We have to place in this context the problem of realism. The filmmaker -trying to capture the reality around him has to contend with the fact that today Manmohan Desai's Coolie is in every sense of the term a more realist film than, say, Shyam Benegal's Mandi. The self-consciousness of heroic creation and its masquerade in a working class outfit is evident: in Coolie the point where Amitabh Bachchan received his bad accident is, apparently, frozen on screen as the legend 'This is where Amitabh got hurt' flashes across, followed, if you can believe this, by a shot of Amitabh himself waving to his fans from the balcony of Bombay's Breach Kandy hospital! The issue of cinema finding its own identity thus becomes a directly political one but must be looked at, expressly, from other perspectives. There is a kind of filmmaking being practiced by a few filmmakers in India which, although having received critical acclaim within the country and without, has not been able to find any distribution outlet and has now seemingly reached an economic dead-end. This cinema, by acknowledging the true limitations of the medium, was beginning to evolve newer relationships with other art-forms. Cinema would not be any more parasitical on literature, theatre or music. A film based on a three-act play, instead of destroying the complexity and limited setting of the original form, would retain its intrinsic sensuousness and, thereby, by paradox, would be forced to discover itself, i.e. what could be truly cinematic about the filming of a play. The moment cinema can lay itself parallel to any other more established art-form, it will be able to free itself into independence (Mani Kaul: Communications) Kaul's statement is particularly relevant to his own work which has always depended on such oppositions whether from literature, theatre, painting or music. But there are other films too which have sought their identity through this conflict: Kumar Shahani's Maya Darpan and Tarang that use anthropology and the epic tradition, to a lesser extent Ketan Mehta's Bhavni Bhavai which uses folk theatre and Kundan Shah's Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron which counterpoints stylised acting with quite starkly realist environments. Clearly the need,'and the attempt is as Mani Kaul says for cinema to 'lay itself parallel to other more established art forms' and thus free itself into independence; although one may define the 'other' in different ways from those Kaul uses. The point however is Journal of Arts and Ideas 15 A CERTAIN TENDENCY