Asian theatre

The .performing arts

'"Asia

Edited and with introductions

by James R.Brandon

Unesco Paris 1971

The performing arts in Asia

c

Published in 1971 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Place de Fontenoy, 75 Paris-7e Printed by Paul Attinger SA, Neuch창tel

Preface In October 1969, Unesco organized in Beirut a Round Table which brought together artists and producers, scholars, historians and critics to discuss the relationships between, and the mutual impact of, traditional and contemporary live performing arts in Asia and the newer media of mass communication. This Round-Table discussion was organized as part ofthe programme authorized by the General Conference at its thirteenth session in 1964 aimed at examining ‘the present situation and trends and possibilities of artistic creation and of attempts at n e w forms of expression linked with the n e w techniques for the dissemination of culture’. A number of studies were accordingly undertaken and meetings were held to enable specialists in the different arts to discuss n e w means of expression and other factors which influence contemporary artistic creation, and the response of the artist to the needs of an ever-growing public which is no longer bounded by national cultures or frontiers.

This publication is based on the papers presented at the R o u n d Table and draws as well o n reports resulting from other international meetings held b y Unesco and the Lebanese Centre for Cinema and Television.

Professor James R. Brandon, professor at the University of Hawaii, w h o was closely associated with the Beirut meeting, was invited by Unesco to edit the contributions to the present volume and to add his o w n views. T h e views expressed are those of the editor and the individual contributors and not necessarily those of

Unesco.

T h e designations employed and the presentation of the material in this work do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the Unesco Secretariat concerning the legal status of any country or territory, or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitations of the frontiers of any country or territory.

List of contributors Jean de Baroncelli, Film critic, Paris (France).

S o m Benegal, Theatre director, New Delhi (India).

James R. Brandon, Professor, Department of D r a m a and Theatre,UniversityofHawaii,Honolulu (UnitedStates of America).

Jacques Brunet, International Institute of Comparative Music Studies,West Berlin.

B. D. Garga, Film critic, Bombay (India).

Alamgir Kabir, Film critic and director, Film School, Dacca (Pakistan).

Mrs. Kashiko Kawakita, Film producer and critic, Tokyo (Japan).

M. J. Perera, Professor, University of Ceylon, Colombo (Ceylon).

B e n G. Pinga, President, Film Institute of the Philippines, Manila (Philippines).

Leonard C. Pronko, Theatre historian (United States of America).

Mrs. Milena Salvini, Historian and critic of Asian theatre, Paris (France).

Tran V a n Khe, MaĂŽtre de recherches, National Centre of Scientijc Research, Paris (France).

Mrs. Kapila Malik Vatsyayan, Deputy Educational Adviser, Ministry of Education, New Delhi (India).

Contents

General introduction Part O n e Fundamental aesthetics Aesthetic theories underlying Asian performing arts, by Kapila Malik Vatsyayan Zeami’s theory of noh Part T w o The theatre View from the West: a theatre of feast, by Leonard C. Pronko T h e Cambodian nang sbek and its audience,

by Jacques Brunet Performing arts in Indonesia, by Milena Salvini Theatre in Thailand, by James R. Brandon Traditional theatre in Viet-Nam,by Tran V a n Khe Popular theatre and dance in Ceylon, by M. J. Perera Western and Asian influences o n modern Indian theatre, by S o m Benegal Japan: theatre’s response to a changing society, by James R. Brandon Part Three Theatre, cinema and other mass media Introduction to Part Three Screen adaptations of Indian literature, by B. D.Garga T h e role of the cinema and radio in the preservation and development of Ceylonese theatre, by Milena Salvini T h e Japanese film industry, by Jean de Baroncelli Japanese film exhibits abroad, by Kashiko Kawakita T h e Chinese cinema, by Jean de Baroncelli A study of the Pakistani cinema, by Alamgir Kabir Cinema in the Philippines, by B e n G. Pinga

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15 28

35 40

49 64 70 79 88 98

109 113 122 125 133 137

144 153

Part Four Discussion extracts Shadow theatre Popular performing arts Current problems of the theatre Cinema and television

161 163 165 166

9

General introduction

T h e performing arts of Asia deserve to be better k n o w n

by theatre artists everywhere. Their riches are legend, but as a practical matter to appreciate Asian performing arts requires a sympathetic frame of mind and advance preparation. T h e arts are so closely connected with Asian religions, mythology, philosophic and mystical systems, and cultural patterns in general, they cannot be easily understood outside of their natural context. Also, they are very complex artistically, exhibiting a remarkable fusion of music, dance, spectacle and drama (in contrast to the Western tradition of separating these components into separate arts).

Speaking for the Western view, Leonard Pronko admits :‘There is confusion and misunderstanding regarding Oriental theatre, even by those w h o are theatre specialists. Or rather there is no misunderstanding, for there is n o understanding at all.’ Within Asia itself, the performing arts of a given country are generally u n k n o w n outside that country’s boundaries (withthe sole exception of motion pictures of major Asian nations). Paradoxically, the Asian theatre artist or scholar is likely to be more conversant with Molière, or Tennessee Williams, or Western ballet, than with Japanese noh, or Indian kathakali,

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General introduction

or Cambodian Royal Ballet. And African and Middle Eastern contact with Asian performing arts has been almost non-existent. The 1969 Beirut Round Table on Theatre,Cinema,Literature and Plastic Arts in the Middle East and Asia was therefore highly significant, for theatre artists, scholars and critics from Asia, the West, Africa and the Middle East met and jointly explored the heritage of Asia’s traditional performing arts and the status of these and the newer mass media in contemporary society.

S o m e are ‘classic’arts-such as Thai classical dance, Japanese noh, Indian Sanskrit drama-which, because of the patronage of sophisticated aristocrats in the past, are among the most refined performing arts to be found anywhere in the world. Others are ‘folk‘ arts, village arts like the Balinese legong girl’s dance or barong trance-dance.

Of particular interest are the dozens of ‘popular’theatre forms which grew up throughout Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though they are different from each other artistically (often borrowing from national classic theatre forms), ‘popular’theatres like Malaysian bangsawan, Indonesian ketoprak, Chinese ching hsi opera, and even Japanese kabuki, are sociologically analogous : they are commercial, eclectic, theatres designed for the urban workers and merchants. Most developed during the period of peak Western influence in Asia, and superficial Western elements sometimes appear, but direct imitation of Western theatre models is rare in popular theatre.

Western-derived‘spoken’ theatre, especially of the naturalistic or realistic type, established itself as a separate strain of theatre arts in all of Asia, but most strongly in Japan, China and the Philippines. And the most recent development of note is the phenomenal growth of cinema, radio and television. Nowhere has this growth been more rapid than in Japan. In some respects these new mass media seem to exist independently ofthe living performing arts ; but they m a y also be used to extend the audience for traditional dance and drama performances or they m a y create new and unique cinema and television art

General introduction

11

forms from traditional materials. T h e major question before the Beirut R o u n d Table was the relationship between the indigenous performing arts and the n e w mass arts of film, radio and television. This theme will be seen running through most of the contributions to this volume.

This book is based on the papers which were prepared for discussion at the 1969 Beirut R o u n d Table.

Excerpts from other published works are also included to supplement these specially prepared materials. Although the breadth of subject matter and wide geographic area being considered precludes including all performing arts, and indeed all Asian countries, nevertheless the general ill find here more contemporary reports, and of reader w greater variety, than in any previous volume.

T h e contributions are organized into four parts.

This arrangement is necessarily somewhat arbitrary w h e n an article covers several topics. Part O n e introduces the t w o chief theories of theatre in Asia: that derived from the Indian Natyasastra and Zeami’s theory of Japanese noh (together with Aristotle’s Poetics, these constitute the world’s three great dramatic theories). In Part T w o the contemporary situation of theatre and dance in seven Asian countries is described. Part Three focuses upon the relation of life theatre and the technological media-film, radio and television. Part Four consists of summaries of the major topics discussed at the R o u n d Table.

Part One

Fundamental aesthetics

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Aesthetic theories underlyingAsian performing arts Kapila MalikVatsyayan

T h e staggering multiplicity of forms and styles of the performing arts in Asia, especially Japan, Thailand, C a m bodia, Indonesia and Ceylon, defies all categorizations and classifications in Western terms. C a n these performing arts be divided into clear-cut categories of the classical and the folk? C a n one identify certain forms as belonging only to a highly developed urban ĂŠlite and other forms a8 belonging to a rural culture? C a n one label these forms as spoken drama, opera, operetta, musical comedy, symphony orchestra and community dances? Again, in terms of the impact that these forms m a k e o n the lay spectator, can it be said that the content of the theatrical spectacle is realistic? Is the spectator, w h o is looking for the drama of climax, the theatre of conflict, not sorely disappointed?

Do these forms not flout all rules known to Greek drama (and the Western academic drama until the twentieth century)? There are no unities of time here, no character development, no internal conflict, no striving of the individual to find an identity with the cosmos.

W h a t then is the impression that these arts m a k e on the spectator? O n one level, there is a strong impact of a performing art which belongs to a bygone age and to an alien civilization. T h e modern m a n is bewildered by

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The performing arts in Asia

the magical, the ritualistic and trance-dances of this region. Their very existence seems to be incongruous or anachronistical with contemporary civilization. On another level, he is deeply impressed by the high literary content of the dances and the dance-drama, the m y t h and legend, which constitute the content of this theatrical spectacle; all this leaves an overpowering sense of antiquity. In presentation, the forms are highly stylized;each distinctive form seems to have achieved a unique stylization both in the manipulation of the note and the h u m a n body. Most stage acting can be seen as a set number of poses, statuesque in quality, and the actor moves from one pose to the other in order to create movement. T h e music which accompanies these dances or dance-dramas m a y sound somewhat monotonous at times but is clearly a part and parcel of the dramatic experience. Again the spectator is impressed by the intricate rhythmical quality of both the dance movements and the music. T h e gestures are symbolic, the costuming is unrealistic, the music is melodic and the presentation cyclical. These general impressions, of a n art which is spiritual and magical in character, highly charged with literary myth and legend, presented through a seemingly improvised dance, drama, opera style to a highly complex percussion accompaniment, provide us with a clue to an understanding of the fundamental foundations of the performing arts in Asia.

Japanese bugaku court dance, along with the highly stylized, sophisticated theatre of noh and kyogen, share these salient features. T h e wajang kulit (shadow drama), the wajang beber (paper scroll play) and the wajang topeng (masked dance) of Indonesia manifest another aspect of this tradition. T h e stylization of the wajang djawa, wajang melayu and wajang siam of Malaya is derived both from India and Indonesia. T h e court ballet of Cambodia and the khon (masked play), the Zakon nui and the nang yai of Thailand present yet another type of stylization based on the principle of suggestion. And then there are hundreds of forms and styles existing in India.

T h e kathakali, bharatanatyam, manipuri, Kathak and

Aesthetic theories underlying Asian performing arts

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Orissi are classical dance forms which have emerged out of a vast store-house of traditional dance-drama forms.

T o all these must be added the thousands of folk-dance forms which can be seen in India and South-East Asia, ranging from the spirit dances of Kerala and B u r m a to the trance-dances of Bali and Ceylon.

W h a t exactly does even this cursory listing of forms show? W e are aware of a bewilderingly rich tradition of the performing arts of South Asia, a tradition which seems to have survived through several centuries of political history marked by invasions, unrest and economic underdevelopment. T h e amazing continuity of tradition and the tenacity with which these forms have survived at various levels of social strata presents a challenge for any serious researcher of the performing arts.

W e are concerned here with t w o questions, the first being h o w these forms survived and developed through successive historical periods. It is quite clear that these forms have continued through the transmitting power of the oral tradition. There are no stage scripts; no musical scores; no documentation; and yet many of these forms can be traced back to the first century A.D. or earlier. As early as 1500 B.C. complex methods of memorizing had evolved in India. T h e Vedas were preserved strictly in the oral tradition, transmitted by word of m o u t h from generation to generation. In the recitation of Vedas special techniques were evolved: an intricate system of m n e m o n ics facilitated memorization. Every hymn was memorized not only verse by verse or line by line, but word by word, word-pair by word-pair, in not only a forward sequence but also a reverse order. This was rendered in the correct intonation and through the right musical note. T h e syst e m of oral rendering w a s so perfected that although there were many schools of interpretation,there has been strict unanimity about the text for hundreds of years and over an immense geographical area.

W h a t is true of the Vedas is also true of the epics.

It was the oral renderings of these works which travelled across the seas to Java, Sumatra, Thailand and Cambodia.

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The performing arts in Asia

There was, of course, also the direct impact of Sanskrit in certain parts of South-East Asia, such as the Kingdom of C h a m p a as early as the third century A.D., but the oral tradition and its methodology of transmission accounts more than any other single factor for the pervasive influence of the Indian myths and legends and epics in South-East Asia. It is also necessary to mention that the Indian myths and legends, the religion and the belief could have taken root in alien lands only if there was already a state of preparedness, of receptivity. T h e indigenous cultures of these areas provided a fertile ground for the assimilation of Indian influences.

T h e second fundamental question regards the formulation of dramatic theory and h o w it was practised by creative artists. It is the practice which gave it validity.

As early as the second century B.C. (or second century A.D.) a theoretician and codifier of the Sanskrit dramaturgical tradition, Bharata, claimed for the stage an unparalleled comprehensive power. Truly he declares there is not a maxim, not a theme, not a world, not an art or science which is not encompassed by this art. In order to understand the theory w e may, once again, refer to the random impression which this theatrical spectacle leaves on the lay spectator. All that w e have said earlier about the nature of the theatrical experience reminds us vaguely of ‘total theatre’, a term m u c h discussed lately.

In recent years m a n y definitions of ‘total theatre’ have been offered and discussed. It has been suggested that total theatre is merely the conventional dialogue drama of the ‘word’ with embellishments of other media such as poetry, m i m e and song added: equally it has been said that total theatre rests for its success on the magic of the ‘word’. Finally it has also been suggested that total theatre is the total amalgam of various media in integrated manner which can satisfy at once both intellectual and popular desire.

For amoment,ifone weretoacceptthethirddefinition and add to it the proviso that no given admixture results in total theatre and that it seeks to present as an organic

Aesthetic theories underlying Asian performing arts ~

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whole a spectacle which achieves a totality of participative experience from the audience, one can be convinced that some forms of the traditional theatre of Asia meet this definition.

H o w reminiscent of this codifier sounds Jindrich Honzl, the leading figure of Czech avant-garde theatre, w h e n in 1940 he declared: ‘It is the task of the dramatic artist to regulate the effect of various theatrical means into impressions of equal,accent.. .. There is no such thing as theatre art but there are music, the spoken word, the actor, décor, props and lighting which jointly produce theatrical art so that it appears to be the s u m of the other arts.’ It is clear that the fresh ground which the West has just broken was in some ways an accepted principle of an age-old Asian theatrical tradition. T h e inadequacy of the ‘word’, the dissatisfaction with the theoretical dependence on Aristotle’s mimeses and the confrontation with Eastern traditions helped to create the n e w form of theatre,which broke a w a y from naturalism and realism.

In the East the situation m a y be looked at M e r ently. Here was a tradition which was built on the purposive negation of the principle of conflict, for that matter on the assertion that death was not a finality, and which sought to evoke a state of awareness, a state of being through the theatrical spectacle. In the tradition there was also an unchallenged recognition and acceptance of the interdependence and interrelationship of the arts.

Indeed, no art asserted its autonomy and at no time was it accepted that the artist in one m e d i u m could be effective without a technical knowledge of other media.

T h e fundamental beliefs of the people gave rise to a theory of aesthetics :a theory which could haveresulted only if the aesthetician shared the visions of the seer and beliefs of the philosophers. In India, at the highest level, the traditional Indian artist considered artistic creation as the supreme means of realizing the universal being. Art was thus considered a unique discipline, a yoga and a ‘sacrifice’through which the artist was to seek salvation here and n o w in this world. This discipline led him to a

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The performing arta in Asia

state of complete harmony or a state of total release from the ‘so muchness’ of life. It led to a recognition of one’s truer self. Since all activity w a s considered as dedicated activity, a sacrificial offering, the creative work w a s also an offering at this level. T h e problem before the artist, therefore, w a s not a problem of reflecting life as it is, but of suggesting or revealing or re-creating through finite forms and symbols a vision suggestive of the infinite universal being. With this objective in view, physical perception or the imitation of natural phenomena could not be the sole purpose of the artist. Indeed, he sought again and again to transcend the reality of everyday living to a higher reality. O n e m a y go so far as to say that the artist sought to establish a hierarchy of realities. Through the aesthetic experience the artist also sought to achieve an experience of supreme bliss, a bliss which w a s second only to the experience of absolute bliss termed as Brahmananda in Sanskrit.

T h e aesthetic which emerged as a direct result of these beliefs w a s the theory of rasa. Since the h u m a n being and his subjective motion were not themes important enough to be portrayed in art, life w a s seen as a series of states of being which, though diverse, led to the one transcendental experience of bliss, a state of ‘release’.

T h e theory of rasa, as conceived by the Hindu aesthetician and as practised by the artist, has t w o aspects.

T h e first is the evoked state (rasavastha)in which transcendental bliss is experienced by the viewer; the second is the sentiments, the moods, the permanent and transitory states, which were the object of presentation. While the first w a s the ultimate objective of all artistic experience and expression, the second gave the artist a unique method of abstracting and thus universalizing the content of art. T h e artist chooses one dominant m o o d or state as his subject matter and then through the presentation of a series of allied transitory states seeks to evoke a similar state of ‘being’ in the heart of the spectator or listener.

T h e principle of abstraction demands also a widely shared

Aesthetic theories underlying Asian performing arts

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body of ideas, myths and legends which could be symbolically presented. All character in drama is a symbol, a vehicle for suggesting something other than itself. This quality can be seen in practically all forms and styles of the performing arts in Asia. T h e technique of the arts which emerged as a result of this particular attitude towards the objective of the artistic experience and the content of art was a set of rules-formulas which would enable the arts to create form which would, in turn, evoke a particular state of being (a rasa) in the mind of the spectator. These principles are evident in the rules of the proportion of architecture, in the detailed formulation of the principles of measurement (tala and mana) along several planes and the deflections of the h u m a n body (bhanga) in Indian sculpture, in the relative disposition and proportion of colour and in the patterns of division and c o m bination of the movements of the major limbs (unga)and the minor limbs (upanga)in dancing, and in the use of intervals (sruti)and notes (swara)in a given m o d e (raga) to create a particular m o o d in Indian music.

It is this aesthetic theory of rasa which provides an underlying unity to the Indian arts. Deriving from this fundamental belief about the nature of the aesthetic experience, they share with one another the principles of technique while maintaining their autonomy. T h e m a n y theoretical works o n dance seldom, if ever, discuss the technique of this art form in isolation: both literature (or at least an aspect of it) and music (sangita) are invariably discussed. Conversely, the treatises o n sculpture, drama (natya),music and painting invariably either devote a portion to dance itself or discuss certain elements of the technique of these art forms in terms of the technique of dance (nrtya or nrtta). Thus, treatises on painting discuss the delineation of the eyes in terms of the glances of Bharata’s Natyasastra and treatiseso n sculpture enumerate in great detail the nrttamurti (dancing aspects) of the various gods and goddesses and discuss the symbolism of the hastamudra (hand gestures) in terms of the hastabhinaya of the Natyasastra.

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Turning our attention to architecture,sculpture and painting, we find that these arts also manifest the principle of multiplicity and unity on the spiritual, philosophic and aesthetic planes. Architecture proves most powerfully that all art reposes on some unity and its details, whether few and sparing as in the Buddhist stupa or crowded and full as in the Hindu temple,must go back to that unity and further its significance: otherwise it is not art and has not fulfilled its function.Indian and SouthEast-Asian architecture, whether Borobudur or Angkor Vat, constantly represents the highest oneness of the self, the cosmic and the infinite in the immensity of its world design. All the special features of this architecture, its starting point of unity in conception, its crowded abundance of mass and design of significant sculpture, ornament and detail, and its return to the oneness, are ‘the necessary units of this immense epic p o e m of the Infinite’.

Without going into the technique of architecture which lays down the method by which this infinite multiplicity can fill the ultimate oneness, it is enough for our purpose here to be fully aware of the tremendous unity of purpose and design which these structures symbolize.

In terms of aesthetics, since architecture,more accurately the temple, represents heaven on earth, it arouses wonder (vismuyu),and leads to the aesthetic experience of wonder (udbhuta).This principle in architecture is also seen in the architectural designs of the temples of Borobudur and Prambanan in Indonesia;at its finest it is also evidenced in the architectural designs of the temples of Angkor Vat and Angkor Thom in Cambodia. Just as Indian architecture reveals the unity through infinite multiplicity, Indian sculpture embodies the spirit and soul of the cosmic Infinite in the form and body of the particular, the impersonal individual-which in turn suggests the cosmic and the Infinite.

A study of the alphabets and basic laws of composition of these arts clearly indicates the parallel techniques followed by them. The various aspects of technique are the first constituents to which each of these arts reduces

Aesthetic theories underlying Asian performing arts ~ _ _ _ _ _ _ _- ~-

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itself, but it is the significance which is given to these constituents that gives Indian art its distinctive, spiritual and suggestive character. F r o m the multiple base of the constituents a well-organized process leads up to an apex where each of the constituents of form has a corresponding spiritual or emotional value. T h e lines of technique m o v e to form an artistic whole, corresponding to physical and spiritual experiences which merge in one overpowering symbol of an inner state of being.

And finally through a beautiful and complete language of movement, Indian dance provides the most concrete manifestation of the inner state and vision w e have spoken of. T h e Indian dance, like Indian poetry, music and sculpture,seeks to communicate universal, impersonal emotion and, through the very m e d i u m of the h u m a n form, it transcends the physical plane: in its technique, it employs the technique of all the Indian arts and it is impossible to comprehend the architectonic structure of this form without being aware of the complex techniques of the other arts which it constantly and faithfully employs and synthesizes. T h e themes which the Indian, Indonesian or Thai dancer portray are not only the r a w material of literature but are also the finished products of literary creation; the music which seems to accompany the dance is actually the life-breath of its structure and, indeed, dance interprets in m o v e m e n t what music interprets in sound; the postures and the stances it attains are the poses which the Indian sculptor models; all these the dancer imbues with a living spirit of m o v e m e n t in a composition of form which is both sensuous and spiritual.

Indian dancing encompasses nrttu (pure dance) and ubhinuya (nrtyaor mime, gesticulation). T h e nrttu portion of dance depends for its life-breath on the music and the rhythm which accompany it: the abhinuyu (mime) portion depends for its expression on the theme of the narrative or lyrical literary composition (termed suhitya by practising dancers) which is sung. T h e abhinuyu portion of dance was indeed conceived originally by Bharata as an integral

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T h e performing arts in Asia

part of nutya (drama). In the Nutyasastra, he discusses it as an aspect of nutyu (drama) which constitutes dancing also: the h u m a n form is analysed from the head to the toe to show, on the one hand, the various possibilities of movement of every part of the h u m a n figure and, on the other, the use of these movements to express certain states (bhuva)and emotions. Throughout the discussion of the major limbs (unga)and the minor limbs (upangu) in the Nutyasastra, w e find that Bharata first states the movements which are physically possible and then enumerates the use to which they can be put in m o v e m e n t choreography to represent the dominant and transitory states. H e first discusses the dominant states and shows the manner in which each one of these states can be represented on the stage through speech and movement: this is followed by an analysis of the movements of major limbs (unga)and minor limbs (upungu) and the methods of using them to express certain sentiments (ram): thus the rules to represent certain dominant states (sthuyi bhuva) and transitory states (yabhicari bhavu) are laid down. Every m o v e m e n t of each single limb and organ of the h u m a n body has a corresponding emotional quality, which is analogous to the emotional expression of the musical interval (sruti)in music. Every gesture and movement of eyes, eyeballs, eyebrows, nose, cheeks, lower lips, chin, mouth, neck, chest, torso, abdomen, waist, thigh, shank, knee, feet and hands thus assumes a significance it would be impossible to imagine ordinarily. This language of gestures finds its complete articulation in the hastabhinuyu (hand gestures) where practically all the permutations and combinations of the fingers, palm and the wrist have been worked out and each hand pose (hasta) has been employed as words are in a language. Like drama thus the m i m e portion of dancing employs the entire h u m a n form to speak a language of movement through which a dominant state can be presented and a sentiment, a m o o d (rasa),evoked. T h e dance does a w a y completely with speech of the drama proper and employs only music and song for that purpose.

Aesthetic theories underlying Asian performing arts

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Again the characters that the Indian dancer depicts are not only the gods and goddesses and demons of Indian mythology but also the heroes (nayaka) and heroines (nayika)of Indian drama. W e find the frequent portrayal of these heroes and heroines in dance; a nayika like the abhisarika (the lady going for a tryst) often forms the heroine of the Indian dance. Indian dancing also follows all the principles of presentation of the Indian drama (natya).The convention of the stylization (natyadharmi) is the backbone of the entire presentation of the Indian dance; it shares with Indian drama its deliberate and purposive renunciation of stage scenery and the imitation of lifelike gestures, its emphasis on stylization of presentation and special representation.The dance is a limb of the drama proper in so far as m i m e or gesture (angikabhinaya), costume and make-up (aharyabhinaya)form a part of drama, and in so far as the kaisiki vrtti (the graceful style) belongs as much to dance as to drama, and inasmuch as every aspect of drama has an element of dance which is indistinguishable from the former. The choreography and movement pattern of dance is built on the themes of literature which have been set to music; this music has been conceived to correspond to the dominant state (sthayi bhava) and the transitory state (vyabhicari bhava) of the literary piece. In order to evoke a particular state, music employs a particular raga, with its particular notes (suara)in a given order: the dancer in turn creates a whole state where the theme, the song and the rhythm all contribute to evoke the particular mood or sentiment (rasa).The poses which the dancer utilizes for this purpose are identical with those of Indian sculpture, and very often the one is a visual representation in movement of the static pose of the other.

M a n y examples could also be noted from the presentation of the Ramayana and Mahabharata inthe dancedrama, puppet and shadow plays of Indonesia, the khon and lakon of Thailand, and the classical ballet of Cambodia, of the survival of artistic principles and techniques of the Natyasastra. Each country evolved its distinctive

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T h e performing arts in Asia

genres, but there was an underlying similarity of approach and presentation. Without going into the complex and highly developed techniques of each of these forms one m a y conclude that there is sufficient evidence to prove that a c o m m o n aesthetic theory governed all the arts, both performing and plastic, in South and South-East Asia. Roughly speaking, the c o m m o n trends m a y be identified as the negation of the principle of realistic imitation in art, the establishment of a hierarchy of realities where the principle of suggestion through abstraction is followed and the manifestation in the arts of the belief that time is cyclic rather than linear. Further, the arts are seen as interdependent and interrelated. While each art has an autonomy, this autonomy is only comparative and in the field of the performing arts no form is seen in isolation.

T h e conception is of a total integrated picture, close to but not identical with the modern concept of the total theatre. This tradition of the arts appears to have been pervasive from Afghanistan and India to Japan and Indonesia over t w o thousand years of history.

While the aesthetic theories m a y have been consciously lost in some areas, the forms have survived, because the performing arts have been an integral part of the process of living :their traditional content has been given contemporary validity through an ever-renewing and reinterpretative oral tradition.

And the last provides the key to the vexing question, why and h o w the continuity of the performing arts in India and South-East Asia has not been broken. O n e artistic principle alone need be mentioned as a possible answer. T h e aesthetic theory and technique had one concept k n o w n as the principle of sanchari bhava (improvisation and interpretation), that is, the artist, creator,actor could improvise present variations o n the same theme within a given set of rules. This provided the freedom to the artist to create n e w form within a given framework: the permutations and combinations were infinite, and the joy of revealing the known, in n e w ways, was the aim of the artist. T h e process of communication was complete

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only w h e n the spectator and reader, i.e. an initiated one, w a s put in a similar state of mind. T h e Sanskrit word for the reader or spectator is rasilca: he is a potential artist (suhrduya)himself. T h e bridge of communication w a s established w h e n the familiar w a s revealed through a known language of symbols. T h e artist exercised freedom of creation, the freedom in a given frame of reference, of beliefs, of philosophic principles and aesthetic theories.

