In memoriam

Mani Kaul 1944-2011

MUCH like Robert