Natyashastra

The Natya Shastra is incredibly wide in its scope. While it primarily deals with stagecraft, it has come to influence music, classical Indian dance, and literature as well. It covers stage design, music, dance, makeup, and virtually every other aspect of stagecraft. It is very important to the history of Indian classical music because it is the only text which gives such detail about the music and instruments of the period. As an audio-visual form, Natyashastra mirrors all the arts and crafts, higher knowledge, learning, sciences, yoga, and conduct. Its purpose is to entertain as well as educate. Bharata was an ideal theatre artist.

It is certainly not an overstatement to say that Natyashastra indeed laid the cornerstone of the fine arts in India. The commentaries on the Natyashastra are known, dating from the sixth or seventh centuries. Abhinaya is a concept in Indian dance and drama derived from Bharata's Natya Shastra.

It is used as an integral part of all the Indian classical dance styles, which all feature some kind of mimetic aspect to certain compositions, for example in depictions of daily life or devotional pieces. A most important partition is that between NATYADHARMI ABHINAYA and LOKADHARMI ABHINAYA. The former is poetic and stylistic in nature, following a codified manner of presenting emotion and expression which pertains to the conventions of the stage, which appear to have greater artistic quality by virtue of taking something from natural life and rendering it in a suitably stylised way. Lokadharmi abhinaya is the opposite: realistic and un-stylised, involving very natural expression and movement, as occurs in daily life. Often this is the more difficult as the potential for interpretation of an emotion or a line of poetry is never-ending. Since Natyadharmi follows classical traditions and rules of acting all the actors tend to act in similar way, whereas Lokadharmi acknowledges the performer’s individual difference in style and talent. This doesn’t do away with the classical nature of the performance, wither. Bharata himself was not averse to the idea of making slight changes in the Mudras as and when the incident demanded.

The first manifests where the play projects natural behavior of characters, depicting various professions and activities of the people as observed in our world, and is enacted without playful flourish of the limbs-ª various conventional gaits and postures. On the contrary, if a play contains speech, activity, beings and states of extra-ordinary kind, and requires acting with playful flourish of limbs and possesses characteristics of dance, requires conventional enunciation, and is dependent on emotionally carried persons, it can be said to have been composed and enacted by ‘natyadharmi’ or the conventional practice.  ‘Lokadharmi’ constitutes the basic or raw material, while ‘natyadharmi’ brings out innovations, gives the play a perspective, endowing it with beauty and puts it in the idiom or language of a particular performing art.

In real life we have some permitted and some prohibited kinship and relations, and union is allowed in the first category only. Bharata calls them gamya and agamya relations respectively and makes some concessions for play productions: "If a person, who has been employed in the role of a woman for whom marital connection with a particular character is forbidden by the sastra-s, is made to appear in trie role of another woman with whom connection is permitted, it becomes an instance of natyadharmi.

Rasa

Poetry without Rasa is an imitation of poetry. The attractiveness of poetry is because of the Rasas. To be able to taste Rasa, the object that is being tasted should have taste worthiness. However, in the case of poetry and drama this taste is to be tasted with the help of the ears and the eyes. When these organs taste the Rasas they create sensations of happiness and sorrow that reach the mind and if the mind is functioning well then emotions such as happiness, sorrow, etc are awakened. The stronger the sensations the stronger the emotions and these are reflected on the human body parts. When the emotions reach a peak then exclamations emerge unknowingly and other organs of the body also react to these emotions simultaneously. The incident or event described by the poet becomes the living experience of the person listening to the poetry. The person becomes samras  with it. This means that the Rasa invoked by the poetry and experienced by the person listening to the poetry becomes the same.

It is believed that Bharata’s Natyashastra is the first work that discusses the form of Rasa process. However, according to Dr G T Deshpande, before Bharata, two Acharyas Druhin and Vasuki also propounded two different Rasa traditions. Bharata restricts himself to the Rasas in Drama. Although the concept of rasa is fundamental to many forms of Indian art including dance, music, musical theatre, cinema and literature, the treatment, interpretation, usage and actual performance of a particular rasa differs greatly between different styles and schools of abhinaya, and the huge regional differences even within one style.