Today, it is the frame of reference which is challenged and endangered through the impact not only of the W e s t but of modern technology. This makes creation impossible in the traditional sense. Also, the participating audience so necessary for this communication is languishing. This is a question which must seriously concern us.

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Zeami’stheory of nohl

Zeami (1363-1443), the founder of noh, is the greatest artist of the Muromachi period. As a dramatist he wrote more than one hundred noh, and as a noh actor he was a master of the art, like his father, Kanami. Furthermore, his theoretical writing on noh, in twenty-three treatises, including Kadensho, is one of the authoritative books on art, one of the greatest works in Japanese literature, and a profound search for artistic truth.

W e experience nowadays, in performances of noh, a religious and sober atmosphere of an almost suffocating intensity, while the subtle and mysterious expression of the noh m a s k reveals an extreme repression of joy and sorrow. It is the sombre expression of an art that has weathered a complete age, full of contradictions, and of alternating release and suppression. Within the microcosmos of the noh stage where there still lingered the m e m o r y of the days w h e n gods and m e n spoke together, the noh attempted none the less to express the various 1. F r o m Foreword to Zeami: Kadensho, translated by Chuichi Sakurai, Lindley W. Hubbell, Rokuro Satoi and Bin Miyai, Kyoto, Sumiya-Shinobe Publishing Institute, Doshisha University, 1968. Reprinted by permission.

Zeami’s theory of noh

29

h u m a n passions caused by the struggles of h u m a n relationships, attempting to do so through the symbolic expression which is called yugen and trying at the same time to express the dynamic power and rhythmical beauty of sculptural movement in an extremely simplified form.

In this introverted tendency which was to determine the national art form, w e can see the long history of a suppressed people. W e can hear the voices of joy and sorrow.

This has a definite connexion with the basic characteristic of noh, a kind of drama which includes singing, dance and music, and which cannot be compared with Occidental dramaturgy. This world of beauty, consisting of an art of subdued brilliance and an abstract formal aesthetic, can create wonderfully fresh experience, even w h e n exposed to the light of the modern intelligence. T h e life and essence of noh, during its long history, c a m e to have a close relationship with feudalism, becoming the authorized ceremonial drama of the samurai through the E d o period. But at the same time almost every line of the texts of noh drama, and the theories on noh, written by Zeami himself, prove clearly that the substantial character of noh was already formed in the Muromachi period. Kadensho itself is only one of Zeami’s m a n y works. But even in this w e can find important statements concerning the things mentioned above.

T h e most important aspect of Kadensho is its explanation of hana (flower). W h a t is this hana? As the meaning given to it by the author varies from phrase to phrase, w e cannot define it in one word. T h e temporary hana, or hana which comes and goes at different times in an artist’s life, is, in general, the aesthetic beauty in his style of acting, as the result of long years of hard training added to the innate artistic character of himself and his age. In the chapter, ‘The Secrets of Noh’,Zeami explains, in more detail, by giving examples, the various aspects of its flowering. Summing it up, the main purpose is to give the audience a n impression of rarity and truth. To create fresh and vivid impressions in their mind and to m o v e them is the actor’s constant concern. This does not

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m e a n quick wit or cleverness, but m u c h awareness developed by accumulated artistic experience in the actor’s consciousness and spontaneously expressed. Zeami says : ‘Hana is mind, technique is the seed.’ If the conscious mind is used in such a case, after severe training, it is only that the seed, the accomplishment of technique, will bloom as a flower on the stage. So although the seed is exercise, the hana which results from it, and which has accumulated in the actor’s mind, will from time to time find expression. As Zeami said: ‘Whatever is suitable to the occasion is real hana.’ W e must not forget that this hana which comes and goes is the result of a performance from which showiness and dryness are excluded, but which has freshness, freedom and fluidity. H a n a is the very essence of variety.

T h e actor w h o establishes a company must have a deep concern for its prosperity, must win the approval of all classes of the public, and must himself be recognized as a master. Zeami tells us that the performer must vary his performance according to circumstances, gauging the taste and psychology of the audience. At the s a m e time he must preserve his integrity as an artist and never pander to those in power. H is aim must be to remain faithful to his o w n artistic conscience as far as he possibly can. Although he must perform differently before the cultivated audience which appreciates yugen and the c o m m o n audience which is less sensitive to it, he must never abandon hana and yugen. Hard practice throughout one’s career, without ever losing the freshness and eagerness of the neophyte, is the basis of good noh. It is as a result of this that hana and yugen will come to bloom on the stage. H a n a is the essence of variety. At the same time it is based on fixed and unalterable form. This seeming contradiction is reconciled by the intensification and purification of one’s centre. Monomane (imitation) is not a synonym of ‘realism’, as it is understood in modern Western art. Monomane means to imitate the essence, not the particulars, and to represent the individual under his general aspect. N o actor can go outside of the restrictions

Zeami’s theory of noh . .

31

. _ _ _ ~ ~ _ _ ~ ~ _ _ _ _

imposed by m a s k and costume. For instance, to express sorrow he lifts his hands and covers his eyes with them.

H e can express sorrow only in this fixed gesture of hiding his tears. T o achieve a vivid expression of individual emotion through restricted and conventional forms he must study these forms endlessly, in order to understand correctly the theme and the kurai (value) of the play, and to attain hana. To have hana is to have grasped the universal within the individual. It is to have creative freedom within limitations. T h e form can be handed on from generation to generation, but the hana cannot. That must be acquired by each artist through his o w n efforts.

Yugen was the central ideal of mediaeval literature.

According to the generation,the individual and the genre, the conception and the nuance varied. B u t yugen in noh was comparatively simple and clear, being almost a synonym for elegance and beauty. In the mediaeval world the striving to achieve yugen arose from the aesthetic aims of the Heian period. T h e nostalgia for the life of the court was the real keynote of the renaissance in the Muromachi period. But because this past splendour could n o longer be captured in the world ofreality,the m e m o r y was transmuted into a longing for things eternal and imperishable, with profound metaphysicalresults in the world ofideas.Inspite of Zeami’s insistence, the aesthetic of yugen was a representation of that of the age ofthe Imperial Court; in actual practice it became a profoundly introspective expression of emotion. This development is inseparable from the establishing of the form of noh which took place in this period and which makes it so outstanding an achievement.

As an alchemist takes out pure gold from the ore, Zeami, abandoning all that is accidental and impure in ordinary h u m a n movement, m a d e of the noh drama an art in which the h u m a n body attains the highest formal beauty and the purest style. To do this it was necessary for Zeami to have a definite theory of yugen, and practical experience. W e can see this in his theories on art. While perfecting the simple and pure aesthetic of yugen by strenuous self-cultivation,his yugen becomes profound,

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deep into the world of emptiness, as oxidized silver has a dull and elegant glow which is more beautiful than mere superficial gorgeousness. T h e mysterious and inscrutable effect of this unification of beauty and power in the art of the noh was achieved by the utmost possible sublimation of the physical and spiritual attributes of the Middle Ages. On the other hand, they had to solve difficult problems :h o w to inherit the traditions of the ancient literature and, above all, a sense of the aesthetic depicted in narrative literature and poetry of the Heian period, expressing their agony which they had to experience in the course of emancipating m a n from a sense of alienation.

Noh in this situation endeavoured to create anew the elegance of the Heian period. This was not attained without a severe struggle against inner and outer difliculties, that is, to bring about a unity and harmony between subject and object and between the universal and the particular. This is far from modern drama. This simplicity and elimination of detail, which are so di%cult for the modern audience to understand, is found in all the Japanese arts of that period.

Zeami speaks of a stage in which hana goes beyond maturity. This stage of beauty was a part of Zeami’s aim. Although yugen originates in the beauty of opulence it culminates in the three supreme kinds of hana, as explained in his Kyui Shidui (nine grades of hana). T h e lowest of the upper three grades is called kanka-fu,which is symbolically described as ‘the whiteness and purity of snow lying on a silver garden’. T h e second grade in this triad is called choshinka-fu (‘among snow-covered m o u n tains one peak has ceased to be white’). T h e first grade is myoka-fu (‘the light of the sun at midnight’). This is a state of mind beyond thought and language. It is mind without mind, kurai without kurai. It is beyond what is called yugen, being my0 and m u (noumenon and void).

Thus hana, yugen and kurai become one and indistinguishable. T h e h u m a n is no longer human and art is n o longer art. This state is the unique characteristic of Japanese literature which culminates in Zeami.

Part Two

The theatre

35

View from the West: a theatre of feast' Leonard

C. Pronko

A n d you seriousIy ask us to admit that w e prefer a dull and mechanical theatre such as w e have today to one where all the gayest, freshest theatrical art flourishes? It is preposterous!

E.G.CRAIG T h e traveller w h o has feasted on the theatre of Japan, China, and Bali cannot repress the feeling, w h e n he returns to the West, that the actors are exceedingly loquacious and singularly incapable of doing anything other than talking. Our hypertrophied rational faculties have led us in the past three hundred years, and particularly since the industrial revolution and the late nineteenthcentury age of science, to theatre that is most often as small as life itself, a theatre that requires careful listening and intelligent understanding. W e sit in plush seats, fatigued after t w o or three hours of dialogue interspersed with a bit of movement, then disperse to discuss the

1. From Leonard C. Pronko, Theater East and West,Berkeley, Calif., University of California Fkess, 1967. Reprinted by permission.

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‘issues’ of the play, if it was a drama of any ‘significance’.

Our serious theatre is so sociology-psychology-philosophy centred that it begins to acquire (as Ionesco claims Brecht might wish) all the charm of a night-school course. Instead of a feast for all the senses and for the mind as well, w e are given the intellectual scraps from the top of the table of theatrical history. As Genet has said, for us everything happens in the visible world.

T h e theatre of Asia treats at least to some degree the invisible world, and it treats that invisible world (as well as multiple facets of the visible, palpable, audible one) in a total w a y that makes of it a feast-a feast the audience enjoys on most occasions, not for a trifling two or three hours, but for five, six, seven hours and occasionally for the whole night through. It is a theatre of the inner eye and of the outer eye at the same time. Like our great theatres of the past, it is both realistic and theatricalized, both illusionistic and presentational. It possesses at once reality and style, whereas w e most often seem to embrace one or the other. O n e reason for this polyvalence is the stress laid upon spectacle, often to the detriment of words; w e are accustomed to the converse, and anything else strikes us as heretical, since for us theatre is above all dramatic literature. Working with images-that is to say, with a purely theatrical poetry which exists in space and time rather than in any abstract sense on the printed page-the Oriental theatre can appeal, in different ways and to varying degrees, to that part of the h u m a n make-up which is refractory to intellectual and conscious stimulation.

Such a theatre of magic and hallucination both engulfs the watcher and keeps its distance-for it is highly stylized, a conscious work of art. It is at once subjective and objective. While it depicts our personal dreams and aspirations, our nightmarish fears and feverish hopes, evokes our childhood heroes and demons, sweeps us up in what Artaud called its great ‘indraughts of metaphysical air’, it does so with a profound sense of formal perfection.

View from the West: a theatre of feast

37

ßred on the small world of television and domestic comedy in films, w e have lost touch with the vital, fullblooded total experience of great ages of theatre. W e are cowardly, pampered, small-minded; too timid, too lazy, too unadventurous to give ourselves from head to guts to a theatrical performance of five or six hours. W h a t we like to think of as the healthy, complete, vigorous theatrical experience of the Greeks or the Elizabethans is beyond us. Perhaps there is more than a grain of truth in Artaud’s violent contention that our theatre today is a ‘theatre of idiots, m a d m e n , inverts, grammarians, grocers, antipoets and positivists, i.e. Occidentals’.

Prisoners of the self, w e seem unable, at any significant level of artistic endeavour, to break loose from the moorings that bind us to our everyday existence, incapable of liberating the spirit that might allow us to enter other spheres, investigate other levels of experience.

Caliban stalks the boards, and Ariel has flown. Or rather, no, not even Caliban-he is far too heroic for us, too imaginative and monstrous for most of us to swallow.

Prospero, with his familiars, has disappeared, leaving the stage to the purely human, as though reality were m a d e u p of nothing but Mirandas, Trinculos and Stephanos.

Most of the rich feasts of theatre in our century are indebted to m e n whose vision embraced both Trinculo and Prospero, Caliban and Ariel, visible and invisible forms of reality ; to m e n w h o attempted to renew their vision through a contact with classicalforme of theatre, including those of the East. Directors like Reinhardt, Copeau, Dullin and Barrault turned not only to Greece, the commedia dell’arte, and Shakespeare for inspiration, but sought n e w air and n e w techniques in the theatres of Asia.

A m o n g dramatists, Claudel, Brecht and Genet reflect significantly an acquaintance with Oriental theatre forms.

Alan Pryce-Jones, writing in Theater Arts (October 1953) about &ThePlays That Never Get Written’, suggests that ‘if Brecht could take a hint or t w o from noh drama, so, with greater logic, could one of our native dramatists.

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Or from the Chinese, the Indian, the early moralities.’ A hint,yes,but a well-informedhint.T o employ a technique without understanding it is to defeat its purpose. The so-called invisible m e n on stage in certain popular American ‘Chinese’plays, or the black-clad invisibles used by Tennessee Williams in The Mi& Train Doesn’t Stop H e r e Any More, all of whom draw attention to themselves, quickly degenerate into the cuteness of false theatricality.

Such distortion is widespread, for there is confusion and misunderstanding regarding Oriental theatre, even by those w h o are theatre specialists. Or rather, there is no misunderstanding, for there is no understanding at all, but total ignorance. People who might discourse for fifteen minutes on the significance of the Morris dance as a predecessor to drama, or the role of the interludes in Elizabethan theatre, are incapable of distinguishing between noh and kabuki,to saynothing ofthe finerdifferences between genres so utterly dissimilar as kabuki and Chinese opera.

The happy blending of style and content revealed by the theatres of Asia (and I mean content in the sense of over-all action with its implications unverbalized and even incapable of verbalization) deserves our study and meditation, for the Oriental theatre has a number of lessons to offer the West. I do not mean a vague lesson of the ‘Orientalspirit’, but specific lessons in technique and approaches to particular theatrical problems. Most of us are cowardly-or perhaps simply lazy-and say that it is all very well to understand the spirit of the East,but w e must beware of imitating the techniques of Eastern playwrights. On the contrary, the Asian theatre can offer us a rich repertory of techniques on which w e m a y draw, seeking out Occidental parallels to Oriental classical forms. Not imitation,but re-creation.

Such a confrontation might result in a renaissance like the one brought about by the rediscovery of another literature in Western Europe three or four hundred years ago. Oriental literature and theatre might well be thc fertilizing element w e need to bring forth fruit as rich as

View from the West: a theatre of feast

39

that produced by the cross-fertilizationof sixteenth-and seventeenth-centuryWestern Europe with classical an-

tiquity.

At any rate, such theatrical dialogue of East and West would allow us to see our own theatre in a wider perspective, to understand which elements are essential and which are pure provincialism. A number ofinteresting questions might arise regarding freedom and discipline in the theatrical art, the functions of the various parts of a play, and even the possibility of writing a play. That such an encounter is bound to take place sooner or later seems quite clear. A glance at current periodicals reveals that the Comédie-Françaisehas revived Voltaire’s L’Orphelin de la Chine, one of the first European plays to take as its point of departure an Oriental drama; plans are announced for kabuki to tour Europe; an issue of the Tulane D r a m a Review carries several articles about the Polish Laboratory theatre including a number of illustrations that show actors using training techniques of Indian kathakali, Chinese and Japanese classical theatres, and Japanese wrestling. The Orient is very much in the air, and has been for some years now. But this is not enough.

W e need a thorough knowledge of specific techniques and of h o w they m a y be applied to already existing plays, or give rise to new works.

40

The Cambodian nang sbek and its audience Jacques Brunet

There are good grounds for supposing that the shadow theatre originated in India. Extremely ancient writings vouch for this and allusions to it are m a d e in the epic p o e m of the Mahabharata, which clearly accounts for the subsequent spread of this theatre with the diffusion of Indian culture both to the west and the east of that country. In the Far East the shadow theatre usually depicts the great legends of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, subsequently taking u p local legends and also the masked dances (the Indian origin of which is scarcely in doubt) which have the same repertory.

Wherever the shadow theatre has developed, it has been adapted to local cultures on both the cultural and the technical plane. Until recently in Indonesia, the m e n took their places on one side of the screen and the w o m e n on the other side; in other words, part of the people saw only the leather objects and the other part the silhouettes.

In Cambodia, where the shadow theatre is animated by dancers holding in their hands large leather panels over 1.7 metres high before a giant screen 10 metres long, the spectators are grouped all on the same side but the dancers revolve round the screen, appearing therefore sometimes in front, and sometimes in silhouette. In Indonesia the

The Cambodian m n g sbek and its audience

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term wajang is the word used for the various forms of theatre and in Cambodia r o b a m nang sbek thm means ‘dance of the large leather panels’.

Although the shadow theatres were developed in Asia-and in some countries they are still a living and flourishing art-that is partly due to the importance given to silhouettes. In Indonesia the cut-out silhouette (or ‘shadow’) symbolizes the shades of departed souls. In Cambodia the leather puppet has the same function as the mask in sacred dances;it is the divinity itself which, after a certain ceremony of taking possession, takes shelter in and enters, in the true sense of the word, into the dancer. The artist then becomes completely identified with the character represented by the leather panel he holds in his hands. It is, as it were, the whole Pleiad of the Gods of the Ramayana w h o come down before the screen and, once again, relive the action of the epic poem which everyone has known since childhood.

M a n y works have been written on the symbol of the Indonesian wajang and the part it plays. I shall,therefore, not linger here further exept to stress certain aspects of the nang sbek of Cambodia and of Thailand (called there nang yai).

The character of the nang sbek is unique in the world : the performance consists of presenting before the screen large delicately fretted leather panels. Movements are imparted to the puppets while the dancers execute dance steps in accordance with very strict traditional rules. N o w what is surprising is the resemblance between these giant leather dolls which come to life before the audience and the great stationary sculptured frescoes of the temples of Angkor in front of which the visitor must move to bring them to life. The treatment of the sculpture is the same, namely each bas-relief, like each leather panel,forms a whole which by itself alone relates an episode. But the behaviour of the spectator is different: it is his movement along the long galleries of Angkor which permits the legend to be enacted before his eyes whereas, facing the nang sbek, he remains motionless while the

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puppets pass in front of him. Here the choreography is the important element in the performance, as its name, morever, indicates: the ‘danceof the large leather panels’.

Identity of intention with Angkor is obvious: whereas w e are fascinated by the dimensions and the harmony of that temple which takes us absolutely into another world so that every detail, every sculpture then stands out in relief with an importance exceeding reality, before the nang sbek and enveloped in the light of the giant screen w e are brought to the point where each leather figure which passes before us also takes on a dimension far beyond that of reality. Coming from seeing Angkor by day, to be present at the nang sbeli at night, one never feels that eight centuries separate these two admirable sights. It is the samein Indonesia or in Malaysia where the wajang purwa takes its part perfectly in the culture of these two countries:representing ancestral shades, these forms could only be articulated puppets which, although stylized, are most suitable to bring them to life.

In China, the psychology of the shadows is very different. Made by dolls, which are articulated also, they have lost all stylization and correspond very well with the h u m a n forms of traditional China. The characters are real persons and not gods or supernatural heroes as in Hinduized South-East Asia and the stories they tell are very realistic tales, even if they verge on the incredible. With their always very materialist mentality, the Chinese have created characters after their own guise. While the C a m bodian or Indonesian spectator goes to the theatre to be amazed and to live for a short time in another world, the Chinese spectator goes to be amused and to laugh and therefore he will laugh more over h u m a n adventures.

It is 8p.m. The spectators are already in their seats (five or six hundred sometimes) and eagerly await the moment for the performance to begin. Now what are they going to see? An episode from the Ramayana which has been told to them since their childhood,which they have often seen at the theatre,which they have heard as m a n y

The Cambodian nang sbek and its audience

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times on the radio and which they have related to each other on social evenings. A s to the nang sbek, they have already seen it hundreds of times; the whole legend has already passed before their eyes and nevertheless -they still expect something from this performance. Although a Westerner would soon be tired of seeing the same ballet, the same film or even the same play several times over, a Cambodian does not feel this monotony. The reason for this is, in fact, that the story is scarcely important. The K h m e r is affected by a movement or a doll if that doll and that movement are beautiful. A farm worker-dancer of nang sbek said one day that he danced for the pleasure of making beautiful movements. W h a t the Cambodian peasant comes to see is beautiful dance movements, even if they are always the same; he is never weary of being surrounded with the harmony which is essential to him.

It is also to hear the fine music (the finest that can be heard in Cambodia) and to see wonderful sculptures again.

Still another reason is sociological: the Ramayana, coming from India, was very quickly adapted to local conditions and each character in the legend has become a person of Cambodian psychology to the extent that the spectators easily recognize their people in the characters which pass before them.

These characteristics are found in all forms of the traditional theatre of Cambodia. The Royal Ballet, more particularly reserved for the court,is in the same vein and when public performances take place, the attitude of the audience is the same as for the shadow theatre. It can even be said that for them, the theatre is not separate from everyday life: everything happens in the open air in the middle of the rice plantation, without a fenced-off enclosure and without anything to pay. As the performance goes on for hours (from 8 p.m. until 1 or 2 in the morning), people are constantly moving about, going to eat something, then they come back or again they stroll if they feel so inclined. They gossip with a neighbour and everyone gives his opinion.

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This is due to the fact that art forms an integral part of life. There is no such thing as Fine Arts with capital letters in the traditional society, requiring of the theatregoer a special culture and knowledge which distinguishes him a little from his circle. Whilst in the W e s t going to the concert is a n act of the culturally privileged, in Asia music can be heard everywhere for in each village there are m a n y orchestras and the farmers take up their instruments readily. A t any m o m e n t here, everybody can ‘listen to fine music’.

It is not surprising therefore that the cinema has been given the n a m e of ‘ballet khon’, which is rather a general term to indicate that there are actors to be seen.

With the same idea, in Thailand the cinema has been given the n a m e of nang, a n a m e for the shadow theatre which means ‘leather’ from the resemblance of using a screen. B u t the resemblance stops there and the K h m e r s -like the Thais-distinguish clearly between what forms part of their national heritage and the cinema, the characteristics of which are entirely different. T h e use of the word nang and of the word khon spring essentially from the lack of a word which might translate ‘cinema’. Although the connexion with the shadow theatre is explained b y the use of a screen the similarity stops there. There is, in fact, in Cambodia another shadow theatre, the ayang, very small and using articulated leather dolls. Its stock of plays is mainly comic and it has been given the nickn a m e of ‘ K h m e r Charlie Chaplin’. But this is not because of Chaplin’s films as films, but simply because the character provokes laughter. And laughter is the link between the t w o kinds of performance.

To the K h m e r mind, nang sbek and the cinema seem scarcely related, for in fact their characteristics are c o m pletely opposed to each other. A s w e have just mentioned, while the traditional theatre is free and always open, one must pay to go the cinema. Already that is something disconcerting. To pay to go in is to give oneself a treat, something which is not a normal and everyday matter.

It is to recognize that one is going to find oneself in a

The Cambodian nang sbek and ita audience

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special atmosphere. But, on the other hand, the cinema has in itself nothing artistic. Of a type of construction that is remote from the traditional rules which the K h m e r knows well and admires, the cinema to him seems m u c h more commonplace and, in fact, too close to reality to arouse his enthusiasm. A t the most he is interested by the novelty of the peculiar technique of the cinema. T h e cinema becomes a diversion in the Western sense of the word: one economizes to treat oneself to this luxury, one chooses the time and the film and one is vaguelycurious to see the fine pictures and to learn about what goes on in other countries. People in fact go to see European films for their documentary value and not for the story which, to them, seems of secondary importance.

Moreover, Cambodians do not find at all in modern films the emotions which are aroused in t h e m b y theatre played according to their traditional rules. T h e psychological problems raised in these films leave t h e m indifferent. Beauty lies only in what is familiar: here there is n o dance, and the balance, symmetry and harmony constantly present in the nang sbek are completely lacking.

Only to comic filmsis there some response, especiallyw h e n there are comic situations and m i m e plays a large part.

For the K h m e r cinema, which c a m e into being some fifteen years ago, the situation is quite different. Starting immediately after independence, it was at first a copy of the traditional theatre. Produced by small local c o m panies, the films were m a d e in the open air with very limited facilities and they depicted either legends of which the Cambodians are very fond or historical adventures which took place in the age of Angkor. Played b y K h m e r actors against the natural landscapes of the country, they did not offend the local traditions. O n the contrary, despite their evident mediocrity, the early films were very successful; the Cambodians were sule to find something after their taste. And then the cinema was really a n e w m e d i u m which revived the theatre. It must be said, however, that the dialogue was very poor but written in

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the language of the people, the costumes were of glowing colours but ugly and the actors had scarcely adjusted themselves to this m o d e of expression.

At present, the cinematograph companies are better organized but, if they wish to fill the theatres, they still present films with a Cambodian background (legends or historical films). E v e n Cambodian films of modern tales are almost always doomed to failure, partly because they do not please the traditional Cambodian, and partly because young people or the intellectuals prefer films m a d e in France or the United States of America, that are better produced and better played. T h e only w a y to attract audiences, therefore, is to m a k e films which adhere to the tradition of the nang sbek or the Royal Ballet.

It must not be forgotten that the traditional theatre has left its impression on the whole artistic culture of Cambodia: the same characters are sculpted o n the pediments of the monasteries, on the frescoes in the temples, are the heroes of the local romances, of strip cartoons and of numerous broadcast adaptations.

Another distinction between the t w o kinds of performance is that the nang sbek preserves its sacred character whereas the cinema remains a secular show. T h e K h m e r public always feels that it is taking part in a religious drama by sometimes backing up the dancers with its cries. T h e preliminary propitiatory ceremony dedicates the performance which is going to take place and everybody participates in this dedication. T h e atmosphere is the same as that which must formerly have reigned during the performance of miracle plays on the parvis of a cathedral, with additionally that impression of forming a whole (the leather puppets, the dancers, the fire, the public) with what is almost a ceremony. This dedication of the performance which relates the adventures of gods in w h o m everybody still believes (and which consequently goes beyond the idea of a performance) fulfils its complete purpose during periods of flood or epidemics. But even in the ordinary performances, the K h m e r k n o w that there is a sort of protection over them during the whole period

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_____~__~________

The Cambodian nang sbek and its audience

41

ofthe show. From the purely plastic point ofview the nang sbek is extremely impressive owing to its dimensions, its enormous brazier with its leaping flames, as well as the percussion music of the orchestra and the long silhouettes swaying to the rhythm of music. It is entirely different from the cinema where the screen is beyond the reach of the audience, where there is no idea of prayer and, on the whole, all mystery has been supplanted by a much more prosaic technique.

It is clear in fact that the Asians have not transposed their traditional art of the shadow theatre into modern cinema technique. The shadows retain their peculiar characteristics, especially that of being the earthly representation of the gods (in Cambodia and Thailand) or of the shades of ancestors (in Indonesia).

As regards the articulated shadow theatre the ayang, the religious side leaves room for the comic side of the repertoire. The dolls hidden behind the screen enjoy themselves to the full: the characters play the part of clowns and improvise on current topics. This is the only kind of performance in which the artistes venture to make fun of the Establishment, the great ones of the kingdom and the priesthood. T o some extent they play the role of our cabaret singers, helped by the degree of anonymity which the use of leather dolls allows. The success of these small theatres is enormous throughout the country, for this is an amusement in which tradition does not go beyond the intention. This theatre, moreover, has been modernized and besides the traditional puppets we see aeroplanes or bicycles on which the characters of the old legends ride happily astride. The effect is continuously and powerfully comic and goes down well both with the country people and the dwellers in large towns. But this is a special case of the shadow theatre which over the centuries has lost its ritualistic meaning and has become a modern performance which, as we said,has been given the title of ‘KhmerCharlie Chaplin’.

