The major limitation in MacCabe is ultimately a lack of open-endedness, in a sense so important while writing about a filmmaker like Godard. He makes a sincere attempt to face up to the demands that Godard's work inevitably imposes on a critical structure, trying to break down the earlier conventions in various ways. For instance, each chapter is preceded by a series of images that attempt to illustrate the chapter itself - the chapter on ^Money and Montage' preceded by a fragmented poster of Coppola's Apocalypse No\^; "Images of Woman; Images of Sexuality' by make-up advertisements, a model directory; Technology' by stills from camera advertisements. And each chapter is concluded by a short interview with Godard himself. Tragically neither works - the former, presumably intended in the style used by John Berger in Ways of Seeing, never transcend their mere decorativeness, and Godard too emerges all the time as a rather eccentric individual with all his "urns' and ^hs' reverently recorded and thus mystified. For those who have seen Godard's interviews with Cahiers du Cinema can see how with a good interviewer like Jean Comolli Godard can be extremely articulate and incisive in his comments. This is not a fault mentioned in passing: it is a key problem. If we consider ourselves in India, trying to face up to the assault of romantic aliistoricism on all our traditions, trying to overcome the very mediocrity of our dominant tradition, the significance of even Godard's romanticism offers us major pointers to the future^ If Ritwik Ghatak's work achieves, in its conflict with romanticism, a pattern of signification, comparable with Godard's (always remembering the vast cultural disparity between the two), we now have Mani Kaul's films facing problems that Godard faced just a decade ago. In some cases the tradition had direct links, clearly seen in Kaul's documentary Arrival, for instance. Under such circumstances, common to cinema the world over, if MacCabe expected his book to serve any useful purpose at all he should have been much more conscious of the bourgeois forms of indi-viduation and isolation, and should have in his structures combated that rather than merely decorated his bobk with pictures and interviews He should have been far more aware of tl^e manner in which the faces Godard's work themselves dialectically fit into a tradition, Perhaps it was after all too much to expect from the British Film Institute. SPECIAL OFFER: Ritwik Ghatak: A Return to the Epic by Ashish Rajadhyaksha. Rs.45/- will be made available to Journal of Arts and Ideas subscribers for 3ls.36.00 Pay by MO to Ashish Rajadhyaksha, 303 Seaside, P. Balu Marg, Prabhadevi, Bombay 400025. January-March 1983