FILM AS A CONTEMPORARY ART 47 academicism of the one, imported from the West, as much as the weak imitation of earlier Indian art. Her need was to find significant form; in this she could align herself with Ajanta as much as she did with Van Gogh or Gauguin. How does the re-invention of language-along with our imagination, and the experience that it mediates into freedom: internally, the commodity that is a work of art, therefore labour and man, as externally, by producing a commodity which is different from all the others and therefore not seen as the same—how does this provoke us out of a passive and into an active state? Marx has already clarified how such a work of art stands in relation to societies based on commodity production: The same kind of labour may be productive or unproductive. Tor example, Milton, who wrote Paradise Lost for five pounds, was an unproductive labourer. On the other hand, the writer who turns out stuff for his publishers factory-style, is a productive labourer. Milton produced Paradise Lost for the same reason that a silkworm produces silk. It was an activity of his nature. Later he sold the product for five pounds. But the literary proletarian of Leipzig, who fabricates books under the direction of his publisher, is a productive labourer; for his product is from the outset subsumed under capital, and com^s into being only for the purpose of increasing that capital.' Internally, the object that refuses to subsume itself under capital, yet uses the enormous potential of forms released by the greater abstraction, the socialisation of its systems, to metamorphose from a silkwork into the equal of angels of paradise, has not only to dismantle the relations contained in post-capitalist forms, but to re-integrate them, through the medium of imagination (not just experience) and the re-invention of language. Ritwik Ghatak, acknowledging his debt to Brecht, clearly saw the need for the epic (because that alone would show how a performance or a work of art is made), developed it further to inject the archetype as the vibrating membrane between the contemporary and the eternal in man. Simultaneously, he showed the fetishism that attached to objects of use, going to its historical origins (Ajantrik). Bresson opposed the cinematography to the cinema: 'Because you do not have to imitate, like painters, sculptors, novelists, the appearance of persons and objects (machines do that for you), your creation or invention confines itself to the ties you knot between the various bits of reality caught. There is also the choice of bits.,.* 'With the centuries, the theatre has bour-geoisiefied...Photographed theatre shows how far...!' Vyith television, one feels that it is lumpenised. We have to work towards the re-establishment of these bonds, 'bonds that beings and things are waiting for, in order to live'. For this, Bresson replaces the actor with the model, snatching moments of being and not impersonation, o, ^1