I would like to conclude by stressing that in general the shadow theatre, which has the advantage of a very

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special technique, seems unable to emerge in a different form which would be the climax of its evolution. In effect, for instance,the cinema has no connexion with the shadow theatre even if a certain technical analogy between them can be found-a thing which personally I d o not feel at all. Neither does it seem that one of these t w o arts could influence the other in any way. T h e y diger too m u c h both intrinsically and functionally.

An essentially Asian art and a n artistic heritage of great distinction,the shadow theatre is incapable of being transformed or hybridized without immediately losing its individuality.

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Performing arts in Indonesia Milena Salvini

Of all the forms of art, it is in the theatre and the dance that the Indonesian civilization finds its best expression.

As in m a n y Asian countries, the performing arts in Indonesia are intimately identified with daily life in its individual and collective expression.

At the origin of the dance, and of all dramatic expression in Indonesia, are found the principal myths forming the weft of the distant past of mankind: the solar and lunar myths associated with the cyclical divisions and subdivisions of the Universe, the eternal conflict of the Good-Evilduality, and chiefly the worship of ancestors through which the link with the primordial enigma is recreated. Interlaced in a tightly w o v e n network, they constitute the primitive Indonesian source from which the art of the theatre, in the beginning a magical ceremony, c a m e into being and branched out; its various branches remain closely related one to another.

Vujung shadow theatre T h e shadow play, wajang kulit or wajang purwa, predominates in the whole history of Indonesian culture, of which

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it reflects the prevailing spiritualand philosophical values.

Various origins have been ascribed to the wajang. According to some it was derived from the Indian shadow theatre (chaya nataka); according to others it was imported from China. After much controversy, it has been recognized that the word wajang (from wajang bajangan meaning

‘shadow play’) is really of Indonesian origin and that this art is probably the most characteristic expression of Javanese culture.

The present form of the shadow theatre suggests that a change m a y have taken place in several stages both on the artistic and the philosophical plane, since early forms of worship devoted to the memory of ancestors (close to the magic ceremony of the ‘caves’described by Plato?). In Indonesian traditional theatre,pure reality is the image of mythical reality. The performer enters into ‘real’life by identifying himself with a mythical ancestor and the mythology which he embodies. So wajang symbolized the spirits ofthe dead,ancestors or heroes,venerated or dreaded. It seems reasonably certain that the wajang was subsequently an initiatory rite, then a religious cerem o n y associated with certain practices such as exorcism, conjuration or propitiation, as it still is nowadays, mainly in Bali. It is in Java, however, that this art has become most complete and its philosophical content preserved.

The ‘didactic’ element in this art is clear. The message delivered by the prophetic voice of the dalang, the puppeteer, is always received attentively by the audience.

AlI forms of traditional theatre are called wajang, even when speaking of the danced theatre (wajang orang or wajang wong),the masked theatre (wajang topeng),or the doll theatre (wajang golek or wajang tengul), which do not involve any kind of projection; in this case the shadows are ‘personified’by human beings or by dolls.

There is no doubt the theatre in Indonesia,whatever the form of its performance, had its origin in the primitive ‘shadow play’ which was later cmaterialized’by fruitful contact with the culture of India and progressively en-

riched in the course of history by the mighty heroic deeds which provide substance for its repertory.

The leather puppet plays the principal part; it makes a ‘living shadow’ for wajang, lending to it its outline and its behaviour. It is shaped with great art,combining realism with the most elaborate stylization.Whatever the legendary character that it personifies-god, hero or demon-its physiognomy gives definite shape to his predominant features. T o the Indonesian people, the puppets representing Kresna, Ardjuna or Abimanju are keramat, that is to say ‘sacred’,because they symbolize a h u m a n ideal which cannot be improved upon. The soul of a hero, divine or demonic, is shown through the form of the head and the outline of the profile. It appears chiefly in the lines accentuating the chin, the jaw, the nose and especially in the form of the eyes, the opening of the pupils and the gaze. There are six different shapes of eyes and nose each corresponding to a well-definedtype of character. Each character has several ‘aspects’in accordance with the exact context of each scene; for instance, Ardjuna in battle, Ardjuna and his wife,Ardjuna as a youth, will be represented by different puppets with appreciably different outlines.

The wajang puppets are manipulated by the dalang, who with them builds up a mythological world of either ‘reality’or ‘semblance’(according to whether the spectator sees the actual figures from the front of the screen or their shadows from behind the screen). Seated before the screen (kelir), and the long banana-tree-trunkstage which holds the puppets, the dalang is sole master of the mythological universe which he brings to life. His art calls for various skills: manual dexterity, a great wealth of vocal ability and, very important, ability to improvise as he performs.

The dalang is more than an ordinary manipulator of puppets, he is the repository of a family tradition which he has made his o w n by impressing his o w n individuality upon it. Formerly a shaman, then priest (for a long time he was called ‘dalang priest’), he still is both and alm an artist w h o knows the laws of music and dance.

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H e possesses almost superhuman energy and physical strength ; for nine consecutive hours he will combine action and music in a single rhythm. His voice has a flexible quality, sometimes delicate, sometimes sharp and it w ill change successively from speaking to singing and from a cry to intoning, imitating each character with such mastery that the illusion of dialogue is complete. It is through the lupa,a kind of secondary state akin to frenzy and trance, that he c o m m u n e s with the universe that he reveals.

T h e art of the dalang also depends upon the manner in which he animates the puppets and gives them the impulses which he does not appear to control. H e gives them a slight dancing motion in harmony with the ‘attitude’ peculiar to each ‘character’. T h e dance technique in the wajang orang comes from the movements of the wajang kulit puppets (later the dalang, in turn, will draw inspiration from the gestures of the dancers).

Besides the kelir, or screen, which symbolizes the universe upon which things are reflected, the dalang works with several accessories. A blentjong, or oil lamp (in the form of a Garuda bird, very often), is hung in the centre of the screen. T h e dalang imparts a slight swing to it from time to time (to give life to the shadows).

Puppets are arranged in hierarchical order, each family separated from the others, in a chest or case (kotak).T h e dalang strikes small tappers to emphasize and punctuate dialogue, to animate battle scenes, and to imitate the sound of wind or thunder. A m o n g the m a n y puppets, the kajon or gunungan is a large palette in the form of a tree or leaf and m a d e of the same material as the other puppets.

It is decorated with designs representing flowers, mythical animals, a tree and often also a door.

This accessory has m a n y meanings; it is associated with Mount Meru, with the Tree of Life, and again with the Gateway to Knowledge. Generally it is used to indicate the beginning and the end of each scene, but it often happens that it is used during the action to symbolize wind, water, a tree or a forest, or again a mountain.

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Of all the puppets, the Panakawan, clown characters, close to the Vidusaka of Sanskrit theatre, are the most popular ; there are three, four, or two of them, according to the region. They appear in the central comic interlude and their entry is always hailed with laughter and enthusiasm. The Panakawan are divine by nature; they are half-way between gods and humans and their simplicity of mind bestows a supernaturalpower on them.

The Panakawan are a specifically Javanese creation; they personify the early men, the ‘fathers’of mankind.

Through them, the dalang speaks to the hearts of the people. They are faithful allies of the Pandawa heroes of wajang.

Their comic interlude signifies more than simple relaxation; it occurs in fact after the crucial time of the night: the gara-gara (or chaos) itself is preceded by the dalang’s sermon. This sermon is a synthesis of the philosophical content of the story performed,which the dalang adapts to the social context of the moment. H e calls m e n to wisdom by reminding them of the fundamental principles of all ethics. The message of the dalang, however, is given between midnight and 1 o’clock in the morning (at the time when attention is most difficult to maintain) and only the least sleepy are there to receive it. Then the dalang re-creates the primordial chaos, the whirling silhouette of the kajon appearing on the screen, symbolizing the great cosmic wind.

The musical accompaniment is provided by the gamelan,the traditional Javanese and Balinese orchestra.

The word gamelan comes from gamel,meaning ‘hammer’; the majority of the gamelan’s instruments are in fact metalophones of bronze which are %truck’.

Adaptations in K a w i (ancient Javanese) of the Indian epics were made to serve the arts ofwajang shadow theatre. It is difficult to decide whether India’s two great epics were transcribed into K a w i and then, gradually, adapted to Javanese traditions until they entered the repertory of wajang purwa, or whether the latter was designed especially for the representation of these epics.

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However that m a y be, it seems that from the beginning the stories taken from the Indian Mahabharata were more popular than those from the Ramayana. Through the numerous interpolations of episodes from Javanese history, the Javanized-epic the Mahabharata became a sort of Cnationarsaga’to the Indonesians. The R a m a y a m is also popular. These two epics have sunk deeply into the thought and imagination of Indonesians and their various adaptations have always supplied material for the repertory of the wajang; more particularly the Baratajuda and the Ardjunawiwaha. In numerous lakon, or plays, Mahabharata and Ramayana charactersare even combined !The heroes of the Mahabharata have served as models for other characters, already legendary, in Indo-Javanese history.

Episodes from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana are found incorporated in the Pandji story which is the classic Javanese epic poem taken from ancient chronicles. Javanese kings themselves were supposedly the direct descendants of the Pandawas.

If the idea is accepted that the wajang formerly accompanied initiation ceremonies, each fight in a play appears as a stage of inward development. The second fight,the most sanguinary, symbolizes the struggle with the most intimate enemy. In the minds of some Javanese, and in particular the Jogjanese, the metaphysical aspect of the wajang is predominant. The art is primarily the vehicle for a philosophy from which the aesthetic laws are derived. In this sense, the art is the concrete form of this notion. Through the medium of a revered man, the dalang, it lays down precepts and sets examples. This explains its powerful action on the mind of the crowds and the educational role which it has played throughout history. The wajang was used in various forms by kings and politicians who m a d e it the instrument of their doctrines.

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Dance T h e Indonesian theatre clearly bears the stamp of Indian traditions, though recast in another mould. T h e dance also has borrowed from India, but indications of this are m u c h more blurred. Stone retains the imprint, the body assimilates it, and the seeds that India planted in Indonesian soil have given other flowers.

Indonesian dance (Javanese or Balinese) and Indian dance are based o n different laws. T h e essential difference lies in the play of balance and the combination of movements. T h e gestures of the Indian female dancer (of southern India in particular) are m a d e within a geometric universe resting on a central axis. T h e Javanese female dancer, o n the other hand, goes to and fro from one foot to the other in a subtle gliding m o v e m e n t which seems in search of stability. T h e movements are rarely in agreement; right and left are engaged in endless dialogue.

T h e play of the hands and the fingers (mudra or hasta) is of great importance in Indonesia as in India, but it is interesting to observe the different usage m a d e of this technique. In India, the mudras are codified in a series of ideograms, and the words of a p o e m can be accurately expressed through them. In Indonesia they have no precise meaning and seem entirely free to describe curves or spirals in space, but the freedom is wholly relative because the forms spring from certain ‘key-gestures’ on which they are built up. T h e mudras are very eloquent, nevertheless, and they speak to the imagination rather than to the mind.

As far as the Balinese are concerned, all performing arts spring from the dance, and the dance itself w a s created by the gods. Each Balinese village has its o w n modes of expression. S o m e are k n o w n for their masks, others for their musical instruments, others again for their sculpture or their painting. For the Balinese knows no barriers in artistic creation and he will express himself just as well in dance, music or w o o d carving. B u t above

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all, each village has its dances. The Balinese are never tired of improvising or of inventing n e w styles.

In Bali, a dance comes to life mainly through the artist w h o invents it or performs it. H e seals it with his o w n personality and that m a y influence the style of a whole region.But it sometimes happens that a dance does not survive its creator if some disciple is not there to carry it on or if, quite simply, the interest of the public fades away. This was the case of the kebyar. The kebyar was a ‘sittingdance’from the south of Bali.Under the influence of a remarkable dancer, Mario, this dance became very popular about twenty years ago. Various kinds of kebyar appeared in different regions in Bali and they are found today adapted to other styles,but the original kebyar has practically disappeared.

The Balinese associate dance with every circumstance, religious or secular: a wedding, a birth, a teethfiling ceremony, a cremation. Funeral rites, in particular, are an occasion for great rejoicing. To say nothing of all the religious ceremonies each of which is accompanied by a particular performance, family festivities are also excuses for the Balinese to enjoy themselves. The trancedances of the sanghyang dedari are associated with exorcism rites, and trance is always part of the barong dancedrama. In the dramatic ritual of the barong (a sort of mythical animal of the same nature as the lion) magic and religion are side by side. The barong resists the destructive forces of rangda (witch-widow).For the Balinese,however, Good never triumphs over Evil: they coexist in balance.

This performance usually takes its source from the Tjalonarang cycle, a legendary narrative ascribed to the reign of King Airlangga.

The Balinese masked dances, topeng, are of very ancient origin. They were probably partly imported from Java. Both in their treatment and the masks themselves, however,they show strictly Balinese characteristics. Here also, the essential difference between Java and Bali is visible. The aristocratic side of Javanese art is glimpsed in the masks where h u m a n emotions are scarcely suggested,

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whereas emotion in the Balinese topeng masks seems to well up directly. Even the Ceylonese masks, though rather extravagant in the distortions of the visage, do not offer as much subtlety in their mimicry. Like all Balinese performances, topeng takes place in the open air and at the end of a religious festival.The stage is laid out on the bare ground in a long rectangular space bounded at one end by the kotak and at the other by the gamelan. T h e audience crowds together on each side of the stage and behind the orchestra. The majority of the plots are taken from the Balinese chronicles that relate the history of various dynasties.

In the tradition of the Balinese,the gambuh is very ancient. In effect the gambuh contains the germs of the principal styles which later developed individually. It was the source of the legong, the topeng,the ardja and m a n y dances. Although the actor-dancersspeak and sometimes sing, this performance is rather a dramatic dance than a play. Movement is the mainstay of the action, the dramatic play and the oratory. The scenes are composed of pure dances, narrative dances, short dramatic ballets and mimed performances broken by spoken sequences. Music has a special function in the gambuh. The entrance of each important character is announced by a melody assigned to him and by an introductory dance executed by a servant or follower. The dance and the music set the dramatic atmosphere. The art was supported by Brahman families and stays associated with religious ceremonies. Although it is rarely performed nowadays it is still well preserved.

The ketjak, 'monkey dance', was formerly part of a magic ceremony, the sanghyang, which was intended to make contact with the gods through the medium of a young girl in a trance. The aim of the ceremony was to ward off epidemics and drive away evil spirits. The state of trance was brought about by the throbbing music of the gamelan soeara, a vocal chorus which reproduced the varied sounds of the gamelan by imitating cries of animals.

This male chorus would sit in several circles round the

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young girl. The litany-likerepetition of certain syllables at different levels of intensity gradually put her into a state of unconsciousness.

The ketjak has been taken from this rite and adapted to the Ramayana. The male chorus here symbolizes the armies of A n o m a n forming a rampart against the forces of Rawana. The m e n (about two hundred) are grouped in wide circles,in the centre of which the action takes place.

They accompany its progress with a symphony of swinging movements ofthe arms,head and body, all the time chanting the word 'ketjak' with various stresses and intonations. The various rhythmic combinations shared among different parts of the group sustain the spoken or sung words of the narrator. R a m a and Sita are performed in feminine legong dance style; Rawana and the other characters use a more dramatic dance style. The superimposition ofthe animal,h u m a n and divine worlds,each appearing with their respective modes of expression, is conjured up very clearly. The performance is lighted by several wicks of a high, branched oil lamp, placed in the middle of the stage. Ketjak is an interesting adaptation of traditional forms with a n e w conception.

New trends in the performing arts Independence was accompanied by a renaissance of the performing arts. This renaissance has been shown by the appearances of n e w conceptions. The oil lamp of the Javanese wajang has been replaced by electric light. The plastic severity of the wajang orang choreography,reproducing the linear movements of the wajang kulit puppets, has made room for the utilization in relief of scenic space.The wajang orang troupes of Solo and Djakarta are n o w turning modern scenography to account, as well as lighting effects and other contrivances.

Acting also has been subjected to the influence of the contemporary theatre and the cinema;it is developing towards realism and expressionism. Spoken dialogue is

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taking a more important place in modern dramatic expression and even in classical forms where it is sometimes introduced. The evolution of the modern world has given birth to n e w requirements within every class. If it proves necessary to restore the classic forms in the present social context, there is nevertheless a reasonable balance to be observed in taking this step. Both the modernists and the traditionalists are aware of the scope of this problem which calls into question the original significance of artistic creation.

The television service in Djakarta sends out daily programmes. These are composed of dramatic, musical and educationaltransmissions,and European-stylevariety shows. The experimental field there is still largely unexplored for financial reasons. Shadow theatre performances are sometimes retransmitted; they are also programmed weekly on the radio.

Contemporary choreographic research is attempting n e w creations starting from classic and folklore styles, integration of European classical and modern techniques in experimental research,and training ofn e w artists starting from a syntheticknowledge ofthe dances of Indonesia.

Independence has awakened an international movement which is by definition a unifying movement. The Bahasa Indonesia has solved the problem of linguistic diversity.

O n e dance of national expression meets a similar political need today. An attempt is being made to found a synthetic language of movement by blending together the expression of each minority. That will be the ‘danced’ counterpart of the Bahasa Indonesia.

For the future, nevertheless, it seems necessary to preserve a harmonious growth of all the performing arts and if possible to maintain them in their great natural variety, for they will have to meet the unpredictable requirements of a society in formation.

Because of wajang’s long tradition and well-known structure, it is particularly suited to adaptation to contemporary requirements. The wajang Pantja Sila was created in 1945 after the proclamation of Pantia Sila and

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was intended to transmit its ideology and its philosophy to the people. It takes the form of a shadow play in which the principal characters symbolize the %ve principles’ of Pantja Sila :belief in God, nationalism,humanitarianism, democracy and social justice. The themes depicted relate the events which followed independence.

Wajang suluh (suluhmeans light or fire) was created in 1947 by the Information Department to make clear the problems of modern Indonesia. Its function was to ‘enlighten’ and inform the people. Its subjects illustrate present-daysocial life since independence by retracing the stages of industrial development. They depict rural life in popular language which is simple and direct. Wajang Adam Marifat was created in 1940 in the region of North Jogjakarta especially to transmit the word of Islam. The puppets used are those of the wajang kulit. Wajang wajhu, illustrating themes from the Bible, was created in 1959 by the Catholic Party to spread the Christian faith.

The cinema The first filmsin Indonesia were patronized by the Chinese minority, and then by the Dutch. This period also marked the introduction, from Malaya, of stambul, a kind of musical comedy in Oriental and European style in which fairyland and reality,fantasy and melodrama,were blended, the whole bearing the stamp of sentimentality and facile romanticism. The early Javanese cinematographic productions, directly inspired by stambul,were not appreciated by the highbrows. After that, the subjects adopted were taken more from everyday life. They reflect mainly the post-1910period in which new trends departing from the traditional social customs were already appearing.

From 1952 onwards, a movement to promote modern European theatre brought more literary themes to the screen. The films produced in 1954 depict the revolution and the subsequent period. In a satirical manner they describe the life of the rural communities grappling with

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the n e w social laws and ‘officials’. T h e influence of Western music and of espionage films was felt about 1955. Under pressure from the European and American cinema, censorship became less strict and h u m a n problems were more freely described.

T h e majority of the Indonesian films,however, bear the stamp of the Indian cinema whose enormous production makes for easy export. A whole succession of films o n political ideology was m a d e in 1963 and 1965. F r o m 1965 onwards, cinematographic production was more directly linked with the nationalist movement. It was helped by the fact that the public was turning a w a y from foreign films, which caused a number of cinemas to close. Since those last years the films produced are staging typically Indonesian scenarios taken from romanticized versions of ancient or recent historical episodes. T h e first colour films date from 1967. T h e Council for National Film Production was founded in 1968 with the task of choosing from a m o n g the m a n y scenarios submitted to it those with the best technical qualities. It is composed of a jury which is reappointed each year.

All production is controlled by the Ministry of Information but financed by private enterprise, with the exception of documentary films. In Indonesia at present there are about ten large private firms which produce one or t w o films a year each. T h e smaller firms are more numerous but less active. T h e total annual production does not exceed fifty films. Indonesian films are n o w exported to Malaysia.

T h e majority of the films distributed on the market come from abroad. Of the films imported, India accounts for the highest percentage, then China, America and lastly Europe. There are about 500 cinemas in the whole of Indonesia, mostly in the large towns. Mobile film shows are organized for the small rural localities,but the viuage people are still somewhat reserved in regard to such performances. T h e impact of the cinema is considerable, however, mainly in the large towns and the university centres. T w o kinds of audience are clearly distinguishable:

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an intellectual ĂŠlite and a majority composed of ordinary people. For the latter, however, the cinema cannot be an everyday relaxation because the price of the seats is still too high. T h e folk-theatre remains the most accessible for them. T h e directors and producers, as well as the artists, generally c o m e from the islands outside Java, more particularly from Sumatra. (Perhaps that is the result of the powerful Javanese theatre traditions?) Since 1951 a n u m ber of student fellowship holders have been sent to Russia, America and France for technical training. Lack of capital, however, perhaps more than the shortage of technicians, is an obstacle to the development of the cinema. S o m e experiments based on the traditional forms have been made. For instance, a wajang orang performance was filmed using different places to m a k e the scenes exterior to the principal action. In this sense, the cinema seems to be a means to extend the compass of the stage. Other attempts have also been m a d e to associate the cinema with the development of wajang but they are still in the experimental stage.

Conclusion Until now, Indonesia’s closest spiritual affinity has been chiefly with the Asian countries. N o w for the first time, owing to the development of the modern world, it will be possible to establish closer relationships with the West, and on a level digerent from that of the past. T h e cultural values of the West will contribute to the development of Indonesian arts through the introduction of improved techniques. Adapted to the art conceptions of the Indonesian people, these will help to renew their creative thought by offering n e w opportunities for expression.

Similarly, the arts of the West, which are n o w tending towards Asian traditions, will draw n e w enthusiasm from these contacts. It seems essential, therefore, that this exchange should take place on the same level of understanding.

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T h e financial difficulties which Indonesia must cope with today are hindering technical and industrial progress, and consequently the development of the means of expression which are bound up with it such as the cinema and television. Exchanges in the sphere of the arts are also limited, at least with Western countries, and as a result, except for a few isolated groups of specialists, the Indonesian masses are acquainted only with the ‘lighter’ aspects of Western culture. It seems necessary to remedy this state of things so that future relations (likely to intensify with the expansion of tourism) are always effected in a harmonious exchange of values.

Allowing Indonesian theatre m e n to study Western performing arts on the spot will give t h e m a n opportunity to enter more deeply into the meaning of these techniques, the utilization of which is essential. Consequently, they will be able subsequently to adapt these methods to different traditions without the risk of diminishing the authenticity of the latter. I shall quote in this connexion an extract from the interesting survey by Professor Tran V a n Khe, which appeared in a recent issue of the Unesco Courier :‘1 strongly believe in preserving musical traditions but “preservation” is not the s a m e as conservatism or stagnation. I a m all for progress, but ‘‘progress” does not necessarily m e a n westernization.’

It seems increasingly necessary to preserve the national character of every tradition at a time w h e n international cultural exchange, on a greater scale than formerly, requires the individual participation of each State.

In this respect the role of the performing arts will preponderate in the relations between Indonesia and the other powers, because more than any other art they reflect the soul of its people.

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Theatre in Thailand’ James

R. Brandon

Lakon jatri is the oldest form of Thai theatre. Its origins almost certainly lie in animistic rituals. Jatri means ‘sorcerer’, and lakon jari performers have always been thought to possess magic power. Dances are part of spirit offerings or serve as prologues to various animistic ceremonies in Thailand. There are m a n y such dances. Lakon jatri is one which evolved into dramatic form, after absorbing first Indian dance and later Buddhist subject matter. Up until recent years, the play which lakon jatri troupes most often performed was the Buddhist Jataka tale Manora.

A typical early 2akon jatri folk-troupe consisted of three actors, plus singers and musicians. Only m e n were allowed to perform, probably for religious reasons. O n e actor played heroic male roles, one played female roles, and the third played clown, ogre and animal roles. T h e clown was often masked. Musical accompaniment was simple: flute, several drums (including the pear-shaped hand d r u m originally used only by lakon jatri troupes) 1. Adapted from James R. Brandon, Theatre in Southeast Asia, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1967, by permission of the publisher.

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and small bell-cymbals. T h e h o m e of Zakon jatri was the southern peninsula of Thailand, especially the area around N a k o n Sri Tammarat. This is the only place where troupes exist today.

During the Ayudhya dynasty, probably in the fourteenth century, lakon jatri underwent gradual development into a popular art form that came to be called Zakon nok. Nok (‘outside’or ‘southern’) is the word Thai use to indicate the southern provinces of Thailand, hence ‘drama from the southern provinces’. In Zakon nok, performance ceased to be a religious act, the number of actors increased, n e w stories were dramatized and the orchestra was enlarged to include more melody-carrying instruments.

Perhaps most important, dance was subordinated to the requirements of action. Popular audiences demanded fast action, colloquial language, lots of rough joking and not too m u c h boring dance. After the First World W a r lakon nok gradually died out; there are no troupes in existence today, although the style of performance is carried on by Thai National Theatre.

T h e date traditionally given for the beginning of Thai classical dance is 1431, w h e n the Thai captured Angkor and kidnapped the K h m e r royal dance troupe.

M a n y kinds of classical dance are distinguished by the Thai themselves, but female and male dance-drama are the t w o main theatrical forms. T h e major type of female dance is Zakon nui, generally believed to be a contraction of lakon nang nui, or ‘drama of w o m e n of the palace’.

In the centuries-long and very complex development of Zakon nui, three major steps are apparent. First, w h e n the Thai took over Khmer-style dance they altered it. They reduced the number of figures used; they changed the meanings of dance figures; they created an ‘alphabet’of dance that, in modified form, is used in Thailand, Laos and Cambodia today. Second, court writers turned to lakon nok for dramatic inspiration. Lakon nok stories were rewritten in elegant verse. Its rough style of movement was replaced by the languorous, gentle style favoured at court. And third, Zakon nai crystallized into its

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present form in the eighteenth century w h e n Javanese Pandji stories came to be staged as court dance-drama.

T h e Thai call the Pandji cycle Inao. M a n y other plays have been written for lakon nui performance, but none has ever equalled its popularity.

With lakon nui reserved for the royal harem, other forms of court theatre were performed by m e n only.

Nang yai (shadow drama) and khon (masked-pantomime) are the most important. Both dramatized episodes from the Ramayana and it is believed the latter developed from the former. Nang yai, meaning ‘large puppet’, is basically the same as Cambodian nang sbek. It is possible that an early form of shadow puppet was taken from Java to Cambodia by King Jayavarman II in 802, w h e n he established the K h m e r empire at Angkor, and that the Thai subsequently learned of the puppets from the Khmer.

T h e first reference to nang yai in Thai records occurs in 1458, or just twenty-seven years after the Thai sack of Angkor.

Probably khon masked-pantomime evolved out of nang yai. It is reported that a performance of khon was given in 1515 in which dancers copied the movements m a d e by nang yai puppeteers while manipulating the great puppets over their heads. T h e dancers wore heavy make-up which later became formalized into the masks used in khon today. T h e simple movements of the dancers were highlighted against the white screen. T h e khon dancer moves in a special sideways fashion, keeping in profile as m u c h as possible, like the puppets of nang yai.

Although originally presented by an all-male cast, as female lakon nui became increasingly popular at court, m a n y elements of female dance-drama were incorporated into khon. Lakon nai singing was added. H u m a n figures and gods ceased to wear masks (now only ogres and m o n keys wear masks). Perhaps most significant, female lakon nui dancers began taking roles alongside male dancers.

At first only Sita and other female roles were danced by girls, but n o w it is not u n c o m m o n to see a girl dancing the part of R a m a or his brother L a k s m a m a as well.

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T h e kings of Thailand were avid patrons of lakon nui, khon and nang yai. Not only did they maintain troupes at royal expense and stage magnificent court performances, but they encouraged members o€ the court to write and wrote plays themselves. W h e n , in 1932,a constitutional monarchy was promulgated a Department of Fine Arts was created within the n e w government which took over the function of teaching and staging public performances of khon and lakon nui and, less often, of lakon jatri and lakon nok. Unfortunately, there is little interest in nang yai; it is neither taught nor performed today.

