, significant elements juxtaposed to make the cinema more meaningful. These elements, present in our different regional forms of folk theatre, appeared in our cinema in a cruder fashion and continue to flourish in our song sequences whenever the motif is not purely erotic. There were rare examples, of course, of partially successful achievements like Sanl Tukaram but usually all attempts at overcoming purely physical representation of artificial situations were reduced to naive, conventional symbolism, borrowing metaphorical structures from an underdeveloped box theatre and the overall influence of the "analytic-dramatic" school (as characterised by Bazin) prevalent in the ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------sound film. For some time there seemed to be no way out of this impasse. Not for us, not until we became aware of ourselves. The liberation of Italy from the fascists had just preceded our own declaration of independence. The Italians abandoned syntax. For all order seemed to them, quite rightly at that time, -----------------------to be imposed, oppressive, fascist. They rejoiced in reality, were happy to be

alive, to pursue the pleasure of just simply being human and flowing into nature's unbroken continuity. Unlike the realism of the Renaissance, it was anti-rationalist. It so emphasised the evocative, lyrical qualities of nature that social institutions, including language, became irrelevant. And that was where it failed. It had a world-wide impact. Even on our largely mythmaking commercial cinema. While melodrama was maintained, Bimal Roy intensified physical reality in Do Bigha Zamin, through comparative photographic verisimilitude, to make a socially relevant film. Even a great showman of Bombay, Raj Kapoor, took something from neo-realism to make films like Boot Polish. The heroes played by the glamorous stars like Raj Kapoor himself, Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand and others, could play unemployed graduates, taxi drivers or the dispossessed lumpen of our streets. But the romantic-humanist seed of neo-realism found its best soil in Bengal. Its literature had already cross-fertilised extremely well with the literature of 19th century Europe. To produce the realism of detail, along with the necessary off-shoot of romanticism, the pathetic fallacy, the ------------------------------strictly chronological and sequential development of narrative from the -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------serialised novel. Satyajit Ray, who is our finest exponent of this form, --------------------------------------brought to it the related tradition of the caricature of social types. Ritwik --------------------------------------Ghatak was the first to try and integrate neo-realism with an operatic, epic ------------------structure working directly from the folk arts and the theories of Eisenstein --------------and Brecht. The movement had its support in what was perhaps India's largest linguistically cohesive middle-class. Necessarily again, as a corollary to romanticism, Calcutta also spawned the now widely accepted theory in India of a regionally "rooted" cinema. While the theory had a healthy contempt for a spurious internationalism which consists in producing -----------------------------------------derivative art (like much of our painting of that period) it had all the ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------possibilities of degenerating into a narrow, medieval and decorative idea of culture. Fortunately, there are signs that it will be given up by the artists before their apologists. Fortunately again, we have a classical culture and it is a classicism which is not totally divorced from our folk traditions as Dipali Nag demonstrates --------------in her paper on music. From all accounts, the Europeans had to destroy some of their cultural achievements to accommodate the more "civilized" Greco>>> Roman tradition. It was an attempt to reconcile - and even to discover and enlarge, as in the case of the Renaissance, through art, a scientific tradition to a society governed by religious thought and hierarchical organization. Unless realism in art is founded upon an attitude which grows out of the --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------contemporary scientific relationship between the subject and the object, it
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will be used inadvertently against the people. The catharsis that an illusion -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------of reality, linked to a tragic vision, provides can lead us even more -------------convincingly into fatalism and put nature above men. Such a realism would --------------------------------be a realism of surface appearances and not even of form. For, form consists --------------------of concepts - which could either be metaphysical or "scientific" in the -----------------------------------------------------------broadest sense. Instead of reducing realism or our own traditional epic forms to decorate surfaces, instead of appeasing and exploiting the people, one should be approaching them with an open, free and truthful discourse. Instead of manipulating their feelings through identification, one can try -----------------and understand their logic. ---There are many ways in which epic form, rejuvenated through a scientific and not a mythic attitude, can serve this function: ------------------------------------------------------The epic form in its verbal, musical, visual manifestations, is not a chronology of static events. The strictly chronological, sequential narrative arose out of a mechanistic and closed system of causation. The intervention ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------of the narrator or the subject in the transformation of the object in nature is --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------clearly recognized in both the epic form and in the modern practice of ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------science. To know is to change. This new relationship between the subject ----------- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ and the object, if accepted, can take us away from both a mechanical idea of objectivity and from a subjectivity which extends into nature, through the ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------pathetic fallacy. The imitation of reality can be replaced by the internal --------------------relationship of society or the social, historical man's consciousness of nature. All this can, however, be done if the artist does not calculate social relevance from box office receipts, cathartic participation or the closeness of images to narrow, regional idiosyncracies. Nor can it be achieved through ------------------------------------------------high-pitched ideological rhetoric with formal and, therefore, conceptual untidiness in an attempt to substitute thematic vocabulary for content and --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------grammar. Such an approach can only lead back to subjectivist anarchism, ------------manipulating the people to revolt impotently against individual circumstances of poverty and deprivation, rather than against the entire social order with a code which only organized practice and conscious theory can -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------unravel. ----------We have so far been shy of revealing the organizing logic of the ------------------------------------director, as Eisenstein termed it, to our audience. In other words, we have ----------equipped them with experiences by proxy and not with a system of signs ----------------------------------------------------------which can convert their gestures into meaningful acts. The sensuous reality --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------that surrounds us should be freed from irrational feeling. The--------------------myths can be ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------given back their original vitality by displaying the very process by which ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------they are formed. To decode the myths is to destroy them as myths and to -------------------------98 . .

