Thursday, July 7, 2011

Mani Kaul 1944 - 2011


Mani Kaul was the closest thing India has had to an avant-garde film-maker. Let me explain what I mean by that term. The great age of the avant-garde in visual art occurred in Europe between 1900 AD and the outbreak of the First World War. A bewildering number of experimental movements flourished at that time: Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, Cubo-Futurism, Vorticism, Constructivism, Suprematism and so on. Around 1905, Henri Matisse and his colleagues began painting in bright hues that bore little resemblance to the real colours of their subjects. A French critic dismissed them as Fauves, or wild beasts. Two years later, the 26 year old Pablo Picasso painted his seminal canvas, Les Demoiselles D'Avignon. Henri Matisse ridiculed the painting, calling it a hoax; and his fellow-Fauve André Derain said that one day Picasso would hang himself behind that canvas. Their response to Picasso mirrored the outrage of the traditionalist French critic when faced with their own work. That's a feature of the best avant-garde art: it feels very unlike what has hitherto been defined as art, and can't adequately be judged by established standards associated with a given art form.


Mani Kaul confronted a similar situation with his first film Uski Roti, made when he was 26. The film is a straight-out masterpiece. I have no hesitation in placing it among the great debuts of all time alongside the likes of Citizen Kane and Pather Panchali. It also holds a secure place in my list of the ten greatest Indian films ever made. On a sadder note, I categorise it as the last truly great film produced in India. Movies have come close since then: some of Adoor Gopalkrishnan's films, and Aravindan's, and the early Ketan Mehta's; and also Mani Kaul's Duvidha, made two years after Uski Roti, and his last film Naukar Ki Kameez from 1999. But Uski Roti has a clarity and command of medium that sets it apart.
The film was so different from the cinema being produced at the time that even directors outside the sphere of commercial cinema couldn't grasp its achievement. Satyajit Ray detected a "pernicious anaemia" in Kaul's work, a "wayward, fragile aestheticism" that had "led him to the sick bed". Ray was in the position of Matisse and Derain faced with Les Demoiselles D'Avignon. His own cinema had been criticised for its supposed incomprehensibility and tediousness, but here was a director whose work Ray himself found incomprehensible and tedious. The formal experiments in Kaul's work left even the leading lights of parallel cinema befuddled and angry.
It is amusing, today, to witness Shyam Benegal and Govind Nihalani being asked to eulogise Mani Kaul. The media groups all these directors in the category of "1970s and 80s art film makers". The fact is, though, that they belonged to two separate camps -- social realists and aesthetes if you will -- with no love lost between them. Mani Kaul and his colleague Kumar Shahani treated Benegal and Nihalani's work with something close to contempt; and, while I'm not aware of what Shyam Benegal thought of the Kaul / Shahani style, I know Govind Nihalani despised it.
Uski Roti doesn't have much of a plot to occupy its 110 minutes. A woman travels from her home regularly to give her trucker husband his lunch. One day she is delayed and he gets upset. Afterwards, they reconcile. The film's affect is determined by its pace and framing, which is as controlled and unwavering as that of the first two Godfather films. I like to say that, had The Godfather Part II run for thirty minutes less than it did, it would have seemed too long. Luckily it runs for over three hours, which is just right. When I first saw Uski Roti, I was completely drawn in; I found its rhythm mesmeric. However, for those who can't feel the power and inexorableness of the near-stasis, a screening of Uski Roti probably feels like watching paint dry.
To go back to what Satyajit Ray said about Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani, I was a bit unfair to the Bengali master. He mentions Uski Roti only in passing, and concentrates his ire on Duvidha, Kaul's third film. Ray observes that Kaul and Shahani have reduced acting to certain minimalistic gestures, eschewing dramatic cliches, but the gestures they favour, such as the slow turn of head from one profile to the other, become cliches themselves, as do the lavish colours they utilise. This is absolutely on the spot, and became a significant drawback in Mani Kaul's films of the 1980s and 1990s. In cinema, particularly experimental cinema, there's no such thing as a good habit. All habits are bad habits. Kaul's over-reliance on particular gestures and modes of expression was exacerbated by an incursion of symbols in his work. An element of self-parody crept into films like Mati Manas, Siddheshwari, Nazar and Idiot. There's plenty to admire in each of them, but they are a long way from Uski Roti and Duvidha. The beauty in their frames frequently comes across as a form of prettiness rather than an exploration of new visual possibilities.
The low point in Kaul's career was The Cloud Door, part of a series titled Erotic Tales. An actress named Anu Agarwal, popular at the time, played the central character. Since her role involved nudity, the film became something of a media sensation. The Cloud Door is a disaster from beginning to end; a risible interpretation of an old myth about a parrot who tells bawdy tales; a princess who saves it from the king's wrath; and a lover led by the parrot to the princess's bedroom.
Kaul found top form once more with his final film, Naukar Ki Kameez. Hardly screened at all in India, the film marked a return to a fluid, less stilted style. Its easy humour and discernible everyday narrative were refreshing after all those films involving myth piled on legend piled on symbol; and Mani Kaul's old control over pace and framing was evident from beginning to end. In person Mani Kaul was a great raconteur, full of energy and humour. Somehow that side of his personality was absent in the films he made in the 1980s and early '90s.
He directed no films in the last decade of his life, but Naukar Ki Kameez proved a wonderful final act.