Thus, the poetry or the drama that invokes emotions within a person listening or watching the performance and the degree to which such invocation takes place determines the degree and quality of Rasa in the poetry or the drama. Such a poetry or drama is said to be having Rasa – it is rasyukt . The poetry that contains the best essence of these specific emotions feels good and one wants to taste it over and over again. Hence literary experts have called these specific emotions Rasa. Feelings of anger, happiness are treated as the dharma of the mind. These could be interpreted as basic characteristics of the mind. These are experienced by everybody and the experts of poetics have assigned them the noun Bhaava. It is impossible to find a person who has not experienced these Bhaavas in life.  These Bhaava exist in the minds of all humans and the moment they get Chetana or they are touched by life they spread like a drop of oil on water and take over the entire mind. The experts on poetics decided on the Rasas based on these basic and self existent Bhaavas in all humans.

Influence on cinema:

Rasa has been an important influence on the cinema of India. The Rasa method of performance is one of the fundamental features that differentiate Indian cinema from that of the Western world. In the Rasa method, empathetic "emotions are conveyed by the performer and thus felt by the audience," in contrast to the Western Stanislavski method where the actor must become "a living, breathing embodiment of a quality" rather than "simply conveying emotion." The rasa manner of presentation is clearly apparent in Malayalam Cinema and internationally-acclaimed parallel Bengali films directed by Satyajit Ray. The latter is indebted to the Rasa method of classical Sanskrit drama, in the sense that the complicated doctrine of Rasa "centres predominantly on feeling experienced not only by the characters but also conveyed in a certain artistic way to the spectator. The duality of this kind of rasa imbrications" shows in The Apu Trilogy (1955–1959), which itself has had a large authority on world cinema.

A Rasa is the urbanized realisable state of a everlasting mood, which is called Sthayi Bhava. This expansion towards a realisable state grades by the interplay on it of helper emotional conditions which are called Vibhavas, Anubhavas and Sanchari Bhavas. Vibhavas means Karana or cause: it is of two kinds - Alambana, the personal or human object and substratum, and Uddipana, the excitants. Anubhava, as the name signifies, means the ensuants or effects following the rise of the emotion. Sanchari Bhavas are those crossing feelings which are secondary to an everlasting mood. Eight more emotional characteristics are to be extra, namely, the Saatvika Bhavas.

Naad

A hearable sound is called naad. The sound which is produced by any medium, reaches and recognized by the ear is ‘naad’. The naad can be produced by three facts: -

By the striking of two objects: Sound of Tabla, Sitar, Benjo, Piano etc.
By the rubbing of two objects: Sound of Violin, Sarangi etc.
By passing one object in to another one: Sound of Harmonium, Flute, Mouth organ etc.

Sound is a mechanical wave that is an oscillation of pressure transmitted through a solid, liquid, or gas, composed of frequencies within the range of hearing.  Sound also travels through plasma. a sound effect is a sound recorded and presented to make a specific storytelling or creative point without the use of dialogue or music. The term often refers to a process applied to a recording, without necessarily referring to the recording itself. In professional motion picture and television production, dialogue, music, and sound effects recordings are treated as separate elements. Dialogue and music recordings are never referred to as sound effects, even though the processes applied to them, such as reverberation or flanging effects, often are called "sound effects".

Rudolf Arnheim

Rudolf Arnheim (1904-2007) was a pioneering figure in film studies, best known for his landmark book on silent cinema Film as Art. He ultimately became more famous as a scholar in the fields of art and art history, largely abandoning his theoretical work on cinema. However, his later aesthetic theories on form, perception and emotion should play an important role in contemporary film and media studies.

The contributors bring Arnheim’s later work on the visual arts to bear on film and media, while also reassessing the implications of his film theory to help refine our grasp of Film as Art and related texts. The contributors discuss broad range topics including Arnheim’s film writings in relation to modernism, his antipathy to sound as well as color in film, the formation of his early ideas on film against the social and political backdrop of the day, the wider uses of his methodology, and the implications of his work for digital media.