destroy their falsification of a true human contact with nature. By showing ----------------------------------------------------------------------------the process by which myths or other systems of signs are formed, one can move from ritual to significant act. << ---------------------------------------------The cinema may have the unique privilege of doing so, with its dual capacity to record nature in flux and simultaneously, to articulate the -------------------------------------------------------process of human interaction with it through the organizing logic of the --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------director-spectator.
---------------------------

Notes 1. 2. 3. Sant Tukaram, a Marathi "saint-poet" film made by the Prabhat Studio in 193 6, now recognised to be a major work in the popular cinema of the pre-lndependence period. D o Bigha Zamin, a film by Bimal Roy made in 1953 under Italian neo-realist influence. Boot Polish, made by Raj Kapoor in 1954.

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Interview
Ashish Rajadhyaksha
By Ashish Rajadhyaksha

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AR: Acknowledging the European readers of this discussion, I'd like to begin with the problem of cultural exchange today, the formal consequences of some of its established assumptions. For example, on the one hand there is a greater degree of exchange than ever, through growing markets, mass-communications and cultural export. But on the other, the only response to this seems to limit the individual work to purely culture-specific boundaries which of course rapidly become geographical boundaries. In most cases there is a straightforward ethnicist argument operating, but even progressive positions seem to find political survival only through perpetuating these divides. I think your work with the epic provides new ways with which to look at the entire issue, in the way it concerns relationships, and the traditions that determine them. Could you speak of your approach to it?

KS: There is, of course, a strong essentialist thinking that operates when people restrict cultural traditions to regional limits. And people still seem to feel a pressing need - here and elsewhere - to seek a homogeneity of culture, static and unvarying in space and time. I think we must re-examine the high points in the history of different cultures, the achievements that today constitute this "essence", and see how they came to be - whether in India, Greece or the so-called "West". In India, for instance, if we take the period from the Mauryas (4th - 1st century B.C.) to the Guptas ( 4th - 7th century A.D.) we see so major a cultural development that it remains the source, and for some, of course, the essence of many things in our culture today. Now this development, if we follow D. D. Kosambi's writings,1 shows not only vast technological changes leading to changes in social organisation and communication, but also that its entire strength lay in its ability to synthesise from a variety of different sources. This "essence" we realise was not in a static homogeneity but a dynamic of exchange, in technology, trade and, consequently, a synthesis of several different ways of looking at the world. Our epic tradition is one of synthesising several traditions, taking into itself the material base, social organisation, technology. It is therefore completely universal. Yet the need to search for a homogeneity seems to remain, and I believe it is a psychological need emanating from remnants of tribalistic ways of thinking and emoting. This inability, in a way, to tackle new realities, new relationships, and to think in terms of a larger fellowship of human values, leads to a lot of frustration, to incestuous relations, a kind of embarrassment at speaking about, and sharing, the actual experience of living. 100 .