A t the turn of the century lakon nok began to be replaced by a n e w ‘popular’ theatre genre, called likay.

T h e word likay is a corruption of digar, the n a m e of a religious chant of the Shiite sect of Islam. It is said that during King Chulalongkorn’s reign (1868-1910) Malays of the Shiite sect living in Bangkok sang the chant to invoke the blessings of Allah on behalf of the king. T h e chant was lively and rhythmic and caught the fancy of the Thai.

Popular troupes in Bangkok adopted the chant and its name, corrupting it to likay in the process, in an effort to capitalize on the current digar fad. T h e digar was chanted behind closed curtains (a custom maintained today) before performance, but likay plays themselves o w e nothing to digar or to Islam. They have always been pure Thai in story, in music and in dance.

In the 1920s and 1930s likay developed into a kind of vulgarized court drama under the influence and tutelage of ex-palace dancers w h o turned to the professional theatre to earn a living Professional likay actors assiduously studied with court artists. For the first time actresses appeared with actors on the stage. Court plays like Inao, Sang Thong and even parts of the Ramayana were staged as likay. Likay is still the most widely performed theatre genre in Thailand, but its popularity is not as great as it was a generation ago and its artistic level is not high.

In the five southern provinces of Thailand which border Malaysia, several types of shadow play are popular.

Opaque puppet figures, in the style of Javanese wajang

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kulit and patterned after khon dancers, are used by wajang melayu and wajang siam troupes respectively.

These troupes are often visitors from the Malaysian side of the border. They perform in the Malayan language, as the population of southern Thailand is composed of 80per cent Moslem Malays. A third type of shadow theatre is nang talung. Nang means ‘leather’, and talung is an abbreviation of Pattalung,a southern city where the shadow play has long been popular. Nang taZung puppets differ from every other type of shadow puppet in South-East Asia in that they are translucent and rather small, so similar to Chinese shadow puppets, in fact, that I a m inclined to believe that in one way or another they were inspired by Chinese shadow theatre.

A doll-puppet theatre used to be fairly well known in central Thailand. Troupes of twenty or more puppet manipulators, singers and musicians were common. These were folk-troupesthat performed at fairs, temple festivals and for any occasion calling for entertainment. Dolls, painted and costumed like lakon nui and khon dancers, enacted a wide variety of plays, including episodes from the Ramayana. Today there is a single folk-troupe in Thailand. Most of the troupe members are old, and Thai puppet theatre probably will not survive their death.

Thailand and Malaysia are the two countries outside of China where Chinese opera is important. Though the size of the Chinese-speaking population of Malaysia is roughly double that of Thailand (4 million compared to 2 million), there are more Chinese opera troupes in Thailand than in Malaysia. The opera was brought into Thailand by immigrants coming from various parts of southern China, so that we find four or five important forms of Chinese opera corresponding to the languages of the immigrants. Teochiu-language opera is most commonly seen (a reflection of the fact that this is the largest Chinese-languagegroup in Thailand). It is notable that performances are not only given for Thai of Chinese descent, but often at Buddhist festivals and at district fairs where the audience represents a cross-sectionof the Thai people.

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The Thai cinema is still in the developing stage. At most a handful of feature-length films are produced yearly by Thai companies, while some 400 foreign films are imported and distributed each year. The ‘foreignness’ of these imported films is diluted, however, by dubbing in the Thai dialoguelive for each showing.A team,usually of one actor and one actress, goes with a film around the country,often for a month or more. They become exceptionally skilled at giving a familar Thai interpretation to Western characters and Western actions.The most talented build large personal followings, who, they say, are as likely to attend the cinema to hear their favourite Thai actors as to see the film.

In conclusion, it can be said that Thailand presents an example of an Asian country which, though not large, has created strong theatre traditions out of a multitude of cultural influences. Historically w e can see h o w Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Khmer, Chinese and Western civilizations have affected the dance-drama,shadow theatre and popular plays as well; yet today these theatre forms are part of Thai life, expressions of Thai culture.

W h e n Thai actors ‘perform’ Western movies according to Thai tastes and expectations,is this not merely the continuation of the Thai tradition of assimilation in the performing arts, adapted to the n e w medium of the cinema ?

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Traditional theatre in Viet-Nam Tran V a n K h e

In Viet-Nam the traditional theatre is called hat tuong or hat boi. Hat means to sing. T h e etymology of the word boi is controversial. A t all events, the hat tuong, a term used mainly in the north of Viet-Nam, indicates a form of theatre which w a s formerly performed at the courts of the kings or emperors of the old Viet country. T h e word hat boi, used by the inhabitants of southern Viet-Nam, indicates a type of theatre which had its origin in the court theatre but which is tending to become a folktheatre.

T h e Viet-Namese theatre has more than a little in c o m m o n with the Chinese theatre but it also differs from it in several ways. T h e similarities are insufficient to allow us to assert that the Viet-Namese theatre w a s derived from the Chinese theatre, any more than the differences permit us to maintain that the Viet-Namese theatre has no link with the Chinese theatre. In speaking of the Chinese theatre, moreover, w e think mainly of the ching hsi, the sung theatre of Peking, and the points of comparison in this article have been drawn from the ching hsi.

To be completely objective, w e must recognize that the Viet-Namese hat tuong or hat boi has been influenced by the Chinese theatre, but it has not sought to copy that

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pattern slavishly. It has been able to retain and develop its o w n originality, to adapt the text of the plays, the stage effects and the songs and elocution to the taste of its public. Let us try to go back to its beginnings and to follow its development in a quick historical survey and to see the reaction of the Viet-Namese public to these recent innovations.

According to certain authors, in approximately the twelfth century and under the Ly dynasty, a Chinese Taoist initiated the Viet-Namese into the Chinese theatre art. In the history of the Viet country, the n a m e is recorded of an actor in the Y u a n army, Li Y u a n Ki (Ly Nguyen Cat in Viet-Namese) who, captured by the soldiers of General Tran Hung Dao, saved his life by teaching the Viet-Namese the songs and dances of the Chinese theatre.

T h e play Tay Vuong Mau (Si W a n g M o u , the Queen of the West), performed at the court by Li Y u a n Ki and his troupe composed of Viet-Namese actors, w a s very m u c h appreciated. In the first month of the third year Dai Tri (1360), King Tran D u T o n (1341-69) c o m m a n d e d the princes, dukes and princesses to give theatre performances in competition.T h e king judged them and rewarded those w h o gave the best. It appears from these historical documents that the traditional Chinese theatre was introduced into the old Viet country about the end of the thirteenth century, and the first companies of this theatre, which was intended for kings and court dignitaries, were formed early in the fourteenth century.

Other authors are more cautious about the Chinese origin of the traditional theatre. Mich Quang, in particular, throws doubt upon the Chinese origin of the hat tuong on the grounds of differences between the costumes, make-up, theatre properties, songs and dances of the t w o theatres. It is very probable that a theatre of Viet-Namese tradition existed independently of the theatre of Chinese tradition and that it continues to this day in the hat che0 (folk-theatre of northern Viet-Nam) the origin of which is lost ‘in the mists of time’. It is undeniable, however, that the hut tuong bears the stamp of the Chinese theatre.

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In this sphere as in m a n y others, the Viet-Namese people have been able to assimilate notions learned from the Chinese and thus to create an original art, a true combination of foreign contributions and of elements of their o w n art heritage.

At the beginning of the fifteenth century, performances of hut tuong were still given simply to entertain the court, to enliven banquets and even in connexion with sacrifices.In 1437,during a ceremony in the royal temples, King L e Thai Tong abolished theatrical performances and forbade the playing of music. Historical documents examined recently show that the hat tuong was in favour not only with the court but also among the people during the last period of the L e dynasty (eighteenth century).

The hat tuong developed chiefly at the Nguyen court in the south,while in the north the hat a duo (song of female singers) was taken up by the Trinh lords. The emperors of the Nguyen dynasty (1802-1945)were interested in the traditional theatre, as were their ancestors the Nguyen lords.Under the reign of Nimh M a n h (182040),the master of ballet and singing in the official troupe was a Chinese actor of the n a m e of K a n g Kong Heou (Cang Cung Hau).

The Emperor Tu D u c (1847-83) invited scholars to collaborate with him in writing n e w plays. T h e Emperor Thanh Thai (1889-1909)was extremelyfond ofthe theatre and did not hesitate himself to take a part in a play.

Under the Nguyen dynasty, especially in the reign of Tu Duc, more than 300 actors and actresses were recruited from among the best in the whole country, and plays requiring a large number of actors were produced. Authors such as D a o T a n wrote plays which were considered masterpieces. With regard to the inner meaning and the form of the plays, and the technique and the costumes of the actors, the hut tuong tended to become a little closer to the Chinese theatre.

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Analogies between hat tuong and Chinese ching hsi A

foreign spectator is immediately struck by the great resemblance between the Viet-Namese hat tuong and the Chinese ching hsi.

For instance, as regards the stage and the properties, there is the same stage devoid of scenery, decorated with a single piece ofplain fabric or material as backcloth; the properties also are few. In the hat tuong as in the ching hsi, the table and a few stools m a y serve as furniture just as well in the dwelling of a court dignitary as in a poor student’s cell. A tablecloth embroidered with dragons spread over the table indicates that the scene takes place in the throne room. A stool placed on the table makes mountains shoot up. The riding whip represents a steed and the oar a boat. T w o strips of white cloth held vertically on each side of the actor and bearing the pattern of a wheel, represent the royal chariot.Add to the objects mentioned above some wooden weapons painted black, red and silver, some many-coloured flags, a piece of material wrapped round some bamboo sticks representing a missive (a private letter or a royal message), a carafe and some small wooden or china cups,and you have nearly all the properties of the hat tuong and the Chinese ching hsi.

As to the actors and their parts, the characters belong to all the classes of the old Viet-Namese or Chinese society: kings, queens, princes, princesses, civil and military mandarins, citizens, scholars, peasants, servants, soldiers,brigands, and also some immortals, goddesses of Chinese or Viet-Namese mythology.

In the Viet-Namese theatre there is a clear distinction between the parts of the good m e n (trung)and the bad m e n (ninh).In the Chinese theatre there is a great variety of female parts: ching i, a modest and virtuous young w o m a n ; hua tan, roguish and given to flirtation; kuei men tan, a young unmarried girl. In general, and

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apart from a few variations, the same types of part are found in both theatres.

Examining make-up and costumes, it will be seen that if the painted faces are looked at in detail, they are not the same in the two theatres, Viet-Namese and Chinese. But the symbolic meaning of certain colours on the other hand is nearly identical: red for the good and loyal characters; white (or grey in the Viet-Namese theatre) for traitors; green for demons; black for the straight and honest parts. In the Viet-Namese theatre, use is rarely m a d e of blue, yellow and brown, symbolizing respectively courage, intelligence and obstinacy in the Chinese theatre.

A beard with three or five tufts indicates the loyal part; a sparse beard, fairly short and in the form of a Newgate frill, a traitor’s part; a bushy beard, a violent character.

A face painted white with black and red streaks indicates the non-Chinese origin or the violent character of a person.

T h e costumes also differ in detail: the soles of the Viet-Namese boots are rounded and not flat and rectangular like those of the Chinese theatre. B u t the costumes and hair-dressinghave been designed with the same idea: broad silk tunics decorated with dragons with five claws embroidered with gold thread for kings, phoenixes e m broidered with gold or silver thread for queens; heavy chasubles spangled with tinsel with little flags on the back for warriors. Peasants, servants and soldiers wear cotton jackets without embroidery. Students wear a black or dark blue cap while court dignitaries wear head-gear decorated with gems and provided with t w o lateral wings.

T h e head-gear of generals, knights or warriors is decorated with pheasant feathers. Certain conventions in materials and colours are found in both theatres :light yellow silk for kings, black cotton for impetuous or unpredictable characters, grey for old persons, etc.

In both theatres, gestures and attitudes are stylized and conventional. S o m e are identical, like the manner of tasting a cup of tea or liquor, the gesture of wiping away tears, the setting-off of a horse marked by striking the

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boot with a riding whip, the crossing of weapons between t w o combatants. Others are specifically VietNamese or Chinese. In the Viet-Namese theatre, it is impossible to distinguish hundreds of sleeve movements, hand play and steps, as in the Chinese theatre. But the walk, the w a y of opening a fan, of stroking the beard peculiar to a traitor’s part are very well exploited in the Viet-Namese theatre. Also very characteristic is the manner of moving sideways without lifting the feet, movements facilitated by the rounded shape of the soles of the Viet-Namese buskins, to express suffering or deep emotion.

For themes of plays, the history of China, especially the period of the Three Fighting Kingdoms (third century A.D.), Chinese mythology, even the Chinese romance Tay Du (Pilgrimage to the West) with the King of the M o n keys, have provided Chinese and Viet-Namese authors with material for their works. T h e texts of Viet-Namese plays contain m a n y Sino-Viet-Namese words understood solely by scholars. T h e plays have approximately the same ending: the good are rewarded, the wicked punished, the kings restored to their thrones though they are for a time threatened by traitors, w h o are often killed at the end by the loyal subjects.

Ifthe t w o theatres are examined in detail, numerous differences appear, more particularly in the inner meaning and form of the plays, the songs and the music.

Differences between hat tuong and Chinese theatre In plays, subjects drawn from the history of Viet-Nam or from certain Viet-Namese romances are not rare. W e mention a m o n g others :Tru’ng Nu’Vuong (The T w o Trung Queens) by P h a n Doi Chau on the exploits of the Trung sisters fighting against the Chinese invaders (40-44 A.D.); Duong Ve Lam Soh, glorifying the fight of the VietNamese people against the Ming, under the leadership of a peasant patriot L e Loi, founder of the later L e dynasty

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(fifteenth century); and Luc Van Tien, a romance in verse of Nguyen Din Chieu.

Although loyalty to the sovereign formed the theme of plays in the Viet-Namese theatre, the fine parts were given to loyal subjects, often of humble birth. At the end of tuong thay (history) plays, the crown princes, pursued by traitors but protected by the people, ascend the throne, reward the loyal subjects and punish the felons.

The language of the principal characters is that of aristocrats. The servants and clowns, when they speak among themselves, use the language of the people. Although in the tuong pho, the text is largely written in the Sino-Viet-Nameselanguage, in tuong thau and especially tuong do domestic plays, m u c h room is left for the national language.

The musical repertory is very different in the two theatres: there are of course speeches (noi loi in the VietNamese theatre,pai in the Chinese theatre) and songs. In the Chinese theatre, the songs are in two principal styles: hsi pi and erh huang. The pang tse m a y also be mentioned.

They are absolutely different from the hat khach, hat n u m of the Viet-Namese theatre.

The passages called kouo men (literally‘togo through the door’), played as interludes, and the pieces calledya ti (literally ‘elegant A utes’) intended to accompany pantomimes or a particular stage effect in the Chinese theatre, do not exist in the Viet-Namese theatre where on the other hand a large number of pieces for percussion are found such as: Khai troung or Trong duong dau (overture) before the beginning of the play; D a m bang or Bai chien for battle scenes.

Reform and change At the beginning of the twentieth century, a tendency to ‘reform’ the hat tuong was shown by the appearance of the hat boi pha cai luong genres (traditional theatre mixed with the so-called reformed theatre) in southern

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Viet-Nam, the hat bo X u a n nu (traditionaltheatre, X u a n nu style :‘springlikeyoung girl’) in central Viet-Nam, and the hat tuong Saigon (traditional theatre, Saigon style) in northern Viet-Nam. In fact, the reform consisted mainly in imitating the play, gestures and make-up of the Chinese actors, in introducing pieces of relaxation music into the traditional repertory, and in using the scenery and curtain as in the Western theatre. T h e production has even been seen of traditional plays taken from a fashionable novel such as Toi Cua Ai (Whose Fault?) and Ai Len Pho Cat ( W h o is Going up to P h o Cat?). In the countryside, h o w ever, the public always calls for the traditional plays.

Immediately after the revolution of August 1945, and during the W a r of Resistance, the hat tuong in the north and the hat boi in the south went through a period of decline. In some provinces, the hat tuong companies tried without success to perform plays for spoken theatre instead of the traditional theatre. F r o m 1952 onwards, by order of the Government of the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam, it was decided to restore the traditional theatre. Plays taken from the ancient or contemporary history of Viet-Nam appeared. W e mention a m o n g others Tru’ng Nu’ Vuong (The T w o Trung Queens),Dung Ve L a m Son (The R o a d Back to L a m Son, the place where the struggle began against the Ming invaders in the fifteenth century), D a u Tranh Giam To (Fight for the Reduction of F a r m Rents), Chi Ngo (ChiN g o the Fighter). Each hat tuong performance was attended by thousands of spectators, and m a n y young people were trained in the hat tuong section of the National School of Dramatic Art. In southern Viet-Nam, the traditional theatre is dying out. A single company gives performances in Saigon which are poorly attended. In Dinh Dinh,the cradle ofthe hat boi, there are about fifteen village troupes. Recently in Saigon, the Association for the Encouragement of Theatre Studies and of Traditional Singing (Hoi khuyen Ze CO CU) organized several hat boi performances for an audience of connoisseurs and students. In the south, however, the so-called reformed theatre (hat cai Zuong) has almost

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completely replaced the traditional theatre.A t the present time the young people are turning towards the n e w music (tun nhuo) or the variety and dance music of Western countries, and they are completely ignorant of the subtleties of song and speech in the traditional theatre. The task of educating the public is just as urgent as that of preserving and handing d o w n the art of the theatre. In northern Viet-Nam, all the forms of theatre are taught in the National Conservatory of Dramatic Art. Research groups are collecting documents on the hut tuong,hut cheo, hat cui Zuong, hut bui choi;and together with the study of a historical or aesthetic nature, experiments are being m a d e to reform or adapt the theatre to living conditions of the present day.

T h e public is sympathetic towards efforts m a d e to find a n e w and original formula for the traditional theatre, which continues to develop in the north. Only the return of peace and the reunification of Viet-Nam, or at least the re-establishmentof cultural relations between the t w o parts of Viet-Nam, will m a k e it possible to give n e w energy to the work of restoring and developing the traditional theatre.

Popular theatre and dance in Ceylon M. J. Perera

Theatre There is n o evidence that theatre was a popular art form in ancient Ceylon. In a country which possesses an unbroken tradition in literature, poetry, painting and sculpture, the absence of a tradition in the field of the performing arts has some special significance. T h e great sub-continent of India provided inspiration in the field of literature from the earliest times. Sanskrit poetics provided Sinhalese poetic norms; even Sinhalese prose styles were influenced by mediaeval Indian works. T h e classical Sanskrit dramatists-Kalidasa, Magha, Bhavabhuti, etc.and their works were not only known but were even used as models. Kalidasa’s n a m e is associated in legend with a poet-king of Ceylon n a m e d Humaradasa (seventh century) w h o is reputed to be the author of the famous Sanskrit p o e m Janaki Harana. In this legend, Kalidasa is said to have been murdered by a courtesan in Ceylon and the king in his inconsolable grief at the death of his friend had immolated himself in the funeral pyre. This is m e n tioned here not because the legend itself is important but to raise the question: why, if Kalidasa himself was so well k n o w n in Ceylon, did not drama, at least as a literary

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form, develop during classical times or, taking a much broader span of time, from the second to the seventeenth century, or even during the rather decadent but theatrically active period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?

The popular explanation of this literary void, and probably the correct one,is that Sinhalese literary activity was generated during almost its entire long career covering many centuries in a monastic and religious environment, until a secularization took place after the .seventeenth century. Authors of all extant work were either Buddhist monks or laymen deeply steeped in the Buddhist traditions and teachings;Buddhist discipline did not encourage ritual as a form ofreligious activity or secular performances which were ‘vulgar entertainment’ in their evaluation.

Even as late as the early twentieth century, children were taught that ‘seeing performances of nadagam and kolam, remember, is a primary cause of depravity’. In such a social environment, w e have to concede that theatrical performances could not have taken healthy root.

Sinhalese culture, however, did not develop along Buddhist traditions alone. It had a parallel and popular aspect,too. There existed a powerful popular development of a folk-religion which thrived side by side and very often intermingled with the Buddhist way of living. It was not inconsistent for a good Buddhist to resort to folkrituals and observances when the need arose. This folkculture recognized a host of male and female deities and demons of great power exercising benefic and malefic influences in the scheme of life of every individual. Their aid could be invoked by one so inclined for the well-being or ruin of another through the intermediary of priest (kapurah)with the deities or an exorcist or black magic worker (kattadiyu)with the demons. These activities built round them a vast range of ritualistic performances and it is in these that w e can see primitive dramatic form taking shape. Legend takes these rituals back to vrey remote times but the performances as seen today are not earlier than the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Such

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dramatic interludes are found in m a n y of the more elaborate rituals like Kohomba Kankariya, G a m m a d u w a and Rata Yakuma.

Connected rather obliquely with these performances, were folk-plays of a very primitive type associated with harvesting ceremonies, and propitiation of the good goddess Pattini. Regarding them, Sarathchandra in his book Sinhalese Folk D r a m a says: ‘The drama is only a byproduct of activities seriously directed towards the sustenance of the entire life of the community, namely, the propitiation of gods and demons, and the performance of magical rites which are calculated to prevent disease, ward off evil, bring plentiful crops and confer general prosperity on the village.’ In the rural villages of the interior, mainly in the central zones, a popular performance was the enacting of the story of Sokari, a long rambling story of the adventures of an Indian emigrant, his young wife and his servant.

Along with primitive, rustic Sokari,w e have to consider a more developed dramatic form known as kolam.

T h e word kolam,with a derogatory connotation, has been prevalent at least since the sixteenth century, and referred to any type of burlesque or a passing show. Bahuru kolam, appearing in a poetic work for that period, refers to ‘ m a n y forms and m a n y faces’ and will apply quite appropriately to a masked dance where a single person portrays m a n y roles wearing different masks. Kolum is the enactment by masked performers of a story in the form of a play, through the m e d i u m of song and spoken dialogue, the latter being, for the most part, impromptu. T h e origin of kolam is obscure but there are some similarities in the characters and methods of representation prevalent in the masked Dahu Ata Sanniya exorcistic ritual. A feature which adds weight to this theory is that these t w o types of performances, the ritualistic and the entertainment, have been developed in the same geographical areas of Ceylon.

F r o m a simple presentation of a series of characterdancers, kolam developed into the relation of a few simple stories, t w o of which have been drawn from the Buddhist

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folklore of the country. They must have been very popular stories, being available in the repertoire of folk-poetry for a long time. They taught the people moral lessons and would have therefore been acceptable to any audience.

M a n a m e deals with the consequences of fickleness of w o m e n while Sanda Kinduru depicts the virtues of steadfast faithfulness.

T h e next traditional period brings us to fairly m o d ern times. In the early sixteenth century, the Portuguese invaded Ceylon and occupied the coastal areas mainly in the west and north, introducing the R o m a n Catholic religion into the areas they occupied and proselytizing it with ruthless vigour. Dramatic performances of Christian origin were gradually introduced in these areas as a propaganda medium. These performances had their origin in southern India and spread into Ceylon through Jaffna and gradually moved south along the coastal belt and established themselves from Chilaw downwards. Singing spread from the precincts of the church to the secular areas for functional purposes such as weddings and other festivals.

These performances became operatic in character, melodramatic in stage technique and, naturally, displayed strong Tamil influence. T h e performances were given generally in the open air with the audience on three sides.

Thus arose the nadagam.

It is clear, even from this very brief survey, that there is no real theatrical material, except in nadagam, from which conventional drama could develop. But they contain ingredients that are suitable for adaptation and this has been done.

Nadagam performances had died out as serious entertainment by the turn of the last century. Kolam existed at not more than three or four centres struggling for existence and depending mainly on festival occasions connected with temples or devales. A more relevant form of drama as pure social entertainment came into being starting from about the latter part of the last century, inspired by Parsee musicals from northern India and by amateur English theatricals. This was the nurti, which

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held sway mainly in the capital city of Colombo for about fifty years until it gradually declined under the combined influences of ineflicient management, poor playwriting, lack of discipline a m o n g acting groups and finally the advent of the motion picture. B u t it is important to note that this period gave rise, for the first time in Ceylon, to a professional theatre and after the collapse of the nurti this achievement has not been repeated even u p to the present day.

Each of the above-mentioned dramatic forms ceased to have popular appeal and more or less became defunct, and as a continuous process there is little reliance on the part of the successor on the predecessor, O n e c o m m o n factor, however, can be identified and that is the appearance of music and songs as an integral part of the entertainment even w h e n it does not help in the development of the drama. In the modern period w h e n a few playwrights modelled their plays on traditional drama they kept this link unbroken.

A complete break with the past occurred during the third decade of the present century w h e n Westerneducated amateur groups sought inspiration f d y from the Western theatre and started adapting popular Western plays or writing n e w plays based on that technique. In keeping with this development, a n e w dramatist appeared during this period w h o wrote and produced a few plays of this type and then apparently dissatisfied with the lack of mass appeal of the imported material, blazed a n e w trail. This playwright-producer was Ediriweera Sarathchandra, then a lecturer at the University of Ceylon. For some time he had been searching for more local background and for a play which could be linked to tradition but could still produce a good drama. H e went back to the nadagam for this purpose and produced the epochmaking play M a n a m e in 1956.This was the greatest event in the annals of Sinhalese theatre for a long time and the impact of it was tremendous. It was produced with actors drawn from a m o n g the university students. H e drastically revised the stock characters of the nadagam, retaining

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only those needed for the main dramatic presentation. T h e Presenter (pethe gura) taken from the nadagam became an important figure in setting the scene for each episode.

A full-fledgedchorus took u p the refrains of the characters as they sang on the stage. Music was supplied by a group of full-time musicians. With these refinements this n e w play of great dramatic intensity, based o n the simple kolam story M a n a m e without changing the characters or the story intrinsically, provided an entirely satisfying, colourful and tuneful drama. T h e play began its career with indifferent audiences because it opened to the small sophisticated audience w h o at that time were the chief patrons of Sinhalese drama, but soon, w h e n the play was taken before the mass of the people, its popularity was immediate.

This was the first conscious effort to evolve something lasting and worth while from traditional material and its popularity was evidence of two facts: first, properly handled by a competent dramatist, the traditional material could lend itself to good drama; second, the people were prepared to applaud this variety of play as something of their own, going back to something of indigenous cultural value.

Sarathchandra’s M a n a m e contained lyrics of great beauty and this was of special appeal to the audience. T h e conventional movements of the characters on the stage and the lilting dialogue became attractive in their very simplicity and brevity. Good sincere acting also contributed, of course. It m a y be said that the very great popularity itself of M a n a m e was the cause of the undoing of its technique. A host of imitators followed without conspicuous success, until Sarathchandra himself wrote another play more brilliant than even M a n a m e o n a very serious theme, with university students as actors again.

This was Sinhabahu, staged for the first time in 1961.

Based o n the legend of the origins of the Sinhala race, he wrote a moving drama in which the lion father w h o obtained a royal princess for his wife and the son and daughter born to them got involved in very serious genuine

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emotional conflicts. This play was as successful as its predecessor and these two plays stand unique in this

field.

Sarathchandra also wrote and produced two delightfuldramasusing conventions adapted fromkolam.Rattaram (Gold) and Elova Gihin Melova Awa (I W e n t to the World Beyond and Came Back). Both used Sinhalese folk tales and some characters wore masks. Drums were used very effectively in the production. H is play VeZZuvahum, a hilarious comedy in which he employed males to act even the female parts, was based on Sokari traditions. Thus, at least one dramatist has consciously gone back to traditional sources for inspiration in his efforts to find a satisfying style for Sinhalese drama and to develop it. Another successful play was Sanda Kinduru. It was warmly appealing because it used traditional dances and folk poetry and the story was from a well known folk play in the kolam tradition. H e was thoroughly conversant with the traditions and knew their strength as well as weakness.

H e had full command over the language,music and even the experimental characters. Others w h o did not have these facilities and faculties failed.

Some techniques of these plays, the chorus, the Presenter, the orchestra, and doing away with all stage sets and props, have come to stay in m a n y present-day productions.