Abizarre series of fictitious technical innovations that he had dreamed up. These included:

1) a special camera that filmed scenes in 5 languages at the same time – the camera was equipped with optical filters to select those elements that were compatible with different countries’ tastes; and the film was developed using developing solutions flavoured with tomato sauce for the Italian version, ‘bouillabaisse’ for the French, Bavarian beer for the German, and tea for the English;

2) A technique of recording sound on a thread, for editing by a dress-maker or tailor;

 3) The Erotoscope, a telescope that radiated invisible ultraviolet rays, through which aspecial guardian was able to discover any violations of public morality in the cinema during the projection; the guilty had to pay a fine, according to the gravity of the offense;

4) the discovery of a film bacterium that infected the audience and led to ‘screen-phobia’ – the abhorrence of film screenings – which after further two weeks of incubation becomes ‘screen-mania’, resulting in a considerable weakening of the pa-tent’s cash resources; in the third stage of this disease, the subject experiences an irresistible desire to become an actor, director or production manager;

5) Arnheim also reported the invention of the close-up, or rather, of the conceptual notion of ‘close-up’. The Italian for close-up is ‘primo piano’, which means. Not only ‘foreground’ but also, and literally, ‘first floor’: the ‘primo piano’ was invented by an elderly woman called Emilia Close upper in her old house.

Beyond the humorous dimension of this enjoyable article, its sarcastic – even sardonic – tone shows ascertain resistance to innovations and implies a critique of “talkies” (that is, to the introduction of speech), censorship, star-mania, and formalistic style. At the same time, the article extols the “wonders” of technique and implies a challenge to it: technology must be used to achieve a more artistic result, rather than mechanically reproduce reality.

Haiku

The haiku in A Dictionary of Haiku are arranged into seasonal categories because, for me, a sense of the season is vital to enjoying and understanding haiku. Lacking our system of travelling buzz words, it is very often difficult, or impossible, to know if an individual haiku (and here I refer only to English haiku) is set in autumn or winter. By putting many haiku together by season, it was my intention to let the season mood of one poem resonate with the next one, causing them to have the same vibration indicative of that time of year without the over-use of the actual words spring, summer, fall and winter.

Japanese saijiki have the individual items within a category listed in the arbitrary order of their natural appearance during the season which is often a matter of debate. In Japan, probably 90% of the adrenalin used for writing haiku goes into the arguments about the use and usage of kigo.

By listing the subjects within a category alphabetically, it avoids the above while it creates leaps within the subject matter of a season spanning such a distance so the reader will stop reading at the beginning of the next subject-word. Though I have consulted available kigo lists from the Yuki Teikei Haiku Society of United States and Canada, those compiled by Kiyoko Tokatomi, and Koko Kato's Four Seasons, where have deviated from them considerably. For the Japanese reader and friend/defender of saijiki, the first category, especially will be a push to the senses.

Generally this section is categorized "season" or "climate" and the kigo convey the spirit of the time of year with honoured expressions which imply the emotions we equate with the season. As English writers we too work with these sensibilities but lacking set phrases to stand for them, have had to express these human concepts and emotional states much more subtly. In the English/Japanese saijiki these haiku would be listed as "non-seasonal."

I felt by making a list of essences or moods of the seasons which embody our emotional states relative to that time of year, haiku which do not blatantly state "spring" but which emote the airiness, gentleness, freedom of spring, could be given their rightful place. Many of the kigo for the season/climate category such as "bright skies" or "south wind" could more accurately fit into celestial phenomenon leaving a category free for emotional states, which to me, as a much a part of any season as a bird or flower.

I've borrowed ideas and inspiration from the concept to accomplish goals I had for bringing a number of unrelated haiku together in one volume to increase an awareness of the season for readers and writers. I hope you will find some poems here to please you. May they inspire you to write and treasure your version of your experiences. 

Spectatorship

These structures are inescapable; individuals have no control over their position within them and are subject to their processes. Film theorists saw many parallels between the pleasurable experience of watching a film in a darkened theater and psychoanalytic discussions of unconscious states of being. When film studies began to establish itself as an academic discipline in the 1970s, film theorists looked to other fields, most importantly semiotics and psychoanalysis, for cues on how to best articulate the ways in which film functions as a system of language.