I think the synthesising process is crucial to the European traditions as well. Geometry, for instance, as developed by the Greeks, was later again seen as the essence of "Western" civilisation. But it was first employed by the Egyptians, whose use of proportions the Greeks so magnificently formalised, and it was later amalgamated into the numerical system by the Arabs. I think the history of European languages, the change in their living habits, design in the 18th and 19th century, the portrayal of women, all these would demonstrate that their "essence" came through their openness to influences outside, although they felt the need to keep calling it "Western". By no stretch of imagination is Greece closer to the West than it is to the East. Assimilating this history, the crucial question we face today is whether we can continue to speak of each other, to each other, in terms other than those of wanting to conquer each other. Can this synthesis, as a continuing effort, speak of an equal exchange that would break barriers of regionality and overcome the tendency to appropriate other cultures without acknowledgement? I think the first effort of all artists must be to re-think that constricted area of artistic practice that we are allowed, and to re-install its primacy in human activity.
AR: From both what you've said, and from your work, it is evident that this crisis has been there for some time; we can see it in the disintegration of classical writing, in the political "feudalising" of the epic, and the breakdown of traditions before commodification. How do you actually see these barriers in your work, and your social position as an artist?

KS: It does seem to happen that the very systems that gave birth to the great institutions of art, whether music or painting, literature or theatre, end up themselves oppressing those forms. It has come to a point today that actually to create something one has to challenge that whole system formally - and it is a global system now. This is evident not only in art but in all formalising, even in political activism. On the whole there has been a disorganised response. Right now we depend on a few individuals. And on a discourse that is in one sense peripheral to the system. One specific problem of our times is that the bourgeoisie has set up, even institutionalised, this response. The post-romantic period shows that even the dominant system demands from the artist an individuated style while actually levelling everything out into an acceptable, easily consumable, mediocrity. This newness, and uniqueness, that is so much in demand, makes it possible for one to work, but it simultaneously annihilates one's individuality, reducing that newness to a sort of trade mark. Television is frightening in its ability to do this.

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To fight the great leveller, one can perhaps learn from the experience of the great saint-poets of India; they, too, were made --------------------------------------------------------------------------marginal while simultaneously being converted into heroes. Even today, the artist and the critic are constantly expected to provide insights by the very system that makes them marginal to it. We may have to accept this as a fact, and only then begin to work: the fact that the artist is simultaneously marginal and the "hero" of society, struggling to exist but making existence possible for others.
AR: Your epic construction in T a r a n g emerges from very immediate concerns in the present which then grow into larger contradictions of history. What was that immediate response, when you began working on it almost 12 years ago, to the conditions prevailing and how did they move into the epic?

