Mani Kaul

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Mani Kaul (born 25 December 1944 in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India) is an Indian film director. He graduated from the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) where he was a student of Ritwik Ghatak and later became a teacher. Currently he is the Creative Director of the Film House at Osian's Connoisseurs of Art, Mumbai.

[edit] Filmography

• Uski Roti (1969)
• Ashad Ka Ek Din (1971)
• Duvidha (1973)
• Ghashiram Kotwal (1979)
• Satah Se Uthata Admi (1976)
• Dhrupad (1982)
• Mati Manas (1984)
• Siddheshwari (1989)
• Nazar (1989)
• Idiot (1991)
• Naukar Ki Kameez (1999)
• Bojh (Burden)(2000)
• Ik Ben Geen Ander (I Am No Other) Nederland 2002
• A Monkey's Raincoat Nederland (2005)
• 'Signature Film' for Osian Cinefan Festival of Asian Cinema (2006)

[edit] Mani Kaul

An Interview by Amrit Gangar

AG: If I have understood it correctly, your life’s and art’s struggle has been to counter the European idea of the Perspective, I mean the mathematical perspective that ‘splits space into object-horizon polarity: the object locates itself in the growth of a foreground, the horizon recedes into infinity.’ How have you gone through this journey, how do you look at this juncture of your life? Of course, your ongoing theory of ‘capturing time without looking through the camera’ which, culminated in Naukar ki Kameez is part of that journey…

MK: In moments of deep affection my mother would use a certain expression to describe the hopeless state of my being: Baudam Chale, Nau Ghar Hile (When the idiot moves, nine houses shake). For its innocent origin, the words were fitting: if I got up to leave the dining table, at least three to four objects shook or fell - the table itself was knocked up and down. My father, on the other hand, drilled the following into my head: Neki Kar, Kuain Mein Dal (Do the right thing, fling it in the well). He was an upright government servant (I mean an ‘officer’) and refused to bow down to the demands of corrupt Indian politicians. Now, as I grew up, my life’s dilemma was simplified when in my mind the two sayings coalesced into one truth i.e., when I realized that I was an idiot set to do the right thing, fling the reward into the well and care a hang if nine houses shook when I moved. The deadly mixture of an idiot doing the right thing became a driving impulse, a powerful creative need, or as Ritida would describe, ‘a blind urge’ in life and work - it propelled (and propels) just about every existential detail of a journey that continues to fascinate.

For a mind so severely in step with chaos, the phenomena of perspective naturally offered small attraction. I mean that point where parallel lines are seen to converge is ultimately a defect in the eye. In the head, I daresay. Things parallel never meet and the right thing to pursue is indeed ‘ananta prayog’, if I may pluck a phrase from your next question. Convergence, where answers and resolutions abound, is a killing field for curiosities, it is an illusion that reduces an infinite universe into a finite domain of rationality, where we feel content to play with cause and effect and imagine an entire future under our control.

‘Not looking through the camera’ is more of a metaphor than a technical device – the objective is that the camera must be freed from the eye. In human body there is nothing more culturally trained than the eye. It can create instant organization out of any chaotic material and there lies the problem. The notion of order turns out to be nothing more than visual obsession. In Europe, in particular, from what I have known after living there for a decade, even hygiene on street and in home is an equal visual issue; cleanliness is an absence of any random (chaotic) element in the imagined visual order. A speck on the floor can for some become a source of anxiety. No wonder the Indian scene must be a shocker to an average European. The question is if chaos can really be entirely wiped out of our existence so that we may live in some symmetrical peace. Tolerance of chaotic developments is not merely a hope for order. On the contrary, visual disruptions are ruptures that open our life to things beyond spatial order. They introduce us to duration (samaya), a pulsating presence of time.

It is ironical that even when the screening of a film happens in time, what absorbs us most is what takes place in that time: the visual information on the screen. Because it can be read, the visual is able to hold both critical and uncritical minds alike. I prefer the word ‘screening’ to ‘screen’ and therefore not consider cinema a visual discipline alone as is widely believed; it is for me first a temporal discipline. I mean the primary material for a filmmaker to make his film is ‘attention’, a factor of time. The level and quality of attention a film is able to generate sets the level and quality of that film.

AG: Your cinematography to me is an ‘anant prayoga’ – experiment-in-perpetuation, I somehow feel uncomfortable with the Euro-American concept of experimental or the underground or the avant-garde cinema. I also find them to be exclusivist. What do you think?

MK: While I was teaching at CalArts, LA last year I had the privilege of watching a series of experimental American cinema. There was even a section devoted to an overview of the history of American experimental cinema. I must say I found a number of films profoundly engaged with fundamental cinematographic issues. However, the abstraction many experimental American filmmakers get involved with does not proceed beyond what one may call literal abstraction. It ends up being descriptive of what is materially abstract – it has a problem in reaching visionary abstraction. A vision is not feasible in a work that is content free. By content I do not mean that which is opposed to form (not that adolescent battle between form and content), by the word 'content' I suggest 'a view of the world' the filmmaker lives in.

