A CERTAIN TENDENCY potent with revolutionary possibilities. It will, as we shall still involve a major battle on several fronts before the issue of culture-specificity versus universality is resolved conclusively in favour of the dialectic, a battle that will enter fields from politics and bourgeois mass-communication to the entire system of international film distribution. footed9 Cultures, international9 market It is very interesting to see how the ideology of international film distribution has interpreted the issues. For various reasons, in part involving the need Hollywood felt in the early '60s and then of course following Vietnam to 'root5 their cinema into some kind of contemporary and 'relevant5 reality, 'regionalist5 exotic products have particularly of late been found to make good marketable products. Big businessmen representing vast American and European conglomerates, who of course admit to no ideology, have for over the last decade capitalised on this selling proposition by sponsoring 'Asian5 and 'Third World5 festivals and making the most of 'political5 film guerillas like Yilmaz Guney, Ousmane Sambene, in many ways our own Mrinal Sen. There is now plenty of evidence to support the view that such filmmakers, and such 'political5 regionalist cinema has received active support from Western financial and educational institutions in the nature of the awards given, the festivals held, the cultural exchanges proposed between nations. (Nor, barring the 'political5 tag, can this be said to be unique to cinema: all state-sponsored art festivals capitalise on this regionalist theme). This wide liberty given by the market to regionalist cinema, however, never extends to a corresponding formal liberty. It is here that the thematic specificity of culture is counterpointed by 'rules5 that are sought to be made applicable to all cinema. I am referring to conventions essentially invented by American film and the 'analytic-dramatic5 principle of construction. These conventions have essentially determined that all action be broken down into its component dramatic links, and that all narrative—of whatever cultural reference—be primarily a linear stringing together of these links. (We must of course again remember that the international film audience was essentially created between the World Wars, and mainly by the near-strangle-hold on international distribution by the big Hollywood studios). Today this particular system of narrative has grown to myriad uses quite different from those that determined their invention, adapting itself to new technology, and building upon other similar systems as it in turn supports them—we shall see this in the purely political uses to which the form has been put. Let us first explore the origins of these conventions in photography and then explore their consequences in just three spheres which may show the degree of their effectiveness: the Indian political situation (in the South, particularly), in the larger context of film 6 October-December 1983