The Case of Sergei Eisensteir culture was quite deep in Eisenstein's work and it comes at various points in various forms. But the earliest writing we have, the earliest theoretical formulation of an idea outside of the European framework, was his use of the ideogram, and how ideograms are formed as a basis for montage. Like an ideogram for the eye and another for the tear, and together you have the word sorrow. This would be a simplistic example, the combination of two words leading to a third meaning, but a combination he saw as a beginning of montage. 22 The other thing that had fascinated him was the concept of the 'monistic ensemble' in the Kabuki. Rather than use one sense, the spectator would be approached through all senses, and each of the senses would have full freedom for some time. Like maybe hearing, or the food that is used in the theatre, which is ritualistic and would also appeal to other senses. The way the senses were used and the way the theatre would shift from the one to the other, became quite important for him, because in the cinema one uses sound and visual and suggests other senses. (This breaking an image into various senses and synthesizing the image through various senses became quite an important point in the teaching of Stanislavsky, and it has really been part of an important, ongoing tradition, even with people like Ignatious Loyola, in his spiritual exercises. Stanislavsky uses the 'sense-memory'; Ignatious Loyola uses also these very systematic exercises for a person to recreate the feeling of 'being there with Chrisf or 'being in Hell'—how you should remember certain sounds, certain smells. It is a systematic reconstruction of an imaginary object.) Eisenstein saw that Japanese theatre, with its tremendous degree of stylization, seemed to offer an alternative to the naturalistic theatre for it allowed the artist to deal with experiences which were below or above those of daily life, in the sense that they could be the experiences of the supernatural, or of cosmic forces, the representation of which in the naturalistic theatre was getting increasingly rare. So he saw in the Japanese culture the possibility of cosmic art-forms. His interest in Japan decreases at a point when Mei-Lang Fan, the Chinese actor, comes to the Soviet Union with his troupe—in fact Eisenstein had shot a film with him—and he began to feel that many of the things he had learnt from the Japanese culture were preserved in more ancient forms in the Chinese. So there are many of these ideas, which he uses in his films, and which one also sees being used in some Indian films—like Ritwik Ghatak's Ajantrik for instance—where he talks of the 'music of the landscape' and how the Chinese scroll has to be read in time, something that becomes a precondition for the use of the background by the cinematographer. Now this use is quite different from the pathetic fallacy, because he takes colour and the landscape and also music as components which could interact with the theme, and interprets it in various ways. As he says, the worst example of such interaction would be of the stars being happy, the audiences being happy, with happy music and happy lighting. But he sees them as creating contradiction with each other. He was in this too influenced a lot by Chinese thinking: about composition, the Tao of Painting, Chinese philosophy. He had studied the work of Marcel Granet, in particular La Pensee Chinoise. Some of the things that he brings over to the cinema are extremely interesting. One of them is a long study about numbers—the Chinese have complex theories on Journal of Arts <& Ideas