of film freeing itself through active interaction with other art-forms has carried on. Thus film has had its most fruitful collaborations with traditions that are distant from it, rather than dependent on it. Much of post-war fiction in literature has been heavily influenced by film. But Alain Resnais, in collaborating with writers, chose the most literary of novelists like Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras. The collaboration did not result in their writing more 'cinematically5 or in Resnais making 'literary3 films. In posing two traditions against one another, the collaboration succeeded in enriching both, not in subsuming one into the other. In India, despite so much of our cinema being subservient to theatre (I can speak with authority ofMarathi cinema), there are some major interactions taking place which can help us understand not only cinema better but also traditions different from it. Arun Kolatkar is a poet who has achieved, despite an eclecticism ranging from Homer to the Hindi film song, a major synthesis of style to become one of our greatest artists. I had once done an analysis of Jejuri as if it were a shooting script, looking at its editing cuts, its image sizes, camera placements. I believe it is possible to use concepts from cinema to understand better the work of major poets like Kolatkar, and to use their work—apparently so distant from cinema—to understand film better. Vivan Sundaram's paintings too are works that seem to me to belong to the age of cinema without parasitically depending on film. As with forms, so theoretically. It may well be that various disciplines external to film will have a lot to say about it— psychoanalysis, linguistics, semiology have all been used. But unless these theoretical positions relate to the material practice of filmmaking itself, we are unlikely to arrive at a significant understanding either of filmmaking or of filmcriticism and filmhistory, to say nothing of using the new form available to us to restate and redefine our traditions. Perhaps eventually the real synthesis would come not merely in ^rt or in 'making' but in living out a historical situation, in the very nature and choices, of human existence. The Epic Form All directions therefore point to the need to achieve such significant synthesis within the form of filmmaking (perhaps more so than in theatre, music or painting) that would draw from other traditions without being subservient to them. Journal of Arts and Ideas 25