The dance Theatrical performances include ballet and opera. Ceylon possesses two types of dances which, though not organized for the stage, are theatrical. The more sophisticated and better developed of these two is the Kandyan dance and the other is the L o w Country dance. As can be understood from the names given to the two dance forms,the former was confined mainly to the Kandyan areas and the latter to the L o w Country areas and here too, mainly to the coastal belt of the south-west.Both have been preserved

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as intrinsic parts of the performances in connexion with the ceremonies intended to propitiate the various gods and goddesses mentioned earlier. B u t certain items of the K a n d y a n dance are not connected with the rituals and have considerable entertainment value. These occur at present mainly in processions-whether religious or secular. During the period of the K a n d y a n kings, these dances had developed as serious entertainment of the court and of the feudal aristocracy. T h e Low Country dance, o n the other hand, remained closely associated with ritual until very recent times. Sporadic efforts were m a d e to introduce, o n the stage, selected dances from the vast repertoire of items included in the K a n d y a n and L o w Country dance forms but not to evolve a sustained theatrical presentation using the forms. Ballet in Ceylon first took over bodily the kathakali dance forms of southern India and s o m e folk-dances from Bengal because local students w h o seriously turned to dancing had studied in India and brought these dances to Ceylon. W h e n the Government of Ceylon opened the Government College of Fine Arts, with a school for the study of K a n d y a n dancing, and indigenous dance became a subject in m a n y schools after 1948, n e w life c a m e to K a n d y a n dancing. M a n y years later enthusiasts succeeded in introducing Low Country dances as a subject in the College of Fine Arts School of Dancing, conferring a greater degree of respectability o n the local dance. It was only a matter of time for those who were teaching Indian dance forms in Ceylon to change their allegiance from Indian to Ceylonese dance.

Ballet using K a n d y a n and L o w Country dances suitably adapted for the stage began to be produced. P r e m a K u m a r produced a n u m b e r of ballets in the nineteen-forties and fifties. T h e n c a m e Chitrasena whose Karadiya set a n e w standard for this type of performance. A s ballet had even less traditional backing in Ceylon than drama, the artist has a great deal of freedom to innovate and hence it w a s not surprising that the recent productions have a mixture of techniques borrowed from kathakali, manipuri, Indian folk-dances, Ceylon’s K a n d y a n and L o w Country dances

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and even movements adapted from Western classical ballet.

Ballet, however, is still not a frequently seen theatrical activity because of the very limited number of persons w h o can handle the art form sufficiently well and also perhaps because of the greater effort needed to produce them. But the few productions of quality which have appeared during the last ten years have been very popular.

An entirely novel effort which used only traditional dance form with great effect, backed by a libretto drawing full inspiration from Sinhalese folk-music, was Makuloluwa’s Depano,which had a very successful run.

T h e fact that drama, ballet and opera, based on tradition, have been very popular w h e n produced well makes one feel that the audiences are ever ready to accept them as something of their own. But the unfortunate thing is that so few have been able to handle the material c o m petently. Hence it is not surprising that plays-within the last few years-have tended to follow stage patterns which are universal. S o m e have written and produced original plays while many have adapted famous plays of Europe and America.

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Western and Asian influences on modern Indian theatre S o m Benegal

The East bow’d low before the blast, In patient, deep disdain.

She let the legions thunder past, A n d plunged in thought again.

MATTHEWARNOLD Any study of Western and Asian influences on the Indian theatre movement will have meaning only if there is some perspective of the social, political and cultural forces that have shaped the Indian milieu. T o talk even of contemporary Indian reality one must of necessity go back into s o m e time for a clear understanding.

T h e West wind, which blows in eastward with everincreasing cyclonic force, sweeps everything before it till it is spent somewhere in the mid-Pacific. T h e East wind has been too feeble to counter it, m u c h less to be able to roll it back. This goes back to as early as the eighteenth century w h e n the Western powers first m a d e their determined, conquering entry into Asia. Matthew Arnold’s optimistic view of a disdainful East unaffected by legions m a y be true only of a certain enduring philosophical content which lies deeply buried in the Asian psyche and which on occasion tries to assert itself. But on the whole,

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on the social, political, cultural and technological levels, the powerful Western presence has been traumatic, disturbing and confusing to the Asian peoples.

It is not as if India had not known conquest before, Indeed, in her long and durable history invasion, incursion,conquestwere like daily bread. The Iranians,Greeks, Parthians, Bactrians, Scythians, Kushans, Huns and Turks had come. But they had all been either repelled or the ocean that was India had simply absorbed them. Even the Mogul Empire, whose foundations were laid in 1526 and lasted nearly three centuries, and whose writ ran almost over the entire country, was not alien for long. The Mogul rulers soon lost contact with the land of their forbears and they became as Indian as any native of the soil.

A synthesis of the invading and invaded cultures flowered during this rĂŠgime.

But when after a brief but chequered inter-European rivalry in the eighteenth century,the British finally eliminated the other contenders and subdued India and set up their empire, the alien rule that was ushered in was alien in every respect. The British in nearly two hundred years never struck roots in the soil of their conquest. On the contrary, they maintained with great determination an unbridgeable gulf between themselves and the Indian people in tradition, outlook and living. Perhaps,it could never be otherwise. Apart from racial reasons and the totally dissimilar,even hostile, foundations of their pbilosophical, ethical and moral view of life,the British never came to settle but to have and to hold.

W h e n cultures collide,the result can be a harmonious blending and synthesis and enrichment through mutual exchange, or a fierce antagonism to be resolved only when one has overwhelmed the other, or it can be an uneasy coexistence sometimes quiescent, sometimes turbulent.

The collision of European and Indian cultures has the elements of the latter two.

The British arrival in India coincided with a disintegrating national fabric and the ebullient, forthright style oftheir occupation was beyond match forthe Indians.

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T h e drastic manner in which they introduced n e w ideas, n e w education through a new, strange language and n e w methods of functioning and governance, created profound psychological disturbances in India. T h e egocentric superiority with which the British imposed themselves on India and the deliberate alienation which they practised could only reduce the confrontation of European and Indian cultures to a n unequal struggle in which the Indian became a borrower or imitator. While it could be said that the large masses of the Indian people in the countryside were only influenced on the outer periphery of their lives culturally, the townsfolk and the intelligentsia were subjected to enormous pressure and temptation. But the deep-seated philosophical and social base of the Indian w a y of life could not wholly be displaced by this n e w extrovert technological civilization which w a s battering at the doors of Indian perception. T h e result, on the whole, was hybrid culture, egregious in m a n y respects because neither side could c o m e to terms with the other. T h e liberationofIndia in 1947 has m a d e the Indo-Europeanconfrontationless self-consciousbut n e w factorshave emerged, particularly runaway technological development in the West and the fantastic growth and strident aggressiveness of Western mass media, to m a k e the Indian even more unsure of himself in his present milieu.

Nothing exemplifiesthe bizarre, the cruel, the comic and the paradoxical in the confrontation of W e s t and East better than the field of theatre. W h e n the W e s t first c a m e decisivelyto India,the great Sanskrit classicaltheatre w a s long past its heyday. Indeed it was in the last stages of moribundity. It had been replaced in s o m e form by a theatre of the temple, a kind of religious theatre which later took to pageantry in the streets, and a folktheatre which flourished with considerable vigour; it still persists tenaciously.

As British rule consolidated itself in India, the Indians after s o m e resistance reconciled themselves, for s o m e time at any rate, to their overlordship and tried to understand and assimilate the ways of the n e w rulers.

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European ideas began to percolate into the Indian consciousness. The robust European theatre was a strong attraction.The Shakespearian theatre had elements which were familiar to the Indian. M a n y of its conventions like the use of imagery, poetry, free flow of time and space, narrative chorus, the grand gesture, soliloquy and aside were concepts extolled and inculcated in the great classical treatises of Sanskrit drama. A t this point, at least, there could be a concord. Not surprisingly, the hold of Shakespeare has been firm and emphatic over the centuries. This is not to suggest,however, that Shakespeare as such is widely popular. Indeed the impact of Shakespeare exemplifies the bizarre situation which results from a fusion of irreconcilable cultures. The worst aspects of the dominating culture tend to manifest themselves in the hybrid. Shakespeare became the unabashed source for m a n y plays which went through such sea changes that the bard would have been horrified at the transmogrification of his work. This burlesque Shakespeare altered in locale and nomenclature and injected with irrelevance was performed with a gusto of melodrama, rhetoric, farce, song and hyperbole. The style had a profound impress on the Indian theatre and persists to this day with great vigour. It has compounded itself into the Indian cinema where it promises to endure for ages to come.

Not unnaturally such a powerful influence would affect not merely the acting style but the writing also.

M a n y playwrights attempting original plays have, consciously or unconsciously, fallen into Shakespearian dramatic construction and characterization. It is curious, however, that there has rarely been a true translation of Shakespeare in an acceptable literary form. The only attempt on any serious scale seems to have been made as late as 1956 and 1959 when Harivansh Rai Bachchan translated Macbeth and Othello in Hindi verse. Nor in all these years is there any evidence that a Shakespearian play (other than by amateur companies in English) has been produced in the serious manner in which it should.

The sole exception is a splendid interpretation in the

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E.Alkazi, a very gifted theatre personality, of King Leur in Urdu. This impeccable production was shorn of all the dress that had gone in the name of Shakespeare on the Indian stage before.

Another imperishable Western influence on the Indian theatre has been the proscenium arch and painted scenery born of the Italian renaissance. Indian classical tradition is totally against both. In the Nutyasastru, that voluminous work which embodies in the minutest detail all the physical, theoretical and conceptual ideas of traditional Indian drama, very precise descriptions are given of three kinds of playhouses :the oblong, the square and the triangular. There is, however, in all the prolific ruins scattered around India, no sign of a theatre or playhouse as such. However, from the structure and content of Indian drama, it is obvious that there could never have been a separation of audience and players in the emphatic divide which the proscenium arch creates. Theatre in the round seems the most likely form to have been used.

Folk-drama which has the firmest continuity in tradition to this day uses theatre in the round. The absence of realism in representation, the use of the poetic image rather than an actual construction,the fluidity of movement in space and time on stage clearly preclude the use of sets or a front curtain. Painted scenery would also be incongruous in such circumstances. Hence the ubiquitous proscenium stage and, even in this day and age, painted scenery bespeaks the total surrender to Western form.

A third significantinfluence from the West has been the cinema. The cinematic form in its crudest sense of an assembly of continuous short episodes overtook the Indian play. Although such jerky changes are impractical on a stage, they have been employed regularly in India.

At one point, things seemed to get out of hand when a revolving stage was installed in a Calcutta theatre. A bewildering number of episodic scenic changes threatened to make plays look like drawn-out films. Even dramatists began to write scenarios rather than plays. Much to sixties by

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everyone’s relief, the novelty wore off.T h e prohibitive cost of constructing and maintaining revolves mercifully precluded mass duplication in theatres around the country.

Another execrable device from the West which has gripped the Indian theatre is the microphone and a m plified sound system. This is increasingly used indiscriminately, incongruously and in utter disregard of sound distortion. Thus, it is not u n c o m m o n for an actor upstage to sound louder than one downstage. And w h e n an actor moves across the stage, a strange rise and fall in the volume of his voice results as he shifts in relation to the microphone. A more serious consequence of the dependence o n amplification is the neglect of the actor’s training in voice projection. W h e r e amplification is not available both actor and audibility are lost. Another unfortunate consequence is the architect’s neglect of acoustical considerations in theatre building.

T h e Grand Guignol style, the proscenium theatre, the cinema and the amplifier m a y , then, be said to be the four profound but baleful imports which have persisted over time and still affect modern Indian theatre. This is not to argue, however, that Western influence has not also brought in m u c h that is positive, stimulating and good.

Despite the once-removed contact through the English language (indeed twice-removed since the Indian has to m a k e an initial jump from his mother-tongue to English), the European, rather than the Englishman, has m a d e a more profound impact on the Indian intellectual. Strindberg, Ibsen, Molière, Anatole France, R o m a i n Rolland, Victor Hugo, Dumas, Zola, Goethe, Marx, Chekhov, Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevski, Gorki and Sartre are a m o n g the m a n y European writers and thinkers to w h o m the Indian intelligentsia have turned.

For m a n y years, Strindberg, Ibsen and Chekhov were strong contenders for style. Their examination of the h u m a n condition and of society battling to establish class and personal equilibrium presented in such majestic style proved irresistible to the Indians w h o themselves were

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beset by the same problems. To this day, these three playwrights are frequently performed either in the original or in adaptations.

Molière has also been popular because his droll and mordant satire on pretentious society eminently suited similar action against the decadent Indian ruling class and upper bourgeoisie. T h e great Marathi playwright Atre, w h o died recently, for example, was not only an avowed admirer of Molière but had completely mastered his art.

T h e reflection of Molibre is strong in his finest plays.

T h e Russian Revolution has had a greater impact o n the Indian mind than is generally conceded and the Moscow Art Theatre movement greatly stimulated Indian theatre workers. Precisely h o w this manifested itself is difficult to say unless it be that the styles of some of India’s greatest actors and directors m a y have some identity with the work of this group. T h e Indian Peoples Theatre movement which flourished during the war years m a y have found inspiration from the progressive theatre movements of the West. Along the same plane, the ideas and work of Brecht have also profoundly interested the more serious element of the Indian theatre movement.

S o m e significant experiments have been m a d e especially

by Habeeb Tanvir. S o m e of the work of the actor-producer-author, Utpal Dutt, shows strong affinities to the general progressive leftist movement.

After the w a r and India’s independence, rising expectations have given a vigorous direction to the Indian theatre movement. Though the Indian theatre struggles most lamentably in the teeth of hostility, indifference and lack of support, it has taken a remarkable world-view.

There is to be seen an inner conflict raging with the desire on the one hand to revitalize a genuine Indian theatre founded o n its o w n logical tradition, to find sustenance in Indian heritage while tackling the contemporary reality, and on the other hand, of trying to take in the bewildering advance of the Western theatre m o v e m e n t without being altogether overwhelmed. For a while, this ambivalence led either to inaction or to grotesquerie. There were some w h o

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unquestioningly tried to follow whatever direction the Western movement took regardless of the absence in India of the compulsions and needs which took that movement where it did. Every turn of the avant-garde movement found its adherents and imitators.Ionesco,Beckett, Albee, Osborne, Pinter, Weiss and other practitioners of the theatre of the absurd, cruelty or anger appeared as themselves or in various guises. There was even a ‘happening’ and an attempt at underground theatre without raison d’être. S o m e of these must be attributed either to overenthusiasm or childishness. T h e more serious-minded, however, stuck to a steadier course, searching carefully even within the avant-garde m o v e m e n t for that which had content and meaning and some significant relevance to their Indian audiences.

Perhaps maturity comes to a nation, as to an individual, in eighteen years. After a long period of frustration, searching and probing, several playwrights, like Badal Sircar, M o h a n Rakesh, A d y a Rangacharya, D h a ramvir Bharati, Girish Karnad and Lakshminarayan Lal, have given Indian producers their first real chance to work on something truly Indian and contemporary. If these playwrights have at all been influenced by the West, it can strangely be not by their most modern counterparts but by persons like Pirandello,Sartre, Anouilh, Giraudoux and Lorca. Is it perhaps a sign of national disillusionment that some of the best Indian playwrights should forsake an optimistic view of life, for which there is ample justification, and take to Pirandello’s philosophy of hopelessness or Sartre’s existentialism?This is not to suggest that these playwrights have consciously accepted either the philosophy or the dramatic structure of Pirandello and Sartre as their model but that an affinity has been noted by some observers.

B e that as it may, plays like Baki Itihas, and Adhe Adhure have been acclaimed as milestones in which, to quote the critic, Frank Thakurdas, ‘the playwright speaks in a language immediate and familiar and compels us to introspection’.

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W h e n it comes to the question of Asian influence on the Indian theatre, m u c h less the modern Indian theatre, the picture is one of desolation. Despite a fervent Asian consciousness, India has had little of cultural contacts with the countries of the East of any significance in recent times. Ancient Indian contacts were generally one-way from India outward. There has been no feedback. In some ways, the tradition of the Indian classical theatre remains intact in some of the Asian countries like Indonesia and Cambodia. T h e Indian w h o has lost touch with his o w n tradition will find the living example of what it was in these countries. In the Japanese music and dance form gigaku, some masks had Indian features, while in the bugaku the sub-division k n o w n as saho-no-mai is k n o w n to have originated from India.

T h e Indians have had little opportunity, either through travel or through the means of mass media, of being exposed in any w a y to the theatre of Asia. T h e presentation as late as in 1966 of an Indonesian ballet, Ramayana, and a Japanese performance of kyogen during the East-West Theatre Seminar and Festival in N e w Delhi were the first limited but serious experiences for Indian audiences. They excited the greatest interest and a genuine desire arose for further contacts and study. T h e National School of D r a m a in Delhi places considerable stress o n Asian theatre forms. Mrinalini Sarabhai, internationally known as a dancer, in her academy in A h m e d a bad has attempted a noh play in Gujerati. But these are but feeble wisps in the wind which m a y not m a k e any impact in the theatre movement as a whole.

T h e general trend w h e n it comes to revitalizing or reviving a tradition-based Indian theatre is to look into Indian heritage at its source for inspiration, rather than where it flourishes best. Nor, in the context of the conditioned reflex of the Indian intellectual to look Westward for anything new, has it been possible to devote any attention to Asia. This is perhaps further compounded by the illusory belief that the West stands for progress and that one victim of colonialism has little to offer another. Per-

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haps also the lack of an effective language of communication between the Asian countries is another inhibiting factor.

Thinking Indians of course deplore this state of affairs and, in truth, the expectation of the East-West seminar was that at least a beginning could be m a d e to reverse this unfortunate process. It was felt that an Asian identity of emotional and philosophical outlook beyond national boundaries and political systems existed which could best manifest itself in cultural contact.

Thus while for years Asia has looked out Westward, it has rarely looked at itself or within itself. T h e seeds of a stirring are n o w there. There is need for theatre peoples at all levels in Asian countries to establish contacts between themselves to see, to study, to ponder, to understand and in that process, to bring forth a n e w and enduring synthesis. T h e need is limitless,the opportunity is limited.

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Japan: theatre’s response to a changing society James

R. Brandon

So m u c h has been written about Japanese theatre; it would be superfluousand presumptuous to try to describe the arts of noh, the puppet theatre, kabuki and modern drama in this short space. B u t inasmuch as the major concern before the Round-Tableconference is to ‘promote and encourage artistic creation in contemporary society through increasing awareness of the n e w conditions under which culture is disseminated’, it m a y be of interest to briefly note the ways in which Japanese theatre artists in the past, and today, have done and are doing just this.

For some 1,200 years theatre has expressed ‘contemporary society’ in Japan, and as society has changed, the theatre has changed with it (or it m a y also be that a changing theatre caused changes in society). At the same time that the theatre changed and n e w forms came into existence, it is notable that most of the older forms were not thereby simply abandoned and discarded as the unwanted residue of misguided ideals past their time; because these forms retained significance for some segments of society, and because their intrinsic artistic value was acknowledged, though they might no longer be widely ‘popular’ they continued to be staged. Both sides of the coin, change and preservation, are clearly evident in Japanese life and art.

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Because so much attention is given to the preservation of Japanese traditions in the arts, I shall focus here only on some of the most significant changes which have occurred, and on their relation to the changing society of which they were a part.

The earliest professional performers in Japan were jugglers, acrobats, puppeteers, street dancers and musicians from China,w h o arrived by way of Korea,and hence actually brought to the islands performances of both countries. From as early as the seventh century the popularity of these very ‘foreign’stage arts in Japan is attested to in numerous written accounts. These were the sangaku, or ‘miscellaneousperformances’, which in time came to be part of almost every kind of Japanese celebration, from Buddhist temple festivals to imperial court entertainments and village rice-planting ceremonies. Desiring to emulate the p o m p and authority of the Chinese court, Japanese emperors sent emissaries to China, not merely to absorb Buddhism and literature and government, but to learn court dances and music as well. By the eleventh century, the Japanese court was supporting troupes of several hundred dancers and musicians, and training schools as well, so that the Chinese court music (gagaku) and court dance (bugaku) could contribute to the harmonious reign of the Japanese sovereign,just as music and dance was expected to in China. Of course, the Chinese music of gagaku sounded strange to Japanese ears (as did the Mongolian, Indian, Korean and Viet-Namese tunes which the Chinese in previous centuries had incorporated into it), and so they changed it to suit Japanese tastes; we don’t k n o w just h o w they changed it, but change it they did. Court music and dance died out in China, but they can still be seen performed, at the Imperial Palace or the new National Theatre in Tokyo, the product of Japanese court adaption of a mainland performing art.

In the fourteenth century the elegant, indolent life of the Heian imperial court (794-1185),of which bugaku was a part, was replaced by a rule of aggressive samurai

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warriors. ‘The harmony of the spheres’, the slow, symmetrical, non-theatrical dance movements of bugaku bored these self-madem e n and they turned, for more lively entertainment, to troupes of sarugaku players that had grown, over the centuries, out of the stage antics of the old sangaku performers. Sarugaku, literally ‘monkey music’, probably refers to a grimacing performer, leaping about to music, a good indication, in any case, of its popular rather than aristocratic origin. Sarugaku troupes sang and danced and did short sketches, and they probably kept some of the old acrobatics and juggling in their variety shows as well. Troupes performed mostly for Buddhist or Shinto festivals; they provided the entertainment to bring in crowds of people, w h o of course were expected to give donations to the temple or shrine, and the religious orders, in turn, paid the performers. T h e connexion of sarugaku with religion was a kind of marriage of convenience, at least at first. In time, however, the profoundly pessimistic Buddhist philosophy that material things are an illusion and life a thing of impermanence, impregnated to the very core the plays of sarugaku. This doctrine, too, appealed to the samurai rulers of the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and, especially since the plays took as subject-matterlives of important rulers and court ladies in Japanese history, sarugaku came to be highly regarded by the warrior class. Buddhist philosophy and glorification of temporal rulers were held in balance.

T h e plays incorporated such contemporary and lively music as the kuse: compared to old-fashioned,slow-motion bugaku, here was an exciting and up-to-date theatre a warrior could appreciate.

This was the form of sarugaku, which by the fourteenth century came to be called sarugaku-noh,and later simply noh. Sarugaku-noh was plebeian, still performed outdoors at village fairs for crowds of farmers and travellers, w h e n the great performer Zeami Motokiyo (13631443)was invited to live with the shogun Yoshimitsu, the warrior-ruler, at the court in Kyoto. N o w , under the influence of court tastes, noh became increasingly refined.

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But compared to the exquisitely precious performance which noh is today, Zeami’s noh w a s practically vulgar in its activeness. Records show us that if a programme of five noh plays that Zeami performed were staged today, the twentieth-century performance would last twice as long. So what began as a plebeian show has become, after six centuries of gradual but never-ending refinement to suit the increasingly sophisticated and delicate tastes of an aristocraticruling class,perhaps the most subtle theatre art in the world and the most difficult for the average audience to appreciate.

Beginning in the sixteenth century, a n u m b e r of momentous changes occurred in Japanese society. After bloody wars of succession all of Japan w a s unified under a peace that w a s to last for three and a half centuries: cities rapidly grew until T o k y o w a s the largest in the world. While the samurai ruled, the t o w n merchant increasingly gained control over the economy. T h e seventeenth and eighteenth centuries s a w a great flourishing of totally n e w arts like the ukiyoe wood-block print, the simple three-line haiku poem, the picaresque novel, and in the theatre, the puppet play and kabuki, all of which appealed to merchants of the t o w n and were supported by them. No longer did theatre troupes play before a shrine or a temple, for a festival, or at the h o m e of a n aristocrat at his c o m m a n d : public theatres were built in the midst of the cities, as m a n y as seven or eight clustered together into a bustling, brawling entertainment district.

Theatres were open every day, all day; a penny could buy a cheap seat. Kabuki grew out of popular street dances; and the puppet theatre (usually called bunraku now) used a n e w foreign three-stringedinstrument, the shamisen,and a series of technical inventions which m a d e the puppets m o v e in remarkably realistic fashion (with moving eyes, eyebrows, mouth, and fingers individually jointed at the knuckles like the h u m a n hand), to attract the middle and lower classes to the theatre. And they thronged to the theatre, tens of thousands every day, in part to enjoy the ‘social’ excitement of participating in the act of theatre-

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going itself. Free of government restrictions in the theatre quarter, even the humblest person was part of this new stream of Japanese life.

For the first time in Japan, thc c o m m o n person could see his o w n life mirrored in the plays set upon the puppet and kabuki stages. Of course,history plays, about aristocrats, were part of the playbill, but the latter part of every day’s performance was devoted to new plays that dramatized the latest newsworthy events of Kyoto and Osaka. For example, in 1703 a sensational double suicide of two young lovers in Sonezaki, a suburb of Osaka, was made the subject of a kabuki play just seven days later.

Theatres vied for audiences by staging the same current stories: as earIy as 1683, there was simultaneous staging of the same love suicide at all three of Osaka’s three as licensed kabuki houses.Later in the nineteenth century, problems in the feudal society of Japan mounted without solution,kabuki plays depicted the lives and violent deaths of gangsters and thieves, again staging events which had special relevance to the contemporary urban audience.

The government feared theatre would corrupt the morals of the audience, and regulations at m a n y times during the E d o period (1600-1867) directed kubuki and puppet producers not to stage contemporary events (especially those concerning the samurai class). The most famous of all plays of this period, The Forty-seven Loyal Retainers (Chushingura),is an example of an actual event which was staged soon after its occurrence and in which the names of characters had to be disguised to satisfy the legal requirement, though this was transparent to every member of the audience: the shocking event of 1702, in which forty-seven retainers of the Lord of A k o took revenge on the m a n responsible and then in turn committed mass suicide, became on the stage a play about forty-sevenretainers of the Lord of Hoki of the fifteenth century, w h o avenged their master and committed mass suicide. The audience was vitally interested in this contemporary happening, and government regulation could not prevent people from seeing on the stage what they

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cared about. In a no less significant way, the kabuki actor was a part of the life of the times, for the actor’s behaviour, taste in dress and attitudes were widely emulated by the audience. T h e actor therefore both created audience expectations and responded to them.

W h e n the full impact of Western culture struck Japanese society at the end of the nineteenth century, kabuki actors and writers tried to absorb into their traditional style of performance these n e w ideas and ways of life.

As they had done for centuries, they tried to put contemporary life on the kabuki stage. But trams and telephones proved totally incompatible with kabuki’s elaborately conceived patterns of non-realistic movement and style of elocution, and though actors such as Sadanji, the first kabuki actor to visit Europe (in 1907), and Kikugoro V cut their hair Western style and wore suits instead of kimonos on stage, the social change which had occurred was already too great to be bridged. So actors and actresses (for the first time in t w o and a half centuries) created a n e w stage form distinct from kabuki. This was shimpa, or ‘new school’, a style relatively realistic and strongly influenced by the West, a theatre for a society caught u p in the d.esperate gamble to modernize fast enough to escape the fate of Western political domination, but not so complete as to destroy the traditional fabric of Japanese society. Shimpa was, and is today, a reflection of this clear duality between Western and Japanese ways; most of the plays of the repertory concern ordinary, middle-class Japanese facing family and business problems of the years following the turn of the century.

Pure Western theatre can be said to have begun w h e n Shoyo Tsubouchi, the indefatigable translator of all of Shakespeare’s plays, established the Literary Society in Tokyo, in 1906. Other groups quickly followed and soon all the latest Western dramatic and theatrical theories-which meant realism and naturalism-were tried,by staging,first,translations o f m o d e m Western plays and, in time, n e w plays written by Japanese playwrights according to Aristotelian rules of dramaturgy. Like

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Western theatre ofthe period,ideology, social conflictand h u m a n characterization were stressed. Shingeki, or ‘new theatre’, as it was called, was ‘literary’as was Western drama, and its audience consisted of intellectuals,by and large, as in the West. Though the shingeki audience was therefore very small,and always has been small,it nevertheless served the requirements ofthe extremely influential educated élite who, in the over-allview, were the agents of the eventual and almost complete assimilation of Western, modern technology into Japanese society.