where I initially got my character, Janaki, in Tarang. But then evidently this conflict also went back into the post-War situation, with all its formal aspects in art, like Bazin's theories on realism, and modernism itself. As I viewed it, the epic always has to find its expression through ---------------------------------------------------------------------------the dominant mode of exchange. I had to place it in the present, in a ------------------------------------------------------historical situation where it had to articulate itself with the positive aspects of commodification. I had to realise the languages that revealed the material states of oppression, as formulated in the ideologies that emerged, and a universe of experience, contained by mythology, that was equally shaped by those material states. With a lyrical construction I would have had to work only with sensuous -------------experience, and to give it a metrical structure; or with the dramatic I --------------------------would have had to turn the social environment into a metaphor, of death possibly. Here I wanted to open up the language, to reveal every articulation in reality by revealing every articulation in the form. It demanded a kind of oscillating movement that concerned the very question of being, revealing the transitions from the social to the psychological, to the spiritual and back. I believe that, in their different ways, both Ritwik Ghatak and Robert Bresson have emphasised precisely this. From them I learnt about the importance of acting, and -------------------------------all that it conveys, which is more than merely conveying experience. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In every shot the effort has been to reveal these transformations within human personalities, to orchestrate their performance with their ---------------------------------------------------------------------presence, to extend this into composition, mise en scene, editing. What -------------I was trying to militate against was that tendency, in realism and in -------------------------------------------modernism, to stultify the object before its transformative relations -1 ------------------ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------think Goldmann has said somewhere that voyeurism emerges because -------------everything is dealt with as an object, and therefore a commodity. I saw, in the form I was using, the ability to divide and counterpose actions and objects into those that were natural, those worked on with gratuitous purpose and those wrought for exchange.
AR: The oppositions in your films are clearly drawn from movements in world cinema, and you are working with and, more importantly, against Eisenstein, the neo-realists and others. In your effort to find a "discourse of history" that takes in layers of verbal and visual --------------------------------------------------------------------------------language, paralleling history itself, do you feel that you have been able to find alternatives to ----------------------------------------------work beyond that crippling trap of realism/modernism, that trap also of the denotative and --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------depictive?

KS: I think those specific conflicts, in the '70s here in the political and economic situation, were definitely part of a world-historical crisis. Commodification, that had so completely become the basis of human relations everywhere, was something that had begun throwing up extreme contradictions - as the drought situation in Maharashtra, which was the subject of my documentary Fire In The Belly, and from 102 .

KS:>>The trap of realism/modernism, as all the other oppositions contained i n it, arises out of presenting experience as a thing: through the transparency of the image in realism and the opacity of the image in modernism. Both procedures lead to a reduction of relationships, events, human action and being to lifeless things. 103

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SHAHAN1 In realism, the object/event referred to is a fetishised commodity. In modernism it is the image itself that has been reduced; the one says "reality is", and the other says "the image is", both in a static, unmediated way. How does it become what it is? After all, the image is created and should begin to have a life of its own, as life itself is created by history and individual mediations. I----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------think if we structure our work on the basis of the great possibilities of "exchange" that the commodity form has opened up, if ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------we recognise and reveal what has gone into the making of an image, ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------we may be able to breathe life into it. -------------------------------------------------------------When the camera and the tape-recorder deny the making of an image, propose a totalitarian reality or a wholly made object, as if it were not capable of further transformation, the film-maker is telling a lie, however "truthful" his intentions. I think even Rossellini realised this when he went into didactic film-making. I remember spending an evening with him where he completely disowned his "children" of the '60s and '70s who claimed that "reality is". At the other extreme, Ritwik Ghatak proposes mythological
images in the first part of Titash Ekti Nadir Naam( A River Named Titash)-

i.e., wholly-made images ostensibly resistant to transformation - and then he delivers them to history. One has to employ several subterfuges to upset established habits ---------------of reading, to use transparence in a way that is not transparent, a way -------------------that would draw attention to oppositions. -----------------One has finally to restore history by restoring the place of the viewer as one actively engaged in a dynamic relationship to the reality and to cinema. One has to put the object of one's creation back into the world of flux. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Definitely we have an advantage over those who inherited the realist tradition, grand as it has been from the time of the Renaissance, or perhaps from the time of Aristotle. We would have to learn from this tradition because it has already changed our ways of seeing dramatically. Similarly the modernist movement has drawn our attention to the code. ------------But the crisis that we have all faced, whether in the West or East, has been that of the restoration of significance. Ever since the novel ---------------------------------------and then the film came into being, the realist image has acquired a meaningless, a false mythical value. It has claimed to be more lifelike than life itself. The modernist image, in reaction, has proposed itself as a saturated mental reality. ----------------------------------------And with both tentatives the significance of the image has been drained. I think this restoration of significance comes for us through two definite conditions in which we find ourselves, if we look sufficiently 104

