122 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
medium, but pose a few questions indirectly. Theoreticians like Lukacs and Benjamin have provided some insights, but it was artist theoreticians like Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov and Bela Balazs who provided a basis for the formulation of a system and a logic for this medium. Unlike literature, painting and other art forms, cinema does not have the benefit of a detailed and analytical body of work from which to draw its inspiration to move forward.
A host of books have been written today by various eclectic authors, but all this prolific writing by metaphysical hair splitting or using mechanical materialist philosophy, has only added to the confusion. Not one of these writers has achieved the cohesion and grasp of Eisentein. In their scramble 10 categorize the medium for all time, these authors have, more often than not, retarded its growth and dynamism. The nature and essence of cinema h still being formulated as one gropes, stumbles, makes mistakes and changes. On can only understand and analyze through these tentative steps.
2) The grammar and language of the film is still being tortuously understood all over the world, as individual artists create their works hesitantly. Artists like Goddard. Antonioni, Rochja, Ghatak, Bertolucci, Resnais, Coppola, Oshima, Ozu, Fellini, Scorccse, Chris Marker, Pontecorvo, Solas, Jansco have groped and faltered. No position is final or absolute. Any film maker in India who ignores the achievements and progress occurring all over the world, does so at his or her own peril. The important point to note is that even where film makers have failed, one learns. A relevant failure is, perhaps, more important than a minor success. In this context, a film which can be considered as a relevant failure is the Marathi film made by the Yukt Film Go-operative Society, Ghashiram Kotwal. The film failed to combine the epic quality of history (if history is to be understood correctly,as changes occurring through shifts in socio-economic forces rather than through the individual machinations of kings and emperors) and the epic quality of cinema—cinema with an epic time and space scale, where cinema deals with ideas and forces and their growth over time. Individual psychological events and motivations pale into insignificance and can only be dealt with as products of a time. Change is the essence of this cinema as graphically [revealed in the works of Jansco. Historical processes reveal the nature of things as they arc, not static but with a past and a future. This kind of cinema also needs a scale of operation, a vastness of approach. Perhaps the greatest drawback of Ghashiram Kotwal was its low budget. If its budget could match its conception, the film might have achieved much more.