But the technological achievement of Japan is n o w an accomplished fact and just as Japanese industry scarcely needs to import from the West technical methods, but is rapidly creating its own uniquely Japanese technology, so, in the same way, shingeki is seen by m a n y contemporary intellectuals,especially college students,as a borrowed technique, no longer necessary. A s one approach to this situation, w e see some film directors, like Akira Kurosawa, re-create a Western story in Japanese terms, as he did in his Castle of the Spider’s Web,a thoroughly Japanese Macbeth. Other artists seek to reinterpret familiar Japanese stories according to contemporary views. The M e n Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail (1940),also directed by Kurosawa, presented in the cinema a very human, unheroic interpretation of one of the great kabuki plays of feudal loyalty, The Subscription List (Kanjincho).

A masterpiece of the puppet drama, Chikamatsu’s Love Suicides at Sonezaki (1703)was stunningly reinterpreted only recently by the young director Masahiro Shinoda in af ilm of the same title. It explicitly showed the vulgarly physical love ofthe young couple,as Chikamatsu’s romantic play did not, and it commented on the theme of the couple’s wretched death, through sinister and wholly unconventional group movements of the black-robed stage assistants of kabuki and the puppet play.

The strongest reaction against shingeki has come, however, not from the traditionalists, as one might suspect, but from young theatre people w h o want to cast off unreservedly the trappings of Western literary drama. A

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~statement, almost a manifesto, by Kaitaro Tsuno takes u p most of the October 1969 issue of Concerned Theatre Japan. Tsuno writes, in part :

shingeki has become an historical entity. .. a ‘traditionof the new’. We do not see European drama as some golden fruit.. ..

W e are already tasting the rotten, discolored flesh of that fruit. Japan’s youngest playwrights maintain a small theatre group, and their dramatic adventures have continued in basement rooms, Buddhist temples, in coffeeshops, beneath elevated superhighways, and in crude tents set up in Shinto shrines. They repudiate the rules of orthodox dramaturgy, the proscenium stage which divides the theatre in two, and the technology of realism; they further reject spiritless audiences raked up out of m a m m o t h organizations.

Representative of the new playwright-actor-director Tsuno speaks for is Juro Kara, whose travelling Situation Theatre works out of a truck and performs almost anywhere-in small basement rooms and even in tents. The scathing and vehement improvisations of Shuichi Terajima’s Peanut Gallery troupe have created something of a sensation in both Japan and in Germany, where his group toured in 1967.

It m a y be more accurate to say these n e w theatre artists are not so m u c h specifically Japanese as they are part of the international theatre of the young w h o see a performance as a participatory experience, a communication enveloping actor and spectator (and hopefully eliminating the usual barriers between them), a direct social action, valued not for its ideological message per se, nor for its cognitive or rational statement about society, nor indeed for its beauty of form, but €or the momentary, but intensely real, h u m a n contact which, hopefully, can occur when the artificial conventions of theatre, Western or Asian, n o longer apply.

At the present, bugaku, noh, kabuki, puppet plays, shimpa,shingeki and theatre so young it has n o real n a m e coexist and are performed on the stages of Japan. Each c a m e into being to fulfil a newly felt need for dramatic

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expression by some segment of Japanese society,at some time in history, and thereby to clarify and express the new ideals of the audience drawn from those segments of society. The continuing existence of these half-dozen theatre forms (and others I have not mentioned) points to a pluralism of Japanese culture which I believe is not sufficiently recognized.

Part Three

Theatre, cinema and other mass media

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Introduction to

Part Three

Long ago, theatre in Western countries ceased to be based o n popular or mass acceptance, and its audience today consists, for the most part, of the urban, intellectual, relatively well-to-do.In contrast to radio, television and cinema, which truly have mass audiences, Western theatre is an art of the minority. But in most Asian countries, folk, popular and even classic theatre troupes perform to enormous audiences, and the theatrical art remains what it only once was in Europe and America-an art of wide popularity, a ‘mass media’. Although w e can only speak in the most general terms on a subject of such vast scope, before considering cinema in specific Asian countries, it m a y be helpful to compare some of the inherent differences between the mass media of theatre, cinema, radio and television.

Public and private media Because theatre and the motion picture are public media, they are in direct competition with each other for the financial support, loyalty and time of the audience. Often theatre and cinema buildings are side by side; their hours

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of performance tend to be the same. Both appeal to the person lout on the town’, who is seeking relaxation and diversion. And regardless of financial considerations, it seems undeniable that they w o o the allegiance of the spectator under similar psychological circumstances.

Radio and television,on the other hand, are private media in the sense that they are listened to or watched in the h o m e (or in small groups at a restaurant, club or other convenient public place). There is the possibility that constant radio or television listening will reduce the amount of theatre-going of a person, but the difference between the public and the private nature of the two reduces somewhat, at least,the possibility of direct competition for the audience’s time. A person can enjoy both, each at different times and under different circumstances.

In large metropolitan centres, such as Tokyo, Singapore, Bombay, Saigon or Bangkok, the competition of the motion picture is the greatest, and this decreases as one moves from provincial citiesand townsintothecountryside.

Films m a y never be seen in remote villages, and here the local theatre troupe flourishes,as yet with no competition for audience attention.

The consequences of technology The theatre can be called a ‘direct’means of mass communication:communication occurs as a single,indivisible act, with the audience responding directly to the live performance before them. The motion-pictureaudience is at %wo removes’: the film is first m a d e and then later projected at a totally different time and place. Radio and television audiences are at ‘three removes’ from the original performance: first a programme ia produced, then it is transmitted electronically, and third it is received on a radio or television set. The theatre-viewer needs only his eyes and ears; nothing special is required of him,The same is true of the cinema; it is the exhibitor w h o provides the rather simple technology of projector and screen.

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But the media of radio and television require the audience to furnish its o w n electronic receiving equipment in order to hear or see a programme. Radio sets are not inordinately expensive, yet in m a n y remote areas even the n e w transistor radios are not common. Television receivers are costly devices and few people can afford to buy them.

Only in Japan is there wide ownership by the public.

Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent in Asia, by governments and by private companies, building radio and television studios, often quite elaborate, and powerful transmitting equipment. Programmes are produced and transmitted, but the effect, especially with television, is less than anticipated because of lack of receiving sets.

Today (again excepting Japan), the television audience is mostly urban and mostly of the educated, upper-middle class.

Because the cinema and also television programmes can be so easily recorded, and then shipped to any destination in the world for transmission or projection, the possibility exists for enormously powerful cultural impact on the importing nations by the exporting nations. India, China and Japan, as the following articles so clearly show, each m a k e several hundred motion pictures each year; although foreign films enter these three Asian countries, their local production is so large as to offset the cultural influence of imported films.But other countries in Asia m a k e few films while at the same time they import hundreds each year not only from India, China and Japan, but from the West, most of these from the United States.

In the small Asian country, then, the cinema has a distinctly ‘foreign’ odour. T h e theatre, o n the other hand, is a very ‘national’medium, for the overwhelming majority of the tens of thousands of theatre troupes performing in Asia at the present time Bring to their audiences familiar stories from their o w n culture. T h e theatre genres which they stage are the unique products of the local culture and they reflect fundamental values and ideals of their culture. Except for the occasional brief trip of an Asian troupe to another country for cultural exchange, theatre

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performances are almost always designed for an audience sharing the s a m e background, language and religion as the troupe itself.

In the years to come, there will be a continuing exchange between the theatre, cinema, radio and television in Asian countries. W e must hope that the impact of modern technology will be beneficial and not harmful to live theatre, and that the cinema and the television will recognize the theatre as a unique and invaluable source of material for films and programmes which can genuinely express the national culture.

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Screen adaptations of Indian literature B.D.Garga

André Malraux has written: ‘Behind each artist stands the cathedral, the library and the museum. Behind each form is originally another form.. ..Every form is a conquest -a taking over, an incorporation,a further developmentof another previously existing form, whose traces it bears.’

Indisputably, behind cinema, stands literature whose traces (or, are they scars?) it bears since its inception. No sooner do w e ponder over their specific properties than differentiating characteristics of the film and the literature begin to emerge in sharp focus. George Bluestone, in his admirable book Novels into Films avers that ‘where the moving picture comes to us directly through perceptions, language must be filtered through the screen of conceptual apprehension. And the conceptual process, though allied to and often taking its point of departure from the percept, represents a different m o d e of experience, a different w a y of apprehending the universe’. Virginia Woolf, contrasting the novel and film, as early as in 1926 arrived at the remarkably perceptive conclusion that ‘eye and brain are torn asunder ruthlessly as they try vainly to work in couples’,1 and added that 1. In ‘Movies and Reality’, New Republic.

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the results of conversion from linguistic visual images are disastrous to both. The difference is too great to overcome.

More recently,Ingmar Bergman declared:‘Filmhas nothing to do with literature;the character and substance of the two art forms are usually in conflict.’ Incompatible though they are by the very nature of their particular properties,yet a relationship has existed between the two from the time that Sarah Bernhardt lent her prestige to the first-everfeature film,Queen Elizabeth, in 1911. Since then, Kalidasa, Shakespeare, Goethe, Molière, Maupassant, Tagore, Tolstoy, all have been grist to the film mill.

The very first Indian film, Raja Harishohandia, made in 1913,was based on a story from Pauranic or Indian mythological literature.Then came films based on the epics -the Ramayana and Mahabharata.Both the Pauranic and the Epic literature are known throughout the length and breadth of India,from the rich m a n living in his mansion to the poor peasant in his hovel. During the silent days, it helped a great deal to re-createon the screen storiesthat were widely known to the people.There was anotherreason too, though a latent one: this celebration of India’s glorious past was an implied criticism of the alien power that ruled India, and which has brought so much misery to its people.

Besides, the Indian has always felt close to and fascinated by his mythology. A little while ago when someone asked Satyajit R a y if he really wanted to film the Mahabharata,the distinguished film-makerreplied :‘Yes, I do . ..it is a theme that endures, a theme of war and peace, tyranny and struggle. Also it is worth while to look at one’s roots.’

F r o m the classic age of Sanskrit drama some sixteen centuries ago to the present times, poets, playwrights, sculptors and film-makershave looked at these roots with growing fascination and drawn sustenance from them.

More important,the epics have set the ethical and social mores of a whole nation. Yet these are no religious books in the sense that the Bible and the Koran are. M u c h less are they the preserves of the priest and the brahmin. The

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wandering minstrels sing them in village squares to large, avid crowds w h o have heard them umpteen times before.

The first decade of the Indian cinema was almost entirely given over to mythological stories from the two epics. As well as their perennial popularity, the Indian film-makerwas quick to discover an inexhaustible mine of dramatic material in the epics that could be adapted to suit any audience. For instance, in the heyday of the serial (‘To be continued next week’) when The Perils of Pauline helped Hollywood make its millions, the Indian film-makertoo followed suit-although on his o w n terms.

H e discovered enough action, the keynote of the serial, in the epics, particularly the Ramayana.

With the advent of sound, cinema became even more dependent on literature-the novel and theplay,particularly the latter. Playwrights from the theatre moved into film studios and grafted new, even alien features to an essentially visual art. Here w e moved back into what René Clair called the ‘canned theatre’. One result was the loss of cinematic style, and another, the remarkable narrative fluidity acquired during the final era of silent movies. Be that as it may, literature was in complete control of the cinema. This in a way gave it a certain sense of respectability.After all, to the bulk of the intelligentsia, w h o were never quite convinced of the validity of film as an art, Shakespeare or Molière were any day preferable to the acrobatics of Miss Pearl White.

In India well-known stage writers were hired to write for films. In the first flush of ‘talkies’, as if drunk with the discovery of its own voice, the mute shadow hardly ever stopped talking. The language that poured forth was florid, rhetorical. The modern Indian theatre stemmed directly from the West nearly a century and half ago. The merchants of the East India Company and officials of the British Crown brought the contemporary European theatre with them and held it as a model before the educated Indian audience. As the Bengali film critic Chidananda Dasgupta says :‘WhenRaja R a m Mohan R o y and other Sanskrit scholars paved the way for education,

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the education they fought for was a Western education in the humanities and the sciences. The nineteenthcentury Bengali was exhorted by his leaders of thought to speak in English, think in English, dream in English.’

Not surprising then that much of what was being written at the time was deeply influenced by European writing.Agha Hashar Kashmiri, who in the early days of ‘talkies’was the most sought-afterplaywright (almost all his plays were made into successful films) adapted Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice into Di1 Farosh, Measure for Measure into Shaheed-E-Nar and King Leur into Safed Khoon. Similarly, Tolstoy’s Resurrection, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and Hernani and several other Western classics were adapted for the Indian screen.

Gradually, the film-makers turned their attention to popular literary figures like Bankim Chandra Chatterji, Sarat Chandra Chatterji and Munshi Premchand. But in most cases, the writers were not active participants.

Premchand, though, worked for a brief while with a Bombay film company but found the process so frustrating that he never once gave it a serious thought. It was only after his death that some of his novels were filmed. During his lifetime not m a n y of Rabindranath Tagore’s novels or stories were adapted for the screen. This was partly due to the poet’s reluctance to allow his works to be filmed, and partly also because unlike some other writers, Tagore did not easily lend himself to screen adaptation,his work is less inhibited and full of fine shades and subtle nuances.

It puts a premium on the film-maker’sintellect and imagination.

Bengali films have always enjoyed a certain reputation for the high level of their content. As now, so in the thirties, soon after the advent of sound, the N e w Theatre Group of directors-Devaki Bose (Sapera,based on a novel

by Kazi Nazurul Islam), P. C. Barua (Devdas, Manzil, both Sarat Chandra Chatterji’s novels), Phani Mazumdar (KapalKundala, adapted from a novel by Bankim Chandra Chatterji) and Kartik Chandra Chatterji (ChhotaBhai, a novel by Sarat Chandra Chatterji)-made films ofnovels

Screen adaptations of Indian literature

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and stories widely k n o w n in Bengal. Their popularity thus was well-assured.These films were not particularly marked by any brilliance of adaptation. While they retained m u c h of the rich,emotional content of the original material, they also packed them with predictable dicht% and popular music. P.C. Barua’s films,however, were a happy exception. A m a n of cultivated taste and familiar with Western film-making trends and technique,Barua, in his film,gave off sparks of pure cinema. E v e n his very first film, Devdas (1935), created something of a sensation w h e n first released. It was a simple love story of a tradition-bound boy and his childhood playmate w h o could not marry owing to sharp class distinctions in the rigid social structure. It was far from a faithful rendering of the original. H e cut out what was unessential to his purpose. H e retained what he felt would enhance the story’s emotional impact. Yet in spirit, his fidelity to the original was unquestioned.

His film Mukti remains one of the earliest significant screen adaptations of a novel. Barua drew freely upon Sarat Chandra’s vast storehouse of emotional riches, and to what he drew he added something of his own-that something which distinguishes an original work from a mere faithful rendering.

During the last decade and earlier, several of Tagore’s novels and short stories have been adapted for the screen. Tapan Sinha, a Bengali film-maker of considerable talent, has particularly specialized in Tagore.

It m a y justly be said that Sinha’s creative inspiration is derived mostly from Tagore’s stories. His first Tagore film Kabuliwallu-the story of a n Afghan street vendor whose nostalgia for his homeland and his daughter are immensely aroused by a small Indian girl-proved popular. But the critics severely attacked it for its tearjerking treatment. Clearly the film-maker had his better is next film,Kshuditu eye fixed on the box-office. H Pashun (Hungry Stones). also a Tagore story, though a distinct improvement on his previous one, still did not satisfy the more discerning critics. It was, however, with

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Atithi (shown at the Venice Film Festival) that Tapan Sinha finally gained acceptance.

Based on one of Tagore’s early short stories, it tells of a boy still in his teens,whose fascination with the sights and sounds of the world draws him out of the narrow confines of his village. In his wanderlust, he comes across all kinds of people, acrobats, wandering minstrels, rich people w h o have built their own kinds of shells for themselves. Nothing can hold the boy for too long and he moves on propelled by some inner compulsion. Admittedly, the film-maker was only translating what the writer had already observed and felt. And,if it is true that reality is not a fixed, unalterable entity and it undergoes a metamorphosis in the very process of shifting it from the printed page to the animated image, then the film failed to add any new dimension of understanding. It tried to recreate a reality which had ceased to exist.

But perhaps the whole process is frustrating from the very start. It seems like an unseemly alliance-between literature and cinema.But n o w and then a m a n does come up w h o with his o w n power of perception and creative splendour turns a literary masterpiece into a cinematic masterpiece. This happened when Satyajit R a y came up with his widely known film of Bibhuti Bhushan Bannerji’s Puther Punchuli. Ray’s interest in the book was sparked off when he was asked to provide illustrations for a new edition. (Perhaps I m a y mention that before coming over to films, R a y was an art director with an advertising company.) It was while doing this that he was struck by the filmic quality of some of its episodes. R a y said: ‘Ichose Puther Punchuli for the qualities that made it a great book: its humanism, its lyricism, and its ring of truth. I knew I would have to do a lot of pruning and reshaping. ..but at the same time I felt that to cast the thing into a mould of cut and dried narrative would be wrong. The script had to retain some of the rambling quality of the novel, because that in itself contained a clue to the feel of authenticity-;life in a poor Bengali village does ramble.’

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Bred in the city, R a y w a s enchanted by the n e w flavour and texture of rural life. H e said: ‘It m a d e you want to observe and probe, to catch revealing details, the telling gestures, the particular terms of speech. You wanted to fathom the mysteries of “atmosphere”. Does it consist in the sight, or in the sounds? How to catch the subtle difference between d a w n and dusk, or convey the grey humid stillness that precedes the first monsoon shower?’

T h e magic of Puther Punchuli lies precisely in the exploration of these details.

R a y has also m a d e films from Tagore’s storiessignificantly Three Daughters and Churudata. These are films which have given us n e w insight into life and h u m a n frailty. A s often happens in the case of a creative artist, it is not the whole book, every situation, each character, which sparks off his interest or fires his imagination. It can be just a single statement or one revelation. H e m a y use this revelation as the core of his work, discarding the rest or moulding it according to his lights.

Ingmar Bergman says that &the irrational dimension of a literary work, the germ of its existence, is often untranslatable into visual terms, and it in turn destroys the special irrational dimension of the film. If, despite this, w e wish to translate something literary into film terms, w e must m a k e a n infinite n u m b e r of complicated adjustments. . .’.

It is over the hero, precisely, that the writer gets incensed. And understandably enough, he m a y accuse the film-maker of ‘butchering’ his work, doing a w a y with its profundity and making a hash of a literary masterpiece.

Margaret Kennedy in her essay The Mechanized Muse contends: ‘In a great work of art, nothing is irrelevant.

To cut any part of it is to damage the whole. In a great work of art the m e d i u m is so wedded to the subject that it becomes impossible to think of t h e m apart. To take the “writing” out of a great novel is to run a risk of emptying out the baby with the bath.’ T h e situation, she suggested, could be remedied by allowing the writer to have greater control over his material.

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In India, during the past two decades or so, prominent literary writers have actively associated themselves with film-making. In Bengal, Tarashankar B a n nerji, Banaphool ; in Bombay, Krishan Chander, Saadat Hasan Manto, K h w a j a A h m a d Abbas, Rajinder Singh Bedi and poets of renown like Ali Sardar Jafri, Kaifi Azmi, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Sahir Ludhianvi; and in the south, R. K. Narayan, Takhazi Sivashankar Pillai. All these writers and poets m a d e a m a r k on the literary scene before they lent their prestige to cinema. Khwaja A h m a d Abbas has been filming his o w n literary works for the past several years. While his films have a definite social Significance, their cinematic structure has always been somewhat shaky. T h e phenomenon of writers producing and directing their o w n work, in order to preserve its purity and authenticity,is something n e w in the Indian cinema.

Whether it would lead to legitimate cinematic creations is yet to be seen.

In the West, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Arthur Miller, Jean-Paul Sartre and Andre Malraux have all exerted considerable control over screen adaptations of their literary works. And yet, paradoxically enough, none of it resulted in memorable movies.

W h e r e lies the malaise?

In Europe and America, there is a growing movement to alienate cinema from literature. It was François Truffaut, who, after seeing A n d God Created Women, declared that ‘filmstoday no longer need to tell a story-it is enough that they tell of a first love, that they take place on a beach, etc.’. Although Truffaut has since changed his position (‘I find myself longing to see a film with a well-told story’) the idea has caught on. As a result w e have the ‘nouveau cinéma’, the underground movies, movies of ‘pure form’ and ‘pure feeling’. An American critic, Pauline Kael, feels that as a result of what she calls ‘creeping Marienbadism’, movies are going to pieces and she chides the art-house audience for accepting ‘lack of clarity as complexity; clumsiness and confusion as style’.

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A t the other end of the spectrum is the underground film-maker. Jonas Mokas believes that ‘as long as the lucidly minded critics will stay out, with all their “form”, “content”, “art”, ‘‘structure”, “clarity”, “imp~rtance’~, -everything w ill be all right’.

It is an interesting debate and its echoes have reached India too. But by and large the Indian film is purely narrative, depending on well-moulded characters, plot and situations :hence it leans heavily upon literature.

Ostensibly, one can dispute the slavish dependence of cinema on literature, and with good and sound reasons too. Because if cinema has to stand apart as an individual art with its o w n syntax, grammar and tools of expression, necessarily it must untie itself from the apron-strings of literature.

Ritwik Ghatak, the well-known Bengali film director, laments the fact that, ‘the relationship between the cinema and the novel has n o w become a two-way affair.

Literature is cramming in all kinds of cinema clichés and stock situations which authors think will endear t h e m to film producers. And films are based on such stuff, thereby giving a further fillip to such writing. T h e result: the growth of banality and vulgarity in literature and cinema’.

Whether or not literature is on the decline is a moot point. But curiously enough, despite the film-makers’ growing aversion to literature, each year m a n y of the more significant films are based o n literary works.

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The role of the cinema and radio inthe preservation and development of Ceylonese theatre Milena Salvini

From the moment of its first appearance, the cinema was well received by the Ceylonese people. The first important films (produced after independence) were based directly on the Indian cinema and the nurtiya: a form of variety performance the popularity of which was to decline with and in proportion to the progress made in the cinematographic arts. The piecemeal development of the Ceylonese theatre, characterized by the merging of so m a n y styles, so m a n y returns to its origins, and so m a n y experiments due to foreign influences, permitted (since it was not rooted in thousand-year-oldtraditions and structures) revolutionaryforms of expressionlike the cinema to branch out freely and even to combine with it.

Today, the development of the cinema is going hand in hand with that of the modern theatre. They are complementary to one another in the sense that,as censorship applies only to the screen,the theatre allows more freedom to deal with h u m a n and psychological themes. It could almost be said that there is an exchange of influences between the cinema and the theatre. European films have lent their realism to the modern Ceylonese theatre, while the ancient forms find their prolongation, through the btructure or choice of literary themes, in the cinema. The

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Ceylonese cinema also draws inspiration from the ancient religious and folklore sources. However that m a y be, the cinematographic art has given the theatre a n e w lease of life and certain dramatic works are sometimes happily transposed into films, as for example the Marriage of Figaro,which was adapted to the screen in the context of the Ceylonese community. Inreeent years numerous documentary and experimental films have been produced by students, w h o are as active in this regard as in the dance and the theatre. With the exception of a few producers, like J. L. Peries,whose work is distinguished by its originality,the majority of films bear the stamp of the Indian cinema, although n o w a very clear bid to escape towards a more purely Ceylonese form of expression can be observed. The Department of Information is supporting the production of documentary films which will gradually form the national archives. A National Film Institute is being set up. AU other aspects of cinematographic production are backed by privatc companies.

As regards education and information,the radio has maintained a continuous effort over the last thirty years.

Its activitieswere particularly effectiveinthepreservation and renaissanceofthe traditionalCeylonese folklore music, more particularly from the kolam and nadagama. Its collection ofancient music, patiently assembled,is n o w the richestexisting in Ceylon.Programmes especially composed for educational purposes enabled a number of talented musicians to createnew stylesdrawn from IndianandEuropean sourceS.TheinfluenceofHindustanimusic(introduced hy the Parsi Theatre) gave rise to interesting experiments using the vannama after the manner of the Indian ragas.

Work by the radio concerning the theatre has been no less important.The exploration of folklore sources has made it possible to rediscover a whole repertory of histories and legends which were readapted to the broadcasting style. The large number of theatre broadcasts n o w enables numerous authors to make a regular contribution.

The work of dividing up the programmes is done in the various divisions which appeal to : schoolchildren, the

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middle class, the rural areas, the intellectual ĂŠlite, and others. T h e works are chosen and distributed in such a w a y as to satisfy each particular group of listeners. A considerable amount of research on the nadagama is being carried out at present.

T h e development in Ceylonese performing arts which has taken place since the beginning of the century shows an increasing interest in Western culture. This interest is clearly more marked in Ceylon than in India and Indonesia where the influence ofEurope is more apparent in the use of its technicalfacilitiesthan in the assimilation ofits thought.

T h e enthusiasm of the younger generation in Ceylon for European literature and theatre coincides with the expansion of art education and the coming of the cinema.

This movement assumed substantial proportions after independence, from 1947 onwards. T h e introduction of music and dance in the school curriculum helped to revive the performing arts. Renewed activity followed with which the Department of Education is directly associated through the organization of annual competitions between the various institutions. But the inhence of Western music and theatre has not smothered the deep currents of Ceylonese thought whose development can be followed from the ritual theatreup to the rebirth ofthe nadagamain 1956.

Since 1952 the main art activities have been administered by the Art Council of Ceylon. Divided into different sections covering dance, Oriental and European music, theatre, painting, sculpture, cinema, its function is to supervise the diffusion of culture and the harmonious development of its different branches at regional levels.

Its action extends both to contemporary research and to the promotion of the handicraft arts.

Today it is possible to distinguish clearly through the various trends arriving from India and Europe a movement to form a classic art combining the dance, the theatre and music in a single national expression.

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The Japanese film industry Jean de Baroncelli

T h e Japanese film industry, which was brought to a complete halt in 1945, started again in 1946 under the control of the occupation authorities. T h e first productions were extremely mediocre, but the public, with nothing else in the w a y of entertainment, rushed to the newly rebuilt cinemas.

However, it was only from 1950 onwards that the Golden A g e began for Japanese films-that is, for the Big Five companies that dominated the scene (Nikkateu, Shochiku, Toho, Daiei and Toei). Thanks in part to the ‘economic miracle’, production rose from 215 films in 1950 to 302 in 1953, then to 514 in 1956 and 547 in 1960. At the same time, attendances rocketed (718 million spectators in 1950,1,127 million in 1958), with a fantastic increase in the number of cinemas (2,641 in 1950, 7,072 in 1958).

F r o m 1959, attendances began to fall as fast as they had risen (1,127 million spectators in 1959,360 million in 1965, 345 million in 1966) and,under conditions to be examined later, production likewise collapsed (265 films in 1966).

Today, the Big Five are colossi with feet of clay.

Three of them have for some years past been running at a loss and o w e their survival purely to income from sources other than iilms.

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In Japan, as elsewhere, while sport (particularly baseball, which draws huge crowds) and the motor-car exodus in the evenings have done much to bring down attendances, enemy number one is television.

Television, whose beginnings in Japan go back to 1953, has experienced an extraordinary boom. In 1968 it was reckoned that by the end of the year there would be a set in 90 per cent of Japanese homes, that is, about 22 million. In Tokyo, viewers have a choice of seven channels,whose programmes begin very early in the morning and sometimes go on until after midnight. Four of these channels broadcast programmes in colour, generally concerned with sport, music-hall shows or traditional plays. Note that the television news-reel broadcast at 7 p.m. by NHK1 is also in colour.

It is estimated that at peak viewing hours, for example the Saturday evening music-hall show from NHK,21 million Japanese are to be found in front of their sets. On Sunday, average viewing time is said to be over eight hours.

Economic factors That economic factors have contributed to the decline is true enough, but it is open to question whether the big companies have in every case taken proper action to cope with the situation.

1. NHK (Nippon Hoso Kyokai, the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation) controls a television channel of so-called ‘general programmes’ and another of ‘educationalprogrammes’. NHK is a public corporation, neither governmental nor commercial, with statutes laid d o w n by law. T h e two NHK channels cover h o s t 95 per cent of Japanese territory. T h e corporation is financed b y means of a tax of 330 yen (U.S.$l = 360 yen) paid b y viewers per month and per home, whatever the number of sets. T h e other five channels are privately owned. In 1965, the television advertising budget totalled approximately 100 million yen.