clearly at ourselves. We don't have to try very hard, because it is visible to anyone who comes here. We are in a condition where history is being played out before our eyes. The remnants of tribal, agrarian, and other stages are still around us. We cannot escape this, even if we don't "know" it. We are, ultimately, the oppressed and the oppressed cannot function without examining every act of oppression that surrounds them. For us, automatically, what might be considered a daily act of no significance becomes an act of significance - drinking tea, for instance, we cannot forget that tea is grown in India and China and Sri Lanka but for Frenchmen to this day it is an "English" habit. I have even met people on the Continent who think that tea is grown in England. In the economically more advanced countries, there appears to be a sort of curtain around the historical relationship with the object. --------------------------------------------------------------Somehow, despite the fact that the bourgeoisie has a considerably greater consciousness of history, which led to its formalising, the actual relationship with the object - in the way it is packaged, "used"denies history. In the United States, Europe, even in the Soviet Union, one is presented something like an outsider's view of history. This 105

DOSSIER: SHAHINI does not happen here; nobody can really escape the dominance of history, whoever one is. What people can and do end up doing is to capitulate to the oppressor and perpetuate imperialist dominance or adopt a "nativism" >> through the mass-media, -------------- that would shut out all -----------------so-called alien influences. But for those who don't do that, to grapple with our materials afresh, to recast any relation between tradition and practice, and consequently the "extent" of our perceived world, this is a continuing struggle.

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AR: You've often spoken of the importance of tradition. In the way you use it you see it as repeatedly intervening in contemporary experience. You use the archetypes it provides you, and even the language that works around the confrontation of man and nature. But what about the more conservative manifestations of tradition as rigidly encoded areas of experience, but accessible to all prevalent ideologies? Also, there is a contradictory tension between "naming" the archetype and evoking it through recollection and seeing it as a container for memory and desire. But when you extend this to the present political and social experience, do you not encounter anxiety situations with your audience, and a resistance? How do you actually contend with that problem in T a r a n g ?

KS: It's true that there are certain encoded ways of making you ready for an experience. For instance, the most rigidly encoded information given to us through heredity is about our motor impulses - the way we walk, or move our arms, hands and feet. Pure theatre, dance, displays ---------------------------------------------the whole history of the body. Yet, in the most traditional forms of -------------------------------------------------dance there is the capacity and the need to innovate. -------------When the body finds realisation or resistance in experience, it produces energy, thought, emotion, and re-creates life. I think that's when metaphor comes into being: dance becomes imbued with dramatic significance. Through certain stages of transformation, the dramatic becomes socialised, yielding systems of thought that are ----------------------------------------------more complex than the purely metaphorical one. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------The absence/presence of the nourishing breast is perhaps the basic metaphor, not only of drama but also of religion. In mythology, the metaphorical relationship is transformed into one of the container and the contained. Myth finds its practice in ritual. Ritual extends into the social act. And so the metaphorical-mythological framework opens out into new sets of relationships, some "scientific", some "associative"; the rational -------------------------------------------deals with the irrational; the irrational yields new configurations of the unknown. I think the film-maker has to work with all this and more: the dead metaphors of advertising; the metonymies of political ideology that make up myths that cannot enter into practice - containers that are empty; the "scientific" cults of idealised relationships in nature; the worship of the irrational, of the Past or the Future that would want to replace the "spiritual" or significant. 106 -