I prefer the word parallel to experimental, for experimental presupposes an opposition to that which is established whereas parallel signifies a production of say independent films as equal to the mainstream and not marginalized into any cinematic ghetto. It is a painful personal experience to know that most of my American students must either end up in Los Angeles or else make marginal home experiments as if they were not permitted a voice in the formation of American culture. This of course no reflection on the quality of the work they are able to create. It is not a surprise that there is hardly any large-scale debate between art and commerce in the United Sates of America. The two have been blended or bent into each other: the art of commerce or the commerce of art. Not just in USA but also in the rest of the USA inspired world we live in today. It is indeed beginning to happen here in India too!

AG: Early on you were quite keen on very empirical experiments, e.g. in your first film, Uski Roti, you wanted to discover what was cinematographic in the filming of (a play) a short story your use of two different lenses – 28mm and 135mm; again in your second film Ashadh ka Ek Din, you chose a play and continued this exploration; you pre-recorded characters dia/monologues and played back during shooting; Duvidha remains remarkable for your orchestration of the classical and the folk – their interplay; in Siddheshwari I found dukh ke prakar; what do you think of these explorations. And if you could tell me more about Ghasiram Kotwal, a perfect prayoga film.

MK: Given the opportunity I should like to return to making long films out of short stories. It is an incredible combination. The more elaborate the narrative the greater the diffusion of attention. The Iranian solution of art and commerce dichotomy lies in the choice of utterly simple narratives. Unfortunately the simple can quickly degenerate into the simplistic, which would mean into a sort of sticky humanism. The material you choose to make your art with carries a significant weight in my mind. If I write about an object what my readers will experience is not the object but the words that have made a new, mutated object made of words. If I were to paint the same object it is impossible to exclude the presence of paint that will make the object. A painted apple has its own taste. This rule applies to film as well. If a filmmaker is not versed in making images and sounds speak and in inventing their unique juxtaposition there is little hope - does not matter how far the filmmaker’s mind can travel in the realm of ideas.

Your question is difficult to answer because the last thing I should like to do is to make an assessment of my own work in retrospect. I usually avoid discussions of that kind. Old films are like old love affairs, good or bad, you would stay clear of all that in order to negotiate your present predicament.

AG: Somehow I can’t forget Satah Se Uthta Aadmi. I don’t know why but I still associatively remember the scene of the woman’s suicide in the pond and Bresson’s Mouchette, the girl when rolls down the hill, over the edge and into the water. The ripples, and the way water settles. I’d like to call your cinematography as ‘cinematography of feelings’. Satah Se Uthta Aadmi is remarkable for its deeply sensuous experience, which of course, there in all your work.

MK: The split between the spiritual and the sensuous is a product of an ill-defined modern-day fear. The whole spiritual-sensuous experience once fragmented allows you to consider the spiritual as some strict religious activity and the sensuous as vulgar pornographic one. In other words the real quest for truth is reduced to a conflict of signs. For instance it enough to carry certain signs on your body to be included or excluded from a group. Of course the debased fundamentalist perspective must look only at the surface of life for signs of the sacred and the signs of the profane. Great Bhakti and Sufi movements as we all know have attempted to reconcile the two and repeatedly given us ways to define what humanity learns and forgets as ‘love’. Not just in India but elsewhere in the world too there appears to arise waves of conservatism that take dangerous shapes and positions. Art is not about naming feelings; it is, I think, about a desire to express feelings. That ‘desire to express’ (vivaksha) signals, arouses, provokes thoughts and feelings. A film is not about a thought, it is about giving birth to a thousand thoughts. A film cannot age.

AG: Bresson said, ‘one does not create by adding but by taking away’. The huge mass of so-called art all over the world has been doing nothing but adding to our familiarities, to our information. My question relates to ‘mystery’ in art.

MK: The great master is one of his own kind. Now, do you think Bresson was visual? That will be a ridiculous statement! The man used one or two lenses all his life. Most shots were static or had minimal movements. The models always stood at a medium distance from the camera. The eye-level was of an average human height – neither low nor high. No sharp angles. There was never a question of zooming in and out. The lighting was evocative of an overall environment and the philosophical context he was elaborating upon but never ever expressing something stridently individual – there is nothing in Bresson that can make us call him a visual artist. His shots were ‘ironed’ out as he himself declared. There were no visual creases that could get our attention for their pictorial detail. When compared to him I would say Tarkovsky was a visual artist – he was like some fresco painter dwelling in cloisters during the Italian Renaissance and reborn in Russia of our times. He made meanings possible through an arsenal of visual vocabulary that was directly inherited from the so-called European Enlightenment. Not Bresson.

In another way that was true of Ozu too. But that will get us far into a separate discussion. The suggestion of time in Bresson, of what Deleuze described as realization of time image in his work, is of the greatest importance to the history of cinema. It will take time before we can grasp the significance of Bresson’s work. People wrongly imagine that we have left Bressonian vision behind and gone beyond, that he is old hat by now.

AG: I am also curious to know, and particularly at this moment, how do you reconcile Robert Bresson and Ritwik Ghatak? The two different (contrasting?) philosophies?

MK: They both equally cured me of a sickness called 'realism'.