Interrogating Internationalism every year and make a selection for his festival, and last year he saw a thousand films; he said he liked perhaps three or four. This naturally posed a great problem to him to mount the festival, and when I went there — in January this year — he was extremely apologetic about the kind of fare he was offering. And I think this situation has come to such a pass because of a standardization, an intemationalization of the market along with centralized distribution networks like television. There is still tremendous confusion, even amongst us, about these centralized modes of distribution, and I think we 6 should take this problem up right away. Many people believe, for example, that television is a kind of art form (even Godard says something to this effect), which I don't think it is. Television is a broadcasting medium, it is not a medium of discourse of any kind. This initial confusion is further compounded by certain things that television has itself led to, which is a quick 'reading" of images, one thai actually leads people to believe that they have become visually more sophisticated. I think we haven't, I think that instead of looking at visual images we have started 'reading' them, like signals whose interpretation maybe made only in a certain direction, certain pre-determined responses programmed to the visual stimuli. So a painting of, let's say, a mother and child has stopped yielding anything more than a transparent image, although we know that, in the history of art, this is merely a thematic substance, that it may have nothing to do with the universe that the particular work of art straddles. Such a habit has actually led to the abdication of the very effort to structure an image, to structure linkages between different events, whether musical events or visual events or narrative events. There has then been a reaction to this, in movements that have taken often quite deliberately retrograde steps, opposing such internationalism with a geographically-determined nationalism, articulated through the region, whether these are visual, philosophical, narrative or musical articulations. If one starts with whatever is 'known', as a geographical entity — lefs say India or Britain — which starts with the concept of a nation state — you instantly arrive at regional identities which are counterposed with national identities, and in places like ours, caste identities and so forth. Even modernist reactions have thrown up a kind of retrograde lumpenism — like the punks in England, who are reacting against a standardization of behaviour and of aesthetics, to propose a group that challenges the dominant on virtually no grounds except of being outrageous. In China we had a Cultural Revolution that has now been seen as a highly infantile way of reacting against traditions which developed out of great struggles and a great amount of practice over hundreds of years. These symptoms were of course also a part of every revolutionary or semi-revolutionary change but it is only now that they have begun to get such a strong base. For not since the Byzantine empire have we had so massive and monolithic a centralization and standardization of expression as we do today. The problem is extremely real, no matter what mode of address you take up. Working in the cinema for example, I have to work with lenses; as Bazin points out, the lens is known in French as objectif -— the lens is supposed to give you a view of objective reality, and the technology of the lens has, we know, developed directly from the efforts of the Renaissance painters. So now we, as practitioners of the cinema, have Journal of Arts & Ideas