A film, theorists drew on Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan's theories of early childhood development, suggesting that the process of watching a film recreates a similar dynamic between what Lacan called the imaginary and symbolic worlds. Because film language works so effectively to make the viewer feel as though he or she were enmeshed in its world, the spectator is able to relive the pleasurable state of being in the imaginary stage again. Psychoanalytic theories of spectatorship make several assumptions that raise doubts about its ability to serve as a suitable model for understanding film viewing.

First, in this model the spectator is always rendered a passive subject of the film text, subject to its meaning system. This suggests that film spectators do not have control over the ways in which they view films and the meaning they take from them—that, in fact, every spectator receives the same meaning from a film. Also, because Lacan's notion of oedipal development is experienced only by the male child, psychoanalytic theories of spectatorship are pertinent only when applied to (hetero-sexual) male spectators. Furthermore, these theories do not take into consideration cultural and historical variants, implying that all film viewers will respond to film language in the same way regardless of their historical, cultural, and political context.

One of the main paths of research in this area focused on the potential for female film spectators to establish a different type of relationship with films specifically made to appeal to them—referred to as women's pictures, weepies, or melodramas. Because these films feature female characters and focus on female issues, theorists raised compelling questions as to whether this more feminine mode has the potential to challenge male-oriented film language. Following the lead of feminist theorists who debated the assumption that the subject or spectator implied by psychoanalysis is male, other film theorists responded to the psychoanalytic model by contesting its inherent dismissal of historical and cultural conditions, specifically those of race and sexual orientation. The emphasis of these alternative readings was both to argue for an active spectator-ship informed by one's cultural and social position and to suggest the possibility for oppositional or alternative readings that deviate from the dominant i.e.Caucasian, heterosexual, male one set forth by mainstream cinema.

Gay and lesbian theorists have also made significant contributions to the "rereading" of film spectatorship. Teresa de Lauretis, Andrea Weiss, and Patricia White, among others, suggest that lesbian spectatorial desire challenges the traditional heterosexist paradigm, creating a dynamic of desire outside of previously theorized notions of spectatorship. If lesbian spectators are outside of the traditional heterosexual system of desire, then they pose a significant threat to previous theories of spectatorship.

Signifying a departure from psychoanalytic concepts, an increasingly prevalent discussion within film studies of spectatorship focuses on the historical development of audiences in the early film industry. By unearthing archival documents such as box-office records, studio files, and periodicals of this era, film historians have pieced together accounts not only of how audiences responded to early films, but also of how changing audience expectations affected the evolution of the film industry and film language.

Foregrounding

Foregrounding may occur in normal, everyday language, such as spoken discourse or journalistic prose, but it occurs at random with no systematic design. But in literary texts, on the other hand, foregrounding is structured. The immediate effect of foregrounding is to make strange to achieve defamiliarization. When used poetically, words and groups of words evoke a greater richness of images and feelings than if they were to occur in a talkative expression.

Foreground is a term usually used in art, having opposite meaning to background. "Foregrounding" means "to bring to the front." The term foregrounding has its origin with the Czech theorist Jan Mukarovsky It refers to the range of stylistic effects that occur in literature, whether at the phonetic level e.g., alliteration, rhyme, the grammatical level e.g., inversion, abbreviation, or the semantic level e.g., metaphor, irony.

The most common means employed by the writers is repetition. Our attention is immediately captivated by the repetition of the sounds of certain words or by the words they and we begin to analyse the reasons why the writer is repeating this particular sound or word. In the tongue twister, "she sells sea shells on the sea shore" it is plain that 'S' and 'Sh' are foregrounded for their euphonic effect.

Verdonk states that foregrounding is the psychological effect a literary reader has as s/he is reading a work of literature. It is generally used to highlight important parts of a text, to aid memo capacity and or to invite interpretation. In foregrounding the writer uses the sounds of words or the words themselves in such a way that the readers' attention is immediately captivated.