Since 1958,production costs have increasedby 20per cent. A film in black and white n o w costs $150,000 to $200,000.1Of that sum, 45 per cent is swallowed up in overheads, with only 30 per cent for the actors and the director. At the beginning of the crisis,the big companies, rather than reduce these astronomical overheads, preferred to amortize them by speeding up production. The result of this was the inflation of 1960 and 1961 (more than 500 films), an inflation all the more absurd in that it took place to the detriment of quality and brought the public more quickly to saturation point.

The brake was applied in 1962 (375 films). In the meantime the price of tickets had shot up, box-office takings continued to increase for a few months, reaching their peak in 1963 with 77,000million yen. But this was no more than a last flicker. The battle of costs, as the big companies went into it, was bound to be lost.

The point

of view of young directors

For most critics and young directors the crisis cannot be overcome either by the star system or by co-production.

In their opinion, the Japanese film industry is at present in the trough of the wave. The Golden Age has gone and gone for ever. To a certain extent, this is an excellent

thing. ‘There is no crisis of the Japanese film industry; there is a crisis for the big companies, which is a very different matter’, I was told by Kirio Urayama, the director of Cupola,w h o is connected with Nikkatsu. ‘The big companies have been unable to adapt themselves to the n e w situation,they are crushed under the weight of their enormous administrative machinery, both financially and in the choice of subjects. Their brains trusts are, in fact, 1. Roshomon, which was made, it is true, in 1950, before the economic boom and devaluation, cost only 15 million yen, that is, $42,000.

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working for a public standard of which they have a false idea. Tastes have changed in ten years. T h e young no longer enjoy lachrymose stories of heroes chained to their fate. W h a t they want are films which reflect their problems, their preoccupations, a certain n e w approach to life, etc.’ To keep its public loyal in the face of competition from foreign films and, whenever possible, to gain a foothold in foreign markets, the Japanese film industry should therefore,in the opinion of U r a y a m a and his friends,break with existing methods of production and, as far as ideas are concerned, stick closer to real conditions in Japan.

That risk is considerable, for it is not enough to m a k e a film;it then has to be distributed. Yet it is the Big Five which run almost all the distribution circuits, and that means that w h e n anyone wants to get back the m o n e y he has invested, he i5 then at their mercy.

The difficulty of being Japanese If the young directors are so anxious to be independent, that is because they are convinced that they have something n e w to say. Whatever their admiration for Mizoguchi, O z u and Kurosawa, they have no intention of following in their footsteps. There can be n o question for them of making jidai geki,l nor are they tempted to yield to the fashion for the melodramas and adventures which are making the fortune of some of their colleagues. W h a t they want is to express in their o w n w a y some of the problems which haunt them, and all of which are concerned, morally as well as intellectually and artistically, with the difficulty of being Japanese nowadays.

T h e generation to which they belong was on the threshold of adolescence on that 15 August 1945 when 1. Ji&;

geki are historical films set in the distant past, whereas gendai geki are modern films. Nowadays, jid0i account for hardly 15 per cent of Japanese production.

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their parents, rigid with respect and stupefaction, learned from the emperor’s o w n lips of the capitulation of Japan.

W h a t that capitulation signified for Japan went far beyond the humiliation of military defeat. A whole world collapsed, an age-old world whose deep-lying structures had not been affected b y Western influences despite the reforms of the Meiji period. In a few months, what had been the political, social, moral, family and religious structure of Japan was swept away.

T h e consequences of the shock are still being felt; for although in the last twenty years it has turned its back on m a n y of its rites and myths, although it has passionately Westernized itself, the old Japan is not for that reason dead. Not only have the Japanese not forgotten that they are Japanese but, under the influence of the foreign ‘implant’, they have become aware of what might be called their ‘specificity’. It follows that their problem is not to choose between tradition and modernism, but rather to fit into the contemporary world while remaining faithful to a certain manner of thinking, feeling, acting and reacting that is peculiar to them.

Such is the many-sided problem which constitutes the deep-lying theme of films by the young directors. T h e height of their ambition is to put on record a historical evolution and at the same time a n unchanging spiritual presence. As one of them told me: ‘ W e belong neither to our o w n past nor to the present of others. That is w h y w e want, through the cinema,to define ourselves as Japanese of today.’

A serious feeling of disquiet T h e rebirth of the Japanese film industry seems to belong to the still-distant future, and the most that can be said of its present situation is that it continues to be most alarming. T h e last few years have been disastrous from every point of view: the quantity of films produced; their quality; box-office takings (foreign íXms have brought in 10 per cent more than national ones).

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Perhaps more symptomatic than these figures is the silence to which three such men as Masaki Kobayashi, K o n Ichikawa and Akira Kurosawa have been condemned.

T h e first was completely ruined by his Kaidan, and there is little likelihood of his returning to films. In spite of the prodigious success of his Tokyo Olympic Games (seen by one-fifth of the population of Japan), the second has been unable to find any more suitable work. T h e third has left for the United States, and w h e n a film-maker of the class of Kurosawa decides to m a k e films outside his o w n country, the explanation is that the m o o d prevailing in that country is one of serious disquiet.

T h e ‘freelances’, as they are called in Japan, include film-makersof genuine talent, such as Satsuo Y a m a m o t o (whose film The Great White Tower was judged by the Critics Association the best film of 1966); Nagisa Oshima (35 years old, with seven films to his credit, possessor of a vigorous personality which is particularly noticeable in Cruel Youth, The Catch and Violence at Noon, his last production); Kosaburo Yoshimura (who m a d e The Chain of Heart, which was eighth in the critics’ choice) ;Yoshishige Yoshida (director of the highly estimable Story Written on Water).

To these directors must naturally be added Teshigawara, w h o m a d e The W o m a n of the Dunes; Kaneto Shindo; S u s u m u Hani; and Shohei Imamura. All have fought, or are still fighting, for that freedom to create, failing which the Japanese film industry is liable to limit its production more and more-as has happened in recent years-to films about gangsters or hooligans, melodramas for women, or tales of monsters like Godzilla, or else ‘eroproductions’.

Cinemagoers will, of course, have to support these freelances. According to some observers, the first signs of a change of taste on the part of the better-informed-and the younger and more exacting-public have begun to appear. W e can only rejoice, because in Japan as elsewhere, while it sometimes makes mistakes, it is none the less the public that is always right.

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Appendix: Literary works as a source of inspiration for Japanese films A very large number of Japanese U m s are inspired by national or foreign, classical or modern, literature.By w a y of example, mention might be made of Akira Kurosawa’s adaptations for the screen of Dostoevski’s The Idiot, Gorki’s The Lower Depths and Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In all these films Kuroaawa adapted the original masterpiece in such a w a y a5 to fit it into a Japanese context. The borrowings from Western literature are, however, exceptional and in most cases the director of Rashomon (adapted from a novel b y Ryunosuke Akutagawa) has drawn upon the literature of his o w n country. The same applies to Kenichi Mizoguchi, most of whose masterpieces (Ugetsu Monogatari, Sansho the Bailif, A Tale of Chikmnatsu, New Tales of the Taira Clan,etc.) are adapted from literature.This fidelity to a literary work is particularly commendable in the case of Hiroshi Teshigawara,whose three 6lms The Pigall,The W o m a n of the Dunes and Face of Another were takenfromthenovels ofKoboAbe,theauthor collaborating closely in each instancewith thedirector in writing the scenario.

T o quote another example of the effect on one another of literature and ams,the Nobel Prize winner for literature, Yasunari Kawabata, has had most of his works adapted for the screen. For instance, The Dancer of Izu was filmed in three different versions (the best-known being that of Heinosuke Gosho in 1933), and more recently The Snow Country, Story of Three Sisters, One Thousand Cranes, and Of the Sun and the Moon have been turned into films.Another Japanese writer, Junichiro Tanizaki, has frequently inspired Japanese directors, and for that matter was personally connected with flms in the silent days, making several of them himself. Ka$, by Kon Ichikawa, is taken from one of his books. M a n y others could be added to these names, such as Yukio Mishima, whose novels The Conflagration and Longing for Love have been adapted in turn by Ichikawa and Kurahara respectively, and w h o has himself produced, made and acted in a film called Yukoku (The Ritual of Love and Death). Or again, Tsutomu Minakami and Yasushi houe, to mention only the most celebrated of these writers.

The plastic arts have always exercised a predominant influence on the cinema in Japan. For m a n y Japanese,

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paintings on rolls, as they already existed a thousand years ago, were precursors of cinematographic art. Pictorial references are legion in the films of Mizoguchi, as in those of Kurosawa and Teshigawara. Ozu insists on all art objects shown in his films being genuine, and Mizoguchi always called upon specialists to design the costumes for his historical films or to reconstruct any ritual ceremonies which might occur in them. Much the same care can be found in Kobayashi, Yoshimura, Gosh0 and Naruse.

The film-makersof the new generation obviously have other things to think about. Most of them deliberately neglect these formal traditions, not only because their elders have been influenced by the West, but also and principally, because their attention is taken up by the defects of the modern world. In the case of directors like Nagisa Oshima (Night and Fog in Japan, Violence at Noon, A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Songs,Death.by Hanging, Diary of a Shinjuku Thief), Shinsuke Ogawa (The Japanese Liberation Front), Shohei Imamura (Pigs and Warships, The Insect Woman, Unholy Desire, The Pornographer, The Profound Desire of the Gods), Tadashi Imai (WeAre Born, But. .., Story of Echigo), the substance is more important than the form, and the tendency of their films is towards a violent denunciation of society.

All, however, are aware that they are Japanese and that it is by following their own ways, which continue to be secretly linked to an age-old culture, that they must conduct their revolt.

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Japanese film exhibits abroad Kashiko Kawakita

As one means of promoting export of films, and greater understandingof them, the Japanese Film Producers Association has sponsored,with the assistance of the Ministry of Trade, film fairs and film exhibits in various foreign countries since 1956. In addition, Unijapan Film and the Japan Film Library Council have begun retrospective package shows and collections of individual works which are non-commercial.

In 1957 fifteen films were shown during a one-week period by the British Film Institute in London. T h e films were : Rashomon (Kurosawa), Ugetsu Monogatari (Mizoguchi), A Tale of Chikamatsu (Mizoguchi), The Gate of Hell (Kinugasa), The Vild Goose (Toyoda), Tokyo Story (Ozu), The Lower Depths (Kurosawa), The Throne of Blood (Kurosawa), You Were Like a Daisy (Kinoshita), Ikiru (Kurosawa), Four Chimneys (Gosho),Seven Samurai (Kurosawa), Darkness at D a w n (Imai), Burmese Harp (Ichikawa) and Rice (Imai). T h e event had a strong impact, for m a n y in the audience had only seen one or t w o Japanese films before this. At this time Mizoguchi (who had already passed away), 1. This article is condensed from a report given by Mrs. Kawakita at the Round Table on Cinema, held in Frankfurt am Main.

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Kinugasa and Kurosawa were well known,but Ozu, Imai, Toyoda, Gosho, Ichikawa and Kinoshita were quite unknown outside Japan.

Ozu particularly was a revelation. In Japan he had been considered a great master since the silent era. But his style and attitude of film-making were considered too ‘Japanese’for foreign audiences. It was Lindsay Anderson, critic, w h o acknowledged Ozu one of the greatest of all film directors. Ozu was awarded the first South-land Cup and the Japanese leamed the lesson that only true nationality has internationality.

In 1963 the Cinémathèque Française held a grand showing of 150 Japanese films selected by the Japan Film Library Council. Eleven of these were Ozu films shown for the first time in Paris, and again they caused a sensation. A young film critic said: ‘The works of Kurosawa and Mizoguchi m a y be forgotten, but never Ozu’s.’ But in spite of the enthusiasm for Ozu, his films are seldom seen in Europe, even in art houses.

In 1966 the Japan Film Library Council organized a K o n Ichikawa retrospective at the National Film Theatre in London,consisting of: Mr.Poo,The Millionaire, The M e n of the North, The Heart, Outcast, Burmese Harp, Fire Over the Plain, The Conjagration, The Strange Obsession, The Punishment Room, A n Actor’s Revenge and Tokyo Olympics. People admired the versatility of Ichikawa. They particularly loved An Actor’s Revenge, being seen for the first time in Europe. Ichikawa used dazzling colour in depicting the drama of a kabuki female impersonator,played brilliantly by Kazuo Hasegawa. Daiei,the producing company which made the film, had thought it too special for the foreign market and had not tried to show it abroad. Being a successin London,this programme was then shown in Paris,Stockholm,N e w York, Warsaw, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Brussels, MOSCOW, East Berlin, Sydney, Melbourne, Bergamo, Rome, Lausanne and San Francisco.

A programme of young directors’works was organized in 1968 by the Japan Film Library Council. It con-

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s h e d of Cruel Youth (Oshima), The Graveyard of the Sun (Oshima), The Catch (Oshima), The W o m a n Killer and the Hell of Oil (Horikawa), Chronicle of Love and Death (Kurahara), Hiroshima (Mori), The Giant and a Toy (Masumura), The Islands of Japan (Kumai), She and He (Hani) and The Pitj'all (Teshigawara). With some variations, it was shown in Warsaw (1968), and later in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Brussels, Moscow, Stockholm, Paris, London, Rome, Lausanne and in Australia. This showing helped make Oshima known as a young champion of the Japanese film.His recent films Death by Hanging, Diary of a Shinjuku Thief,and The Boy (shown at Cannes, Venice, N e w York and London in 1968-69) caused quite a sensation. Oshima was nominated by the British Film Institute as the film-maker w h o contributed most to cinema art during 1969.

In February 1969, 'The Seventh Cinema W e e k of Poitiers' exhibited thirty-two Japanese films,the first large-scaleshowing of Japanese films held outside capital cities. This successful showing included works by all the major directors (Ozu, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, Ichikawa, Toyoda) and new directors, such as Oshima, as well. In August, eleven films were presented at the Avignon Festival as Young Japanese Film Week. One of them was so new (Yoshida's Eros Plus Massacre) it had not yet been released in Japan. Young f ilm critics of Cahiers du CinĂŠma, L'Express, Paris Match, Nouvel Observateur, Positq, etc., interviewed for hours and days three ofthe young directors w h o attended (Oshima,Shinoda,and Yoshida). They succeeded in building a bridge of understanding, not only for theiro w n films,but also fortheir attitude towardlife,people and society.It is characteristic ofthese young film-makers that they are independent of the major companies. They used to belong to one of the five major production companies, but either left or were sacked.

The year 1970 was an important one for Japanese films abroad. In February, the National Film Theatre in London began a showing of the complete works of Kurosawa,twenty-twofilms,the first time such an eventhasbeen

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held in any country, including Japan. T h e M u s e u m of Modern Art in N e w Y o r k staged a retrospectiveof Japanese cinema consisting of 120 films,mostly with English subtitles. Organized by Donald Richie, an expert on Japanese film, this was the first retrospective showing in the United States of America. A showing of ninety Japanese films (with English and French subtitles) was organized at Sir George William’s University in Montreal.

These manifestations of Japanese culture will help promote the export of Japanese films,but perhaps more important, they w ill promote interest in Japanese people and society.

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The Chinese cinema Jean de Baroncelli

T h e cinema is under the sway of politics. An ideological ‘Great Wall’ separates the Chinese of Communist China from those of H o n g Kong, the Republic of China and Singapore. Very few films are produced now in C o m m u nist China; in the other countries m a n y films are produced, but they are stereotyped and lacking in artistic and cultural interest. T h e standard reached in either case is very poor, either because of the sectarianism of the leaders or because the aim of the economic system is the determined pursuit of commercial gain. T h e causes are quite different, but the result is the same: so far, the cinema is still remote from the enormously rich culture of China.

The People’s Republic of China Before the cultural revolution, about 100 films a year were produced in the People’s Republic of China. M a n y of these films were based on battles fought by the R e d Army against Chiang Kai-shek’stroops. Others were about figures from history w h o had taken part in the anticolonial wars, such as the famous Lin Tse-hu, the hero of the opium war. T h e public, moreover, never tired of

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applauding the many adaptations from classical or modern operas, typically Chinese spectacles,the best examples of which, in our view, were Loves of Liang Shan-po and Chu Ying-tai,the latter shown in Paris in 1962.

The cultural revolution put a sudden stop to the production of such films. The films produced before 1966 were strongly criticized, as were theatre performances, on the grounds that they depicted the past in too favourable a light or that traces of revisionism were discovered in them.Their projection in national territory and their distribution in the countries of South-East Asia, where they were often well received and successful, were consequently very soon prohibited. Madame Chiang-ching, the wife of Chairman Mao, was made responsible for subsequent film productions.

Little is known about these new films, but so far they appear to include nothing but purely ideological works, official documentaries and film versions of opera and ballets arranged (or rearranged) to accord with the modern taste. A m o n g these w e m a y mention The Red East, a ballet in which classical choreography is allied to daringly modernized Chinese music; The Red Lantern, an opera in which the piano, long held to be a ‘reactionary’ instrument, regained its proletarian qualities ; The Girl with White Hair, a remake of a famous opera which had already been screened in 1950 by W a n g Pin and Shui H u a ; and Chachia Pang, an opera based on the people’s war.

Hao-Liang,w h o took the leading part in The Red Lantern, is an active member of the Communist Party, and represented the artists at the Ninth Congress. The leading lady in this opera is Lau Cheung Yee who, though only 17, is already a most ardent militant. At the last Canton Fair, she opened a discussion on the cinema with a speech in which she proclaimed her debt of gratitude to the thoughts of M a o Tse-tung and denounced the misdeeds of Liu Chao Chi with regard to the arts. These two artists play a very important role in Chinese theatre and cinema today.

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The n e w cinematographic works are produced by groups, and do not bear the n a m e of an author. All that w e k n o w is that M a d a m e Chiang-ching supervises them, as she supervises all original works for the theatre.

No n e w films have been produced, nor have any plans for future productions been announced, since the production of the films w e have mentioned. All that can be said is that the only accepted sources of inspiration are the three great periods of the revolutionary struggle (the Long March, the struggle against the Japanese occupation, and the final contest with Chiang Kai-shek) as well as the efforts of peasants, workers and soldiers to improve production in the people’s rural communes.

Only one fiction film was shown at the Canton Fair -an old film (1955) with different credits. Its theme is the guerilla campaign against the Japanese occupying troops. This f i l m is shown several times a week on the Canton television service, and it seems to be the only one that has survived the floodwaters of the cultural revolution.

Television programmes are very poor, and the same films are repeated constantly. The main film-producing agency is the central studio for documentaries and newsreels in Peking. This studio produced three films on the Ninth Congress, one of which is in colour, a film on the frontier incidents between the U.S.S.R.and the People’s Republic of China, and another on the curing and reeducation of the deaf and dumb, thanks to the thoughts of M a o Tse-tung,this last film being one of a number of events dealing with the same theme which are taking place throughout the country. These films are technically very weak: the sound is rarely synchronized, and the brownish colour is like that of the first Agfacolor films made during the war. A s to news-reels,they show only parades and meetings of enormous crowds waving the little red book.

From the point of view of art and culture, it can be said that the cinema today is non-existentin the People’s Republic of China.

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Hong Kong T h e condemnation of films produced in China before 1966 also applied to Communist films m a d e in H o n g Kong. In the British colony there is not only a commercial circuit which handles only ‘red’ films, but also a studio where about ten progressive films are m a d e every year. These films,which a short time ago were shown o n the mainland, n o w come u p against closed frontiers; a recent film, for instance, though it seemed likely to please the Peking government, was not admitted into China.

Apart from these Communist films, which m a y be regarded as marginal, 300 Chinese films a year were being m a d e in H o n g K o n g recently. Four-fifths of these are in Cantonese and are produced in extremely precarious material conditions (sometimes shooting lasts only three days) by small firms with little capital, or run on a family basis, whose activities remind one of the heroic age of the film-makers.About sixty of the films are in Mandarin. At least half of the latter are ‘sword films’, a type of film which for the last t w o years has been very popular in the Far East. T h e ‘sword film’ is a kind of Chinese western.

It is a cloak-and-daggerstory enacted in a historical context, nearly always with a central theme of revenge. Such productions are distinguished b y horror, cruelty, violent action and sometimes also a touch of the miraculous.

Although w o m e n play an important part in them (the chieftainess is an especially favourite character) these bloodthirsty stories are absolutely chaste, love being expressed only in furtive or poetic ways. Not even a kiss is allowed.

Apart from the ‘sword films’, most of the films produced in H o n g K o n g are melodramas and comedies. In other words, production is governed by purely commercial considerations, and despite the reputation of some producers (such as D a o Ching and Lao Chen), even the idea of cinéma d’auteur is unknown. This lack of concern for art has not shielded H o n g K o n g from trouble. Since 1967, box-office receipts have gone d o w n by 40 per cent. This

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deterioration in a situation which until then had been exceptionally sound is due to a sudden rise in the price of seats (which had not been changed for twenty years previously) and the Communist demonstrations in 1967.

Another reason, of course, is the growth of television.

Possibly because of the crisis, the wind of contention -it is still only a light breeze-is beginning to blow on certain film circles in H o n g Kong. Authors, producers and actors do not conceal their impatience to be free from the arbitrary control of the producers. Four banks, 130 cinem a s or theatres, amusement grounds, a printing works and a publishing house, a studio at Singapore, another at H o n g K o n g comprising 10 ‘sets’ and employing 200 people, laboratories, distribution networks, a corps of producers and stars working under preclusive contractsthese are some of the key-stones of their empire.

Although it is difficult to struggle against such power, the rebels in H o n g K o n g are dreaming of a kind of cinema in which the prime concern would not be to m a k e money, and in which they would have an opportunity to m a k e something other than ‘sword films’.With makeshift facilities and in semi-secrecy, some of them have even undertaken the production of a few films after their o w n heart. Today there is an ‘underground’ cinema in H o n g Kong, albeit timid and hesitant. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely so far that the existence or possible expansion of this ‘underground’cinema will lead to an improvement in the cultural standard of the Chinese cinema. T h e producers (mostly very young people) w h o are trying to m a k e it successful are passively influenced by their European and American counterparts. They k n o w only the superficial aspects of Western culture, and o n the screen this results in a few idiosyncrasies of form and crude eroticism, which is a n e w phenomenon in the Chinese cinema.

It is to be hoped, however, that some of these young directors w h o uphold the principle of cinéma d’auteur-a production independent of the big companies-will eventually realize that the only w a y in which they can succeed is by being true to their national culture.

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Miss Shu Shen, a young w o m a n of 27, recently showed that this hope w a s not completely illusory. Having completed her education in California, Miss Shu Shen, w h o intended to take up writing, and has a n excellent knowledge of the literature of her country, returned to H o n g K o n g to produce a film in accordance with her ideas, which she financed herself. This film,The Arch,was shown recently in Paris, and w a s very favourably received by the French critics. In the opinion of Miss Shu Shen, the Chinese should be a m o n g the best producers in the world, for the idiom of the film, with its varying tempos and close-upsfrom time to time, is very close to the pattern of Chinese poetry. Thus, starting from the plan considered as a n ideogram and from that inward ‘respiration’provided by the cutting, film becomes the natural extension of certain Chinese poems. For the moment, unfortunately, Miss Shu Shen seems to be the only person in H o n g K o n g to have realized this and to have tried to put her ideas into operation.

A few independent directors with European financial assistance have also tried to leave the beaten track, but they were soon discouraged, for the Chinese did not feel at h o m e in these films,although their o w n language was used and the actors were k n o w n to them. Thus the tremendous cinematographic potential in H o n g K o n g is still almost unexploited as far as the art of the film is concerned. Despite a past rich in legend, philosophy and history, the Chinese cinema cannot reach the level of the world’s great artistic creations, and seems fated to imitate all that is most unimaginative and most drearily c o m mercial in Hollywood films.

Republic of China T h e people of the Republic of China are still regular filmgoers. Television is not yet completely established, and its impact on the public is still negligible. Cinema is like cinema in H o n g Kong, the only differencesbeing that there

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are more independent directors there than in the British colony and that super-productionson the wide screen and in colour have completely superseded films in black and white.

About 100 films a year are produced by the five studios on the island, all in Mandarin. Here, as on the other side of the China Sea, the adventure film is the most popular, together with sumptuous musicals, melodramas and historical epics. T h e Republic of China is proud of having produced the champion of champions in the ‘sword film’ category, the famous Dragon Inn by the producer K a n Chuen, which in a few months broke all box-office records in the area. In so far as it is possible to draw up a scale of values in film, it would seem that films produced here are more subtle and more original than those produced in Hong Kong, although this superiority m a y not be very great.

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A study of the Pakistani cinema Alamgir Kabir

In 1968 Pakistan produced over 100 feature films in three languages.T e n years earlier, in 1958,the total was only 34.

This spectacular expansion in feature-film production shows that the cinema is fast becoming a major industry in Pakistan. Numerically, it has already exceeded the production capacities of m a n y advanced countries.

For Pakistan’s population of over 100 million the cinema is the only popular m e d i u m of entertainment.

Until recently various religious and sociological factors forced the cinema to stay an exclusively urban phenomenon where only 8 per cent of the total population live.

But the situation is changing fast. Overcoming their age-old prejudice against visual-art media, the cinema is successfully moving into the rural populace. Films of traditional folk tales have been particularly responsible for this in East Pakistan. In West Pakistan, considerable improvement in the communication system connecting remote villages with old and n e w urban areas has been responsible for creating cinemagoers from a m o n g the rural people. As things are now, it will not be surprising if Pakistan’s film industry expands doubly or even more during the next decade.

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A short history of Pakistan’s film industry T h e history of Pakistan’s Mm industry dates back to the silent days w h e n Lahore, Pakistan’s present film capital and largest film centre, became the third important centre of film production in the subcontinent (being led by B o m bay and Calcutta). On account of various economic reasons and linguistic problems, Lahore suffered particularly under the domination of Bombay. E v e n though it had a monopoly of films in Punjabi, a spoken dialect of the northern part of the Indus plain k n o w n as the Punjab, stiff competition from Hindi and Urdu films m a d e in B o m b a y shrank its market to a minimum. As a result, by 1947 w h e n the subcontinent was granted independence by the British colonial government, Lahore had m a d e (with4 studios) only 27 feature films (193547)in Punjabi and about half that number in other languages.

Independence (14August 1947) brought into existence the n e w State of Pakistan. Overnight Lahore became the only film production centre of the n e w country consisting of t w o geographical units (East Pakistan and West Pakistan) separated b y 900miles of Indian territory, with over 350 cinema houses (of which 120 were in East Pakistan) to be fed with a steady supply of feature films. It was a tremendous challenge. T h e position was clear. Until Lahore industry could recuperate from its initial set-backs stemming from a wholesale migration of Hindu studio and cinema owners to India, Pakistan’s filmic requirements had to be met by imports. There has been a trickle of counter-migrationof Moslem artists and technicians from B o m b a y to Lahore.

In East Pakistan, where the majority of the population lives, the main demand was for films in Bengali.

T h e technical k n o w - h o w a m o n g Bengali Moslems in respect of film production was next to nothing yet the objective conditions demanded a Bengali film-production centre at Dacca, capital of East Pakistan. T h e beginning had to be m a d e at Lahore. All the four studios that were

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left behind by their Hindu owners were declared evacuee property by the government and were allotted to migrant film-makersw h o left behind their properties in Bombay.

In 1949,Hichkoley became the first-everfilm planned and produced entirely by Pakistani personnel. Five more films were completed during the same year. By 1950, twenty more films were completed and released. Almost all these films were based on unrealistic themes with blatant commercial aims. Almost all of these failed at the box-office mainly because similar but better finished films from Bombay drew a majority of the crowd. Such a reception is bad for a young industry and, as it became apparent years later,the government took a secret decision to gradually curb the inflow of Indian films into Pakistan without abruptly jeopardizing the exhibition industry (Pakistan needed at least 100 new films a year to keep the cinemas going). Embargo on the imported Indian films appeared in various forms. In September 1952,importofIndian films was totally suspended in West Pakistan. The measure, though disliked vehementlyby the distributors who thrived by trading in Bombay productions, resulted in a fast and spectacular expansion of the industry in West Pakistan.

