to recognise that this attempt can only work if it is accompanied with a conceptual understanding of the issues involved. Most critical work on cinema today, in India, subordinates film to literature and theatre, by equating the film with the story in it. Such as equation between film and literature precludes the possibility of a more complex relationship, which is in fact a necessity if film is to find its own independent identity. Peter Wollen quotes Roland Barthes as pointing out that non-verbal systems of communication exist only rarely without support at some point or other from the word. "Words either anchor meaning or convey it" (Wollen). In the absence of significant verbal correspondences, provided by art-criticism, the tendency of transforming the visual experience into a simplistic literary one is very strong. It is partly the absence of such art-criticism that has caused the problem of meaning in the purely visual arts. The need to critically make genuinely material correspondences between film and various arts is a vital one, and cinematic practice is specifically useful in the way it opens up such possibilities. (Arun Khopkar has elaborated upon this point in The Linear And The Displaced^ in this issue). With Eisenstein we may have to reaffirm the fact that, in the manner in which cinema is grounded unambiguously and unshake-ably into the contemporary, the existence of montage structures in other forms is what still provides us structures at once widespread and rooted in the contemporary experience to refer to the point we departed from, structures that are then at once universal and rooted in the culture-specific. There have been several batterings that this concept of structures has received, and yet, bruised and bleeding, it still retains its original promise. If we can link to this concern the tools that structuralism now provides us and which would finally enable us to take the commercial cinema seriously as cinema, as mythology, we would have made the first great breakthrough. That would enable us, finally, to withstand the pressure of those who have insistently demanded that the commercial cinema be considered the more relevant form, and who would seek to elevate filmmakers like Ramesh Sippy and Manmohan Desai to the level of auteurs. If we can make these links, and relate the immediate to cultural, political, universal aesthetic attitudes, then that would be the first significant step. Francois Truffaut, suggesting just such a breakthrough in 1954 towards a new attitude, spoke of a 'certain tendency' in the French cinema. Maybe one can be more assertive than that. 16 October-December 1983