>> When we try to make sense of our whole experience, we naturally succumb to all manner of anxiety. Language breaks down and turns into bizarre objects. Instead of the metaphor equipping us to face the reality of the absent object, it -----------------------------------------proposes itself as the all-containing reality. We break it apart and fill the world with pornographic images, irrational fears, voyeurised fragments of the real container. I feel very strongly that if the critical tradition does not begin at some point to see all that its investigative probes are evoking, it will end up only with self-flagellation. In the modern world, the moment a mental act is performed, it gets surrounded by fragmented images. Those who begin by mourning the state of civilisation end up mourning the subjective state of the person mourning the state of the civilisation. Thus, everyone is rendered voyeuristic, pornographic, self-destructive. An ethical-spiritual question gets reduced to a moral------------------------------------------------------------------------------------religious one. --------------------The standard communist response is its mirror image, since all it does is to take a moral-religious stance of condemning the decadence of such art. One is right in seeking an affirmative art. But it has to >>> begin with the affirmative discovery of the Self, as it gets realised in the Other. I think our material condition in India and our traditions do both push us to take this position vis-a-vis the world built upon the debris of our civilisation. For Ghatak, the development of archetypes came from traditions of the Natyashastra2 as well as folk-cultures, which included above all folk music. He did have a tremendous facility with that, using when he needed an Eisensteinian-Cherkassovian methodology. I have tried to ----------------------reject expressionistic content completely, depending more on the ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------psychoanalytic insights provided towards understanding archetypes, ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------and the consequences this would have on, for instance, realistic acting that does not take into account the social-historical signs sufficiently while claiming to do so. Unlike Bresson, who would jettison the layers of signs to free the actor to the point where s/he would come into contact with the unnamed presence, I've depended on our traditions that would interact these layers to arrive at a transformative, "cosmic", universal ---------------------------------------------------------language. As a dancer depicting Radha's love for Krishna may include ------------the maternal love of Yashodhara or the heroism of Draupadijanaki in Tarang alludes to many Mother Goddesses - Durga, Radha, Sita, Urvashi - and is therefore free of the encapsulated meaning contained by the "name", freed in a way by the contemporary cosmos of the >>> commodity form which is, although few acknowledge it, a new form of exchange which therefore develops a new language. 107

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AR: Continuing this question of freeing meaning, 1 want to discuss the use of some of the elements of the film-making medium, in the way you free those. Colour in M a y a D a r p a n was used rigidly, metrically as in lyric poetry, but in T a r a n g if is freer, taking in several movements that would counterpoint and again "free" the dramatic movement. Here you seem to have made use of the modernist effort to liberate elements. But elsewhere in your visuals you have arrived at a freedom through fairly ancient traditions, for instance in the way Indian classical music has been symphonically composed and the way it has found correspondences --------------------------------------------------------------------------with the visuals. --------------------On the other hand, you've also had to move towards a concretising, especially in positioning your spectator before the universe of your theme, and in developing a sequencing order that would acknowledge the spectator's sites, which is obviously an ethical issue as well as a formal one. Could you speak of this process?