The number ofstudios and cinema houses increased sharply and,in 1954,Karachi appeared as the second film centre of Pakistan. Between 1954 and 1956, Pakistan produced, on average, about seventeen films per year.

Meanwhile, capital was shy to invest in a film industry in East Pakistan. There were no professional artistes or technicians. And the distributors,w h o usually ilm production, were doing quite well distributinvest in f ing Indian films without any risk whatsoever. Soon it was clear that only by State enterprise could a film industry come into being in East Pakistan. In 1957, by an act of the ProvincialAssembly,the East Pakistan Film Development Corporation was set up. It has now developed into a modern, well-equipped studio, one of the largest in Pakistan. So far the studio has turned out 133 full-length feature films since its inception in 1958, most in Bengali.

The average rate of film production per studio in Pakistan

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is 8,which is higher than in France (7.5), United K i n g d o m (7.0), United States of America (5.0), India (5.0), Italy (2.4)and the U.S.S.R.(2.4). T h e total number of cinema houses is 510.

Reflection of traditional arts and literary works in the cinema T h e geographical configuration of Pakistan exerts profound influence o n culture and its growth including cinema. W e must remember that the history of West Pakistan is a history of invaders w h o came to plunder the treasures accumulated in the cities, towns and temples.

T h e part of Bengal that is n o w East Pakistan had a lesser share of marauding invaders. H e r green, fertile land, six colourful and fruitful seasons, a n intricate network of mighty rivers and comparatively peaceful political transition through the centuries helped to evolve there a resourceful traditional culture. T h e factor that forcefully modified the growth of traditional arts in all parts of the subcontinent was the spread of Islam. T h e religion forbade, according to the interpretation of its fanatical adherents, most of the visual and performing arts. Plastic arts became particular victims because, according to its conservative interpreters, these were symbolic of idolatry and hence incompatible with the concept of one-god-oneprophet teaching of Islam. However, Islamic religious interpretationshave always displayed a degree of flexibility, yielding to traditional rituals and practices more than a few times. These factors have acted and reacted differently on the t w o units of Pakistan, warranting separate treatment in this study.

East Pakistan T h e traditional arts of East Pakistan, though influenced since early times by the rituals of various religions that

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flourished there, assumed a fairly secular character and met the artistic needs of the people irrespective of religion except,ofcourse,fortheplastic arts likepuppetry,sculpture, terra-cotta figure works and other model works depicting h u m a n and animal figures which remained exclusive possessions of Hinduism.

T h e performing arts and traditional or ‘folk‘ literature which underlie cinema and which the bulk of the population enjoy include : Jutru: This is a form of performing art that is somewhat similar to the West’s operetta. Its cost of production is low. A raised wooden platform in the village market will do for a stage. An all-male cast portrays roles of both sexes and musical interludes are provided by local and Western instruments (bugles, trumpets, etc.). These are financed either by rich landlords or businessmen or by subscriptions raised from the community. In the old days, the feudal lords were great patrons of the art. Most of the themes of the repertoire are based on legends and anecdotes that are partly historical and partly fictional. T h e story layout is simple. T h e hero or the heroine wins in the end after evil has got its due.

S o m e of the themes are so popular that they survive through generations. E v e n the invasion of Westernized urban civilization has not been able to reduce their popularity a m o n g the villagers (who comprise about 90 per cent of the population).

Traditional literature: Folklore or fairy tales based mostly on historical themes with religious overtones.

Both Islam and Hinduism have influenced these profoundly.

Plastic arts :These are exclusively confined to Hindu and Buddhist temples and shrines.

So far East Pakistan has produced nearly 140 feature films, most of which are in Bengali. T h e influence of traditional performing arts and of traditional and modern literature on East Pakistani films is considerable. Several significant trends have been noticed so far. In the early

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days, i.e. until 1965, the general tendency was to rely on scriptswrittentoincorporatethecommercialconsiderations as dictated by the producers and, hence, could not faithfully reflect the literary trends of the period. The cinema audience then consisted mainly of urban lower middleclass and ‘urban’ proletariat who were comparatively secluded from the traditional jatra or punthi (folklore) literature that was popular among the rural population.

It must also be kept in mind that religious superstition against the medium of cinema has been very m u c h alive in the villages where small-timepriests made the cinema look like a devilish lure, an incarnate sin. Thus the film themes were urban-oriented and,being deeply influenced

by Bombay’s concept of commercial cinema, were far from realistic in their portrayals. Extreme melodrama which was an essential element demanded by theproducers could not be found in contemporary Bengali literature with its strong social-realistovertone.

Bad film-makingdue to inexperience and unpopular middle-class themes soon pushed the new industry on a path leading to extinction. As the crisis mounted directors racked their brains for themes-themes that would attract not only the urban audience but also a part of the vast rural population. The first clue dawned on director Salahuddin. H e thought of picturing, in the simplest possible way, the popular jatra play called Roopban. It was a golden hunch. The moment the word got round that Roopban would be shown in a town cinema, there was an unprecedented rush. Villagers w h o always considered the cinema a corrupting temptation of the Devil, flocked in thousands with their families to the towns. Failing to get tickets they camped outside the cinema halls. W h e n asked if they did not consider such a craze for cinema as something sinful they replied, quite sincerely: ‘ W e have come to see Roopban, not cinema!’

So the magic formula was discovered at last. And, until 1969, people witnessed a flood of films that were either based on popular jatra plays, or on folklore and fairy-tales,and historical themes from the phase of the

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struggle for independence. A whole n e w audience, the exact number of which is yet to be assessed but certainly runs into millions, was w o n from the villages. This phenomenon is probably unique and without precedence in Asia. Of course, the spate of success brought with it a great deal of artistic dishonesty. It appeared that for the ‘new’ audience from the villages (also the urban proletariat with roots in the villages) the themes alone were satisfying enough. They cared less about h o w the films were m a d e and they were m a d e badly. In this frantic rush for gold, film directors appeared overnight from nowhere and began to m a k e films that cared little about essential cinematic elements like continuity, appropriateness of the costumes, acting (this was extremely stagey and very m u c h the same as in jatra productions) and film-making in general. Soon the traditional themes were exhausted.

T h e script-writerswere then engaged to write ‘folk-tales’ keeping the basic ingredients that were c o m m o n to them all. Most of these failed to dupe the audience. But the ‘new’ audiences were not to return to their villages once they had discovered the magical charm that cinema has in its store. T h e film-makers were then confronted with the task of inventing a formula that could deliver ‘folk’ elements in different garbs.

West Pakistan A rugged, hostile terrain and repeated invasion by central Asian conquerors throughout history deterred the growth of arts and culture in the regions that n o w constitute West Pakistan. Only in the plains of the river Indus-in Punjab and Sind-could peaceful eras prevail from time to time and various forms of art flourish. But as described earlier, the advent of Islam in the eighth century brought about fundamental changes and wiped out any art form directly or indirectly related to idolatry. During the centuries that followed, except music and some forms of community dancing, no other form of performing arts could develop.

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Not even jatra-style operetta or stage productions could be performed. W o m e n were strictly forbidden from participating in the social occasions where m e n other than direct blood relations were present. T h e m e n were too busy safeguarding their families in hostile situations to have time for any elaborate cultural occasion other than austere recreational dancing. In recent centuries feudal lords in Punjab, Sind, Baluchistan and North-West Frontier Province patronized those forms of performing arts that contributed directly toward sensuous pleasure. These included music, songs, and dances by girls.

T h e traditional literature of West Pakistan is rich in folk-tales and anecdotes and legends of historic origin.

T h e influence oftraditionalArab literatureis also quite pronounced. Most of the love-lores, fantasies and tales of heroism that are dear to the people of West Pakistan have the ancient city of Baghdad as their setting. Tales from The Arabian Nights are also popular and have been used, time and again, in the cinema. Laila Majnu, Aladdin, Alif Laila, Ali Baba and Gu1 Bakawali are some of the very popular themes that seem to possess endless cinematic potentiality.

Most of the regions of West Pakistan have martial traditions. T h e people in the North-West Frontier region and Baluchistan in particular are well k n o w n for their love of freedom. They always revolted against powers that tried to subjugate them. This tradition has given rise to m a n y tales of heroes; heroes w h o became ‘outlaws’ and fought and died seeking freedom for their people. These, naturally, proved popular themes for films.S o m e historical figures like Genghis K h a n and invading Moguls have also been successfully exploited in the cinema.

Modern literature in West Pakistan belongs almost entirely to the U r d u language which, though the mother tongue of an ĂŠlite comprising only about 3 per cent of the total population, is the only language in the region with a modern vocabulary and grammar. All the important writers and poets of West Pakistan write in Urdu. Writing in U r d u experienced a tremendous upsurge of creativity

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under the active and direct encouragement of all the governments that ruled Pakistan since 1947. A considerable number of the writers and poets w h o came into prominence joined the cinema. Munshi Dil,K.Mohiuddin, H a k i m A h m a d Shuja, Zia Sarhady, Hasrat Lukhnavi, Younus Rahi, Arsh Lukhnavi, Imtiaz Ali Taz, Saifuddin Saif, Riaz Shahid, A h m e d Rahi, A n w a r Kamal, Razia Butt, Shabab Kairanvi, Danish Dervi, Fayyaz Hashmi, Salim A h m a d and a number of others have not only contributed scripts, lyrics and dialogue for m a n y important films m a d e at Lahore and Karachi but some have turned film-makers themselves. Riaz Shahid, Shabab Kairanvi, A n w a r K a m a l and Danish Dervi are n o w devoting more time to film-making than writing.

Although the participation of literary figures in the cinema of West Pakistan is considerable, instances of filmic adaptation of popular novels or stories are not numerous. Badnam (1966),directed by Iqbal Shahzad and rated as one of the best story-based films ever m a d e in West Pakistan, was m a d e from a short story by the late Sadat Hasan Manto, possibly the greatest short-story writer in Urdu. It asserts that the real tragedy of poverty is hidden not only in its economic state but also in the despicable and disastrous lure that ‘gold’ has in it for the poor. B a d direction and commercial considerations, h o w ever, reduced the strength of the theme to a minimum.

Recently, a few popular novels-mostly by a young writer, Razia Bautt-have been adapted for the cinema.

She is n o w one of the most sought-after and prolific writers of scripts and dialogues for films.T h e reflection of literature in Pakistani cinema is, thus, quite considerable.

But its cinematic portrayal often m a k e the efforts appear futile. T h e cinema there is n o w locked within rigid conventions set by the producers for w h o m commerce means everything. Realism is taboo because all stories must avoid portraying the miseries of day-to-day life.

T h e slogan is ‘cinema is entertainment’, and no more.

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G.Pinga

Asian motion-picture industries such as those of Korea, H o n g K o n g and Taipei m a d e tremendous advances during the past decade in production and processing and n o w in movie festivals their films are offering competition to those of Japan and India.

On the other hand, the newly emergent Philippine movie industry, hamstrung by taxes, high cost of materials, low budgets, lack of outlets in Manila and competition from certain imported pictures, is n o w floundering in mediocre westerns,karate-choppingagent films,sex-andviolence-ridden vehicles and other objectionable types of motion pictures. This trend stems from desperation o n the part of the producers w h o try to please the paying public by serving what is their idea of general preference.

This desperation is aggravated by the fact that whenever these film-makersventure into turning out a movie, they gamble-win or lose.

Philippine producers are aghast at the astronomical s u m s foreign film companies expend w h e n they m a k e movies in the Philippines as compared to the few thousands of pesos on which local movies’ troupes have to scrimp. W h e n The Golden Bullet was being shot o n location in Pasig, Rizal, extras in Muslim attire kept walking back

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and forth while the camera recorded a street scene. Out of m a n y takes only a tiny portion of the scene would actually be used for a few seconds on the screen. And out of 150,000 feet of film exposed for the entire movie, only 10,000 feet would be included in the finished picture. So while foreign film producers can pour millions of dollars into the production of one single motion picture and expect to recover m a n y more millions than they invest through world distribution, Philippine film-makers are having headaches making ends meet.

Production costs In the early sixties, Philippine movie-makers could turn out a picture for 40,000-50,000 pesos1 and a quickie for about half the sum. But not today. T h e prohibitive price of celluloid and other production materials has jacked up the cost of the black-and-white filmto 140,000 pesos. A colour movie today requires something in the area of 500,000 pesos. There was a time w h e n most Philippine films were produced with celluloid furnished b y K o d a k on credit. But since m a n y companies have not been able to pay the cost of the film to date and have run u p enorm o u s debts, Kodak n o w refuses to give film on credit.

T h e cheapest celluloid in the local market today is Fuji.

Eastman film prices have gone up. And for colour, the producer has to pay almost 1,000 pesos per roll.

T h e only chance for a colour film costing half a million pesos to earn back the expenses and profit a little is for it to be shown in Philippine communities in Hawaii, G u a m and the west coast of the United States of America, and possibly in Asian movie houses in Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, Bangkok and other film capitals. However, Philippine films are directed only at the Philippine market so the stories are confined to the Philippine audience and m a y not be properly appreciated in foreign theatres. Only 1. U.S.$l

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those with universal plots have chances of being purchased abroad. But h o w can a 200,000pesos Philippine film or even a colour picture costing 500,000pesos compete with a $5 million Hollywood technicolor production starring actors and actresses of international renown? It is not only the matter ofbudgetbutalsothehasteWithwhichPhilippine pictures are produced that prejudices their quality.

The pernicious play-date The manner in which Philippine films are produced within a month or less is a source of amazement to foreign filmmakers. And this is on a very limited budget too. A movie is rushed in order to make the play-date in a Manila theatre. Booking is so tight that most theatres have a schedule of movie screenings for one year in advance.

Some movie firms in need of an outlet for their picture have to buy play-time from other companies.

Scenes are haphazardly shot day and night. The players are taxed to the limit and m a y go without sleep for two nights merely to finish the picture in time. While the movie is scheduled to be shown on a Saturday,the last scene is still being shot on Thursday. T h e fans m a y be lined up at the box-ofice on Saturday morning for the opening day while the last reel is still being processed at the laboratory. And it is only on this first screening that the movie wiU be reviewed by the censors.

This method of rushing a film in order to catch up with the play-dateis highly detrimental to quality. It is indeed amazing h o w these twenty-oneor thirty days’wonders are eventually pieced out to make a motion picture.

Small profits The gamble starts when the film is released. With the national and municipal taxes heaped upon local pictures, the take-home pay of a producer out of the 1.35 peso

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orchestra ticket is about 55 centavos. So depending on the size of the audience, the screening of the f ilm within the first few days in a Manila theatre can determine if the ill m a k e m o n e y or not. S o m e good films recover movie w the production cost during the showing of the movie in Manila alone. Whatever income is derived from the provincial circuit is clear profit. Manila theatres are usually the gauge on whether or not a film w ill click, although at times there are pictures patronized by the provincial moviegoers which m a y not be appreciated by Manilans.

There is a total of 800 movie theatres in the Philippines today which show both foreign and Philippine pictures. Only 25 per cent of these are showing exclusively foreign films. In the Manila and metropolitan area, 65 movie houses exhibit Philippine films while the 50 others screen foreign films or both. F r o m the statistics it would seem that the Philippine movies dominate. Actually, however, local cinema is encountering competition more from imported B, C and D pictures capitalizing on sex and violence than from the few imported quality films.

A Senate bill has been introduced in the legislature which intends to exclude these low-budgeted,low-class film imports. T h e bill also proposes the utilization of Philippine talents and technicians by foreign companies making films in the Philippines.

Studios T h e Philippine movie industry is set back also by lack of equipment and studios. T h e only film-producingcompany in the Philippines which owns its o w n studios is S a m p a guita Pictures. T h e rest-LVN, Premier and Lebranwhich with Sampaguita Pictures once formed the Big Four studios, n o w lease out their equipment and studios to other film-makers or are utilized as laboratories in the processing of black-and-white and colour films. Nepomuceno Productions has its o w n studio and modern equipment and has its films processed in colour in Holly-

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wood. EPJ Productions occasionally purchases a camera or t w o and other movie equipment. Remweed, a FilipinoAmerican financed company, is outfitting itself with n e w film-productiongear. But what about the rest of the movie firms that are entirely dependent for studios and equipment on the established companies? At times the production of a film or the continuity of a scene is dependent on the availability of the studio or the equipment.

Of course, there are other needs of the industry today such as worthy stories, plots and scripts, and the elimination of the bad old habits, the affectations, and the unnatural high-flown archaic Tagalog which no one speaks today anyway. But the major need of the industry still is capital. Bigger capital can do wonders for the Philippine cinema. There are factors that discourage the moneyed individuals from investing their millions in movies, h o w ever. A n d w h e n they do intend to invest, are there any competent directors, actors, actresses, crewmen available at the m o m e n t ? All of t h e m perhaps are busy cranking out more thirty days’ wonders. There are no n e w directors nor technicians to take the place of the old. And if there are, they have acquired the bad habits of their predecessors instead of learning more modern and better methods through schooling.There are no trainingschools.Film c o m panies rely merely on the experience ofthe crew members.

It is not surprising therefore that the Philippine motionpicture industry that has seen its golden age is in its doldrums while Korea,Taipei and H o n g K o n g are on the ascent.

T h e local industry sorely needs administrative, congressional and financial backing. But it seems that even the government o5cials w h o should do something to bolster the cinema are not only apathetic but prefer foreignmovies.

There is a consciousness a m o n g the students and the youth about the sad progress of the industry. They are the ones w h o are n o w seriously appraising the motion pictures and are studying better techniques. B u t their learning is still in the theoretical stage. Given technical training these youths m a y some day inject n e w blood into Philippine cinema that will m a k e it function better.

Part Four

Discussion extracts

Shadow theatre Saleh Mahdi (Tunisia): Shadow theatre is of particular interest because it is one form of theatre which is c o m m o n to Asian and Arab countries. Although it originated in Asia, the Arabs learned of it from the Turks, through their karagoz shadow plays. In Tunisia it is mainly an entertainment for children n o w and is performed only for the R a m a d a n festival.

Cherif Khaznadar (Syria) :We do not k n o w why it c a m e by w a y of Turkey, w h e n it could have c o m e just as easily by w a y of the silk route from China to the Middle East. It has been a political theatre from the beginning, but it could be transformed into a theatre of social views.

Enrico Fulchignoni (Unesco): In Cambodia the spirit of the deceased is represented by a shadow figure, which raises the question whether or not there is a similar religious significance in Middle Eastern shadow theatre.

Saleh Mahdi (Tunisia): It is popular entertainment and has no religious significance in Tunisia.

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A h m a d Sefrioui (Morocco): Shadow theatre, or ‘box of mysteries’ as it is called in Morocco, is disappearing for lack of artistic value.

Alamgir Kabir (Pakistan): During the period of British rule, shadow plays were used to express political criticism. T h e form has largely disappeared now, but television might revive interest in it.

J. K. Sibunruang (Thailand): T h e large puppets of nang yai, of northern Thailand, have deep religious significance. T h e southern form of shadow play in Thailand, nang tabng,has been influenced by Javanese shadow theatre and is based on legends and stories from that country which have been overlaid with aspects of Buddhism. A full study of shadow theatre would be of great value.

Marcel Martin (France): I a m concerned that shadow theatre seems to be disappearing.

James Brandon (United States): A t least in Indonesia, shadow plays are still deeply rooted in the spiritual and cultural life of the people. Shadow theatre (wajang kulit) is both sophisticated and widely popular. It is usually asserted that shadow theatre of China, Indonesia, Thailand or India are of the same origin, but this m a y not be so. There are m a n y differences in form and performance techniques.

Ossia Trilling (United Kingdom): Shadow plays were widespread in Europe in the Middle Ages. Like the court jester, the puppeteer was authorized to say what was forbidden to others. It was a form of free expression, not subject to censorship.

Louis A w a d (United Arab Republic): T h e Egyptian shadow play grew as a political criticism of our foreign rulers in the Middle Ages. T h e karagoz shado w play c a m e from Turkey, and to the Egyptian, the character of Karagoz symbolized the Ottoman or Mameluke ruler, whom w e dared criticize only in this manner. Perhaps our shadow theatre is partly satirical comedy and partly attached to religious festivals (Ramadan), for in Greece dramatic art

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originated in fertility festivals which were obscene and religious at the same time.

M o h a m a d Aziza (Tunisia):In spite of technical similarities, the goals of shadow theatre in Asia are different from those in the Arab world.

R. P. Sobolov (U.S.S.R.):T h e shadow theatre can contribute most usefully to animated cartoons of the cinema, in terms of design and colour. Perhaps cinema itself was inspired by the shadow theatre.

W e must agree that art always has religious roots.

Narayana M e n o n (India):T h e number of shadow puppet and marionette forms in Asian countries which exhibit similar characteristics and c o m m o n origins is very large. Although it has not been possible yet to fully study them all, m a n y of them n o w could be compared through the modern technique of videotape recording.

Popular performing arts KapiIa Vatsyayan (India):W e must distinguish between genuine popular arts, or folklore, which express the traditions and culture of a people, and imported popular arts, which are entertainment and not part of the culture. T w o points are important regarding folk-art: it must continue as a living tradition of the people and it can contribute to other art forms. This is the case in India.

R. P. Sobolov (U.S.S.R.):T o state it briefly, folk-art is the oral art of the people. Attempts to transform folk-artinto modern art can only result in harm, but folk-art is not only capable of evolution, it can provide materials for modern forms of art, through songs, stories, n e w music, for example.

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Jean Louis Bory (France): Folklore is a trick, a means of escaping present problems b y turning to history.

Tayeb Saddii (Morocco): Official recognition of folkperformances signifies the setting of a rigid form, and rigidity means death in art. W e find attachment to folk-spectacles is an obstacle to artistic creation and progress in countries in the process of development.

J. K. Sibunruang (Thailand): Contrary to the situation in some countries, folk-arts are living arts in Thailand, because they are important in the lives of the people. M a n y religious elements are found in them: the gods, love stories and epic battles taken from Hinduism, and calmness and a spirit of tranquillity from Buddhism. Especially the Rumuyunu epic has been an influence in Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, B u r m a and Ceylon. At first foreign, they became part of our culture.

A h m a d Sefrioui (Morocco): In spite of their primitive qualities, folk-dances of isolated mountain groups are very beautiful and deserve to be kept in their pure state.

M. J. Perera (Ceylon): In Ceylon w e can see in music m a n y examples of how traditions contribute to the development of art: popular songs of today have their roots in music of the countryside. Our modern plays have been inspired b y simple folk-arts, too.

Henri Storck (Belgium): W e have the same situation in the West, in the ballet works of Maurice BĂŠjart which have been inspired by folklore. Carnivals, pageants and spectacles, connected with historical or religious occasions, can he folklore events which m a k e political criticism.

Saleh Mahdi (Tunisia):Ancient arts are inherited through traditional oral teaching. If folk-arts are to be preserved, that must be done b y young people. A country’s unique personality can be maintained by using folklore in contemporary productions.

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R. P. Sobolov (U.S.S.R.): A troupe has been

formed, in Uzbekistan, of young actors w h o are devoted to preserving local colour in their productions.

Jalal Khoury (Lebanon) : A folk-dance transferred to a music hall is no longer folk-art. W e must consider three possible conditions:folk-artwhich is consumed by the one w h o produces it; folk-art which has bec o m e an ossified tradition; and folkloric vestiges remaining in the collective m e m o r y of the people.

Current problems of the theatre T o m o Tobari (Japan):T h e government-supported National Theatre, completed in 1966, provides a n e w large theatre for kabuki and a smaller theatre for puppet drama. Audiences for our modern drama, based on Western drama, are large. Recently Weste m directors have been engaged to produce modern plays and musicals, in Japanese, in our theatres in collaboration with local artistes.

Narayana M e n o n (India): Indian theatre has had a religious basis, but after a period of stagnation during the nineteenth century, its traditions are being reevaluated and, in some regions at least, n e w theatre is emerging.

M.J. Perera (Ceylon): After first being influenced by the theatre of B o m b a y and then Western drama, since 1960 young people have tried to write and produce national drama. But young people are more attracted to the cinema than to theatre.

Jean Darcante (International Theatre Institute):There must be change in the theatre. T h e revolt of the young is nothing more than a profound search for a modern theatre which will meet the needs of the

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public. Perhaps in the West w e can learn from the Third World some things, but most important is to change to a theatre which meets the expectations of youth in its twenties.

Ossia Trilling (United Kingdom): W e should not eliminate, just for the sake of change, traditional and important works in the repertory.

Tayeb Saddiki (Morocco): Our theatre is not based on traditions or o n classics. Our amateurs take theatre to the people in the streets and in public buildings.

W e ask what is theatre? H o w can w e reach our audiences ?

Pierre Schaeffer (Office de Radiodiffusion-TélévisionFrançaise-ORTF): A work of art cannot be created without close association with the people. Theatre goes through crises, and then the public reclaims it.

Yet, at the same time, w e must respect traditional and well-developed forms of theatre.

Ali Rai (United Arab Republic):W e have seen kabuki in Japan and Indian folk-theatre at performances in N e w Delhi. I find the artistic principles of Asian theatre and its flexibility close to the Arab spirit.

James Brandon (United States): Most Asian theatre is a theatre of the spoken word. In the West the drama of the written word is facing a crisis. W e in the West can learn from the East the value of non-written, extemporized theatre.

Cinema and television Pierre Schaeffer (ORTF):Because modern m a n is scientific and technologically oriented, he has produced remarkable means of mass communication. T h e Japanese were the first to produce a moderately

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priced video-tape recorder. N o w via television it is possible to rediscover, conserve and transmit throughout a country folk-performances which previously could only be seen by local audiences. It is even possible to exchange such programmes between East and West.

Cherif Khaznadar (Syria):With the development of radio and television, there has also arisen the possibility of creating n e w techniques for artistic expression.

For example, in Japan video cameras replace film cameras during rehearsals, and this is done in the theatre, too.

Ossia Trilling (United Kingdom) : It is a mistake to think of television as just a means of transmission: it is a special form of artistic expression and it can help the living theatre. In Iran television finances and supports a live story-tellingprogramme. In England television and theatre have a healthy coexistence.

Cecile Guidote (Philippines): T h e cinema faces great problems in my country. Although most of the public is oriented toward the television and the film, rather than theatre, the m a n y imported programmes and films have no national character. But film and television artists are working with theatre groups toward the creation of a national theatre.

Alamgir Kabir (Pakistan) :A cinematographic society for the production of films has been founded and considerable m o n e y invested in it. It promotes popular films which have artistic value and which treat political, social and spiritual problems. There are some 500 members. However, actors and directors leave the theatre for cinema and television, where they can succeed with less effort and as a result theatre is dying.

Saleh Mahdi (Tunisia): It is my opinion that cinema and television producers are not aware of traditional theatre that exists in their countries and they do not sufficiently exploit performances such as shadow plays, extemporized poetry, folk-songs and dances.

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Alamgir Kabir (Pakistan): Festivals of Asian films, in Asia, would do m u c h to bring local cinema to the attention of other countries.

Marcel Martin (France): Asian film festivals are held in Europe, but regular distribution of Asian films in the West faces difficult economic and political problems. Festivals in Asia would help, as would the establishment of film libraries.

KasJiko Kawakita (Japan):T h e publication of the Japanese Film Producers Association, in English, gives regular information about n e w Asian and Arab films.

Enrico Fulchignoni (Unesco): A s has been pointed out, some Asian theatre forms are already being replaced by radio and television. It is important that theatre troupes travel in Asia and that the members of these troupes have the opportunity to meet theatre artistes of other countries.

Abdel Salam Moussa (United Arab Republic) : Professional theatre and good films are presented in conjunction with each other at cultural centres in the United Arab Republic. There are twenty-two such centres in cities ; travelling companies visit villages showing both films and giving stage performances.

Milena Salvini (France): I want to return again to the need to document, on film and by electronic means, the traditional performing arts of countries such as India and Indonesia. There is a crying nced for archivists in these countries rich in theatre arts,but resources are greatly lacking. Artists in India and Indonesia survive by the grace of their o w n superh u m a n efforts.