***The problem lies elsewhere. The ultimate goal of most investors is to launder their ill-gotten money in the film industry, while indulging in the additional lures of its sordid side. Oscar Wilde claimed that life imitated art more than art imitated life. When our movies are rising from the depth of that squalor, it no longer matters which is what.

Whether movies imitate our lives or our lives imitate movies, how can we separate the filth of one from that of another?***

How does it explain why our movies are so bad. why their plots and characters are nothing but jumbled confusion of buffoonery and bawdiness? Take any movie of the day. and you will find how a skimpy story line is stretched by absurd elements of sex and violence. Now like a stab in the wound chine the obscene titles to destroy the last relic of sobriety in movie production. If you look at the billboard on the marquee of a movie theatre, you will find how gun-toting and knifeclashing men figure in (he concourse of flesh-showing women, all captioned by a tasteless title to give you the preview to a cultural hell.

But where does that hell begin? Does it begin in the minds of the cine-goers or does it begin in the minds of the cine-makers? That seems to bring us to the age-old question of which came first: chicken or egg? The answer is that art is to culture what lightening is to thunder: one is precursor to another. Thus art is the genesis of a culture and culture is the germination of art. It is said that the Renaissance might have been expected to appear first in Rome, if not for its political situation being very unfavourable to artistic endeavour Instead it appeared in Florence, which

was economically prosperous and politically stable under the leadership of the Medici family.

So. art leads culture and culture lifts people. The artist conceives himself, in the words of the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, as the “unacknowledged legislator of the world", an autonomous, godlike creator of new orders of reality obedient only to his perceptions and the categories of his mind. One can say that artist creates the reality, which shapes the culture. In the year 1401, a competition was held among sculptors and goldsmiths to design a pair of doors for the old baptistery at Florence. The sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti won. and a losing goldsmith. Filippo Brunelleschi, turned to the study of architecture. Brunelleschi investigated ancient Roman architecture and acquired the knowledge of classical architecture and ornament that he used as a foun-

dation for Renaissance architecture.

Where do we place the tawdry banalities of our movies in this symbiosis of art and culture? Are they work of art, or bulwarks of culture? They are perhaps neither. How can subliminal plot's of lewdness and mayhem carrying unseemly titles embellish the creative forces of a society? How can profanities engender profundity in the inane energy of misguided art?

And more often than not the buck is passed to the viewers who may or may not know the difference between artfulness and art. For the matter, there has been controversy over what constitutes cinematic art. In the United States after World War II, “art houses” were set up to define it for sophisticated audiences in large cities, screening primarily European films, such as those directed by Fellini. Bergman, Bunuel, and Antonioni. Also. 16-millimetre

films were distributed to museums and college campuses to spark Interest in avant-garde films.

The line between a mass audience that seeks entertainment and a smaller group that is consciously concerned with artistic values goes back to 1920. The films that appeal to these two groups, however, vary' from one nation to another and from one period to another. The Hollywood comedies by Charlie Chaplin. Buster Keaton, and others, for example, were originally popular entertainment but were later taken up by the art film audience. The comedies of Jerry Lewis received little serious critical attention in their native United States but a great deal in France.

Thus the quality of movies, like that of most other commodities. depends on the choice of consumers all right. But it also needs the commitment of producers. In 1951 Daiei films of Japan, which generally produced cheap domestic genre motion pictures, reserved a portion of its budget to make lavish historical spectacles, such as Mizoguchis Ugetsu (1953), that would appeal to the art audience outside of Japan. In 1926 William Fox paid Mur-nau $1,000,000 to relocate in Hollywood in the hopes that he

would make the greatest movies the world had yet seen. It remains the Holy Grail of our film movement that increased government grants are essential for the production of good movies. While movies were made with government grants in the past, have they helped us with the taste buds of our viewers? In fact, occasional work of art is no more relevant for the artistic sensibility of a nation than improved diet on the Inde-l>endence Day is for the health of prisoners.

The problem, therefore, lies elsewhere. The ultimate goal of most investors is to launder their Ill-gotten money in rhe film industry, while indulging , in thy additional lures of its sordid side. Oscar Wilde claimed that life imitated art more than art imitated life. When our movies are rising from the depth of that squalor, it no longer matters which is what. Whether movies imitate our lives or our lives imitate movies, how can we separate the filth of one from that of another?

Does Haji Selim know about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which states that the more precisely one of the quantities is measured, the less precisely the other is known? Our lives and movies have mashed together in a terrible depravity where art and life have infiltrated each other. Do we take up on the movies and hope to change our lives? Or. do we do it other way around? Maybe, a good way to start is to realise that endurance is more important than entertainment in life as well as in art.