KUMAR SHAHANI: BIO-FILMOGRAPHY Born: December 7th, 1940. Graduated from the University of Bombay (1962) and obtained the diploma in Screenplay Writing ( ranked first) from the Film & Television Institute of India in 1965 before coming top of the class again in 1966 in the Advanced Direction course, where he was taught by the great Ritwik Ghatak. He studied film in France (1967-68) where he worked with Bresson. He lectured extensively, served on the Executive Council of the Indian Film Directors' Association (1980-81) and was a contributing editor of the influential Journal of Arts & Ideas (1982-83). 1966: The Glass Pane (35mm, b&w, 10 mins). Graduation film about a couple who return from a funeral and feel drastically disoriented. 1967: Manmad Passenger (35mm, b&w, 15 mins). About a young man in search of something to commit himself to. 1969: A Certain Childhood (35mm, b&w, 22 mins). Documentary. 1970: Rails for the World (35mm, Technicolour, 20 mins). Promotional documentary for Hindustan Steel Ltd on behalf of the government of India. 1971: Object (16mm, Kodachrome, 10 mins). A film about phantasies made for a psychoanalyst's thesis. 1972: Maya Darpan (35mm, Eastmancolour, 100 mins., Hindi). Produced and directed by Kumar Shahani; Sc: Nirmal Verma; Ph.: K. K. Mahajan; Mus.: Bhaskar Chandragupta; Ed.: Madhu Sinha; Art Dir.: Bansi Chandragupta. Cast: Aditi, Anil Pandya, Kanta Vyas, Anil Kaul. 1973: Fire in the Belly (35mm, b&w, 18 mins). Documentary about the drought in Maharashtra. 1974- Montage (Bombay TV ). 76: Programme on film appreciation. 1976: Our Universe (16mm, b&w). Educational film. 1984: Tarang (35mm, colour, cinemascope, 171 mins, Hindi). Dir.: Kumar Shahani; Prod.: National Film Development Corporation (India); Sc: Roshan and Kumar Shahani; Dial.: Vinay Shukla; Ph.: K. K. Mahajan; Mus.: Vanraj Bhatia; Lyrics: Raghuvir Sehay and Gulzar; Sd.: Narendra Singh. Cast: Smita Patil, Amol Palekar, Dr Shriram Lagoo, Girish Karnad, Jayanti Patel, Arvind Deshpande, M. K. Raina, Om Puri, Sulabha Deshpande, Jalal Agha, Rohini Hattangady, Kawal Gandhiok.

KS: I have always felt that in film, one constructs space primarily through sequence: movement from shot to shot, movement within. The most evolved form of sequence that I know of is the khayal, -------the North Indian classical vocal system of music. The nuanced tensions between the "named" notes, the proportions that always lead from a kinetic home to a point of rest; the sculpting of sounds from the continuous scale suggest modes of composing movement, including improvisation, revealing transitions, rather than suggesting them. The Western mode of music seems to be more like architecture. It builds up a structure. It has fixed lines of stress and strain. I find that architecture (and music that evokes architecture) a fine constructive principle for the layers of sound that we use in film. I feel that if form, colour and tone are made as fluid as Indian -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------music, it frees the spectator from the "immutable". Similarly -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------(conversely?) I would like to hold together sound through the principles of Western music, to create an architectural structure. I think that the achievements of Eisenstein, of Bresson, of Western artists, have been in the extensions of geometry, to the exclusion of -----------------------------------processes that reveal themselves in melodic time, of being. --------------------- -------------I--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------think we must begin by trying to breathe life into our icons, sculpted from the infinity of space which has become our acoustical ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------environment. -------------------(Bombay, November 1985) Notes 1. D. D. Kosambi: Marxist historian and anthropologist, author of An Introduction to The
Study of Indian History, Myth & Reality, and many other studies. 2. Natyashastra: the ancient Indian text on drama (including music and dance) written by the sage Bhanata Muni.

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Selected Bibliography (in addition to the items published in this issue): 1975: The Necessity of a Code: paper read at the Symposium on Parallel Cinema, Int. Film Festival, New Delhi. 1975: Colour, Light and Shade: AIR broadcast. 1976: Pour Ritwik Ghatak in Cinema '76, Paris. 1977: Film-maker's Purpose read at Int. Film Festival, New Delhi. 1978: Internationalism and the problem of authenticity, paper read at the 3rd Triennials of International Art, Lalit Kala Academy, New Delhi. 1978: I'm burning ... the universe is burning - a tribute to Ritwik Ghatak in Filmotsav Documentation, Madras.
1978: A Meeting with Miklos jancso, journal of the National Center for the Performing

Arts, September. 1979: Homage to Tarkovsky, New Delhi International Film Festival Documentation. 1980: The Saint Poets of Prabhat in Film World, January. 1980: Meet Julia, in Imprint, February. 1980: On Pornography, in Imprint, March. 1980: Cinema of Research & Relevance, in Film World. 1981: The Cinema and the Press, Indian Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi.

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