James Monaco, American film critic and author, argues that 1/24 of a unit, which is the lowest common denominator of film, exceeds the quickest rhythms at which Western music can be performed. In his book, How to Read a Film: Movies, Media and Multimedia, he says, "The most sophisticated rhythms in music, the Indian tals, approach the basic unit of film rhythm as an upper limit."
Like music (and dance), time is a central element of film. Unlike literature, where the reader controls time to a large extent by consuming it at their pace and theatre, where only crude time signatures can be used through the characters' speech, Indian music and by extension dance, revolve around time signatures in the form of rhythm cycles.
Here, of course, we are talking of the most literal presence of these time signatures in dance, music and film. Taal (or Tal, as Monaco spells it) in the case of Indian music and dance, and frame rate (which Monaco calls the lowest common denominator) in the case of film. Rhythm exists in layered forms in both these art forms, but even an examination of the most tangible form of rhythm in these arts shows us why the presence of dance and music in Indian cinema is not simply a cultural or stylistic choice by the filmmaking community. There is a syntactical relationship at the most granular level of form.
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