But-right from here enormous confusion is caused by many who write and talk about cinema. There is a persistent tendency to equate the events portrayed, or (he characters established with the content—a film dealing with a revolutionary character, possibly portraying events of a revolutionary nature, is very often mistaken for a revolutionary film (as happened recently at a cost of crores of Rs. to the Indian government!) To me the content of a film can only be defined by the attitude expressed by the author to the events/characters he portrays. He need not be in sympathy with them, nor indeed need the characters be in sympathy with the events. Or, as in the commercial Hindi cinema, there could be sympathy all down the line—when the hero and heroine are happy the event becomes joyous one, and the filmmaker instantly duplicates this with a musical pattern demonstrating the joyousness. Therefore, it is the particular set of structures that demonstrate the attitude of the author to the events and characters he portrays which must become the focus of our attention when we speak of content. Once I emphasise this, I would like to immdiately relate the terms of this thinking to the two lines of aesthetic development that have really shaped if for us—of Eisenstein and Brecht. Abstraction: and the Relationship to Historical Forms Eisenstein's major work, The Non-Indifferent Nature (unfortunately not available in English) deals basically with the problem of how the human emotion—of character, author and spectator—extends to the man-nature relationship. For instance, he speaks of various forms of the pathetic fallacy, from the allegorical level, as in Pudovkin's Mother, to the far more complex levels, relating to mythology, as in his own Battleship Pfltemkin. He elaborates the man-nature relationship to an extended examination of the compositional principles at work behind the author's demonstration attitudes. Brecht, likewise, makes this the fundamental basis of his .theoretical position, as seen in the distinction he makes between the attitude of the author to the character, and of the character to the event—in his persistent demand that the actor should act as if he is playing the character, and never be the character. Neither Brecht nor Eisenstein ever believed that the establishing of an attitude towards evej-it/character was as simple as having one dominat 'message'. Since Eisenstein elaborated on the precise means of creating within the spectator a complex, multi-dimensional attitude to a 18 October-December 1983