Such a synthesis cannot come on the dramatic level alone. It has to take place at a level where the particular manner of intervention of the work within the social processes is arrived at historically, through a recognition of the antecedents of the structures used, and their redefinition. This can only happen on the epic dimension.
In film I think it is only the work of Ritwik Ghatak that has achieved a form I would call the epic. Here even simple events, with easily definable characters, echo centuries of history. I feel that most of the significant filmmaking in India carries on from Ghatak's films, and is an attempt towards consolidating his remarkable breakthroughs in Meghe Dhaka Tar a and Subarnarekha.
Filmmaking and the critical activity that accompanied it in the West, has led to major revaluation of its traditions. In Eisenstein we see how the tragic form has been restated, defined within the modern period to which the very medium of film belongs. Similarly a critic like Bazin has used Bergson's theories of laughter while speaking of Chaplin's work. In India we have very sophisticated theories of emotions—like the rasa theory of the Natyashastra—but do not always possess the means of restating them within a non-revivalist modern context. It is such a context that film has the potential to provide us with.
As our filmmaking crystallises its aim and finds expression in the conscious choice of organising principles, the manner in which it can intervene in the material process will become its comment upon its historical, political class context. It would then permit us to come to grips with a complex past, even as we come to grips with a complex present.
26 October-December 1983