OUTLOOK FOR CINEMA W Breaking the classical pattern of the epic in cinema are film makers like Goddard, Resnais and Oshima, who use the allegory and metaphor along with the factual. What results is a blend of an individual track of occurrences and events that are simultaneously being lifted out of their immediate time context and placed in a historical perspective. Just as theatre had Brecht, cinema too has its visionaries. They use time and space both for its immediate and symbolic value. 3) The nature of the cinema is such that technology has a very important role to play—the technology of film stock, cameras,. laboratories where chemicals, temperatures and densities are of crucial importance to the eventual results of a film; the technology of optics, wide-angle, tclephoto, deep focus, fast and slow lenses; the science of acoustics, microphones and mixers, ^his technology is not an end in itself. But, an understanding of it can make a vast difference to the very nature of the film. Results can be achieved that can completely alter, enhance or add extra dimensions to the basic content of the film. A vast new area unfolds before the film-maker. Technology is at the service of art. And technology becomes the content. Colour, sound, light and shade^ grain depth, time and space alteration vie with the spoken word or the narrative. The cinema, if it wants to, can now break free from the shackles of the story, plot or narrative and discover a reality which is inherent to the very nature of the medium itself. There, however, is a trap—a trap, where technology takes on an independent existence to swamp the medium, mesmerizes audience with its sheer technique, elevates itself to the realm of magic, and eventually leads nowhere. With this brief background and introduction, let us come to the nature of the cinema in India, and discuss the task before the conscious film-maker. There are three basic and broad forms of cinema that have evolved since its inception: 1) the dramatic, subdivided into the analytic and the narrative; 2) the lyric; 3) the epic, again subdivided into the classical and neo-classical. Most of the films that are made in India follow the dramatic narrative pattern. This is the "commercial film" of the country. The choice of subject does not make a difference. It could be a suspense thriller, of the gangster genre, a "social", a comedy or a. permutation of all these genres. The easiest way out for a conscientious film maker is to bring in "content"—story, characterization aad, most important, logic. The other easy way out is to use the preexisting pattern of the dramatic narrative film and hope that with this content one will achieve the miraculous. The subject