10 comments:

Mohammed Musthafa said...

Fascinating read! But could you please elaborate on the Godfather 2 opinion. Why it would have seemed long if it was half an hour shorter? Would love to know.

Girish Shahane said...

Mohammed, first let me say that I'm not 100% certain it would've seemed long, had it been shorter. But the point I'm making is that some shots or sequences have a time which seems appropriate from a utilitarian perspective. Once that is exceeded, the shot / sequence feels like it's gone on too long. But occasionally, holding the shot or carrying the sequence even further makes it seem appropriate in an entirely new way. Few directors have the courage to push things to that level, and the first two Godfather films do.
Right at the start of the first film, there's Connie's wedding reception that goes on for perhaps twenty minutes. That action, including the discussion with the Senator, would be compressed to some five minutes in a conventional Hollywood film. Ten minutes would seem too long. But the fifteen minutes or so that Coppola gives it feel absolutely right.

Anonymous said...

Revisited both Albert Pinto and Maya Darpan on You Tube and I was appalled by APKGKAH and fail to see why it was celeberated when it first came.The characters are all one note caricatures and both the plotting and characterisation is very Bhandarkars. The accents are uneven and there is a lot of hamming at display, specially Naseeruddin shah. But, its the staging which is mostly quite amateurish and once the film has made its ideological point, there is very little else left to the movie. In Maya Darpan characters speak in an affected manner and entirely in non sequiters. Mani and Shahani, to their credit brought Hindi literature to Hindi cinema, i guess in no other language its literature and cinema have had such non-overlapping trajectories.And that includes both mainstream cinema and pulp fiction as well. So they broght the aesthetic of contemporary lit movements like the 'Nayi Kahani' or 'Akahani (Non story) into their cinema and mostly sourced their material from Nirmal Verma , Mohan Rakesh etc. For a more conventional treatment of very similar source material I can point you to Basu Chatterjee's adaptation of Mannu Bhandari's Yehi Sach Hai as Rajanigandha. So a short story which unfolds mostly in the head of its protagonist and is mostly about her insecurities becomes a study of contrast between her two suitors in the movie. Incidentally Chatterjee's debut Saara Akash is closer to the rhythms of Kaul and Shahani's films.

Girish Shahane said...

These are great points; I wish you'd told us who you are :)
The one scene from Albert Pinto that remains in mind is, of course, the one with the unbreakable vase (is it a vase?).
Mani Kaul was definitely at ease with Hindi literature; I'm not as sure about Kumar Shahani, though of course Maya Darpan was written by Nirmal Verma.

nagrathnam said...

Hi Girish,
Have tried to catch hold of duvidha, uski roti & naukar ki kameez but to no avail.
Where can I get it from ?

And a very well written article. Makes me keen to watch his films

Girish Shahane said...

Thanks, Nagrathnam. I watched these films at previews and public screenings in the past. I hope there will be a festival of Mani Kaul's films arranged soon, but I don't know how to view those films otherwise.
I do know there's one print of Uski Roti circulating that's so damaged, Mani Kaul said he'd prefer the film not be viewed at all than be viewed in such poor condition.

Anirudh said...

I have seen only one film of Shahani's -- Tarang -- and am not at all sure of his achievement.

It is as though having dissociated the sign from its referent -- the something in the world (or having acknowledged that dissociation, another way to put it) -- Shahani allows a free play of signs, which are sometimes symbols, sometimes mimetic, sometimes both (theoretically, of course, always both but I am talking of how it affects the viewer) without any tension in the object he creates. His interview regarding the film is far more interesting than the film itself, which is a failure.

In Bergman's Persona, the image on the screen is important for itself, for what it might symbolise and for how it fits into the structure of the whole film. Each shot and scene that is included exists in a deliberate relation with everything else. This creates a tension which is completely lacking in Tarang. I hope Mani Kaul's films are not like that and that these two directors do not constitute a primarily theoretical avant-garde.

Girish Shahane said...

Mani Kaul's films are not like that.

Anonymous said...

I discovered Mani Kaul the reverse way so to speak. I first saw Duvidha @ my first film school and as is generally believed is more like mani film simply because of it "understandablity". And then I see Uski Roti @ a film screening ... and I'm mesmerised to the point of being addicted to it's trippyness. People who swear by Tarantino for Pulp fiction should watch Uski Roti for it's pure, less adulterated and truly indian version which came much before (if I'm not mistaken). And then I re-visited Duvidha and seemed to hate it. I thought Mani kaul went back on his own philosophy of not using cinema as a story telling medium but a temporal medium whereby film is about a film and not merely a story.

Sankeeasever said...

I discovered Mani Kaul the reverse way so to speak. I first saw Duvidha @ my first film school and as is generally believed is more like mani film simply because of it "understandablity". And then I see Uski Roti @ a film screening ... and I'm mesmerised to the point of being addicted to it's trippyness. People who swear by Tarantino for Pulp fiction should watch Uski Roti for it's pure, less adulterated and truly indian version which came much before (if I'm not mistaken). And then I re-visited Duvidha and seemed to hate it. I thought Mani kaul went back on his own philosophy of not using cinema as a story telling medium but a temporal medium whereby film is about a film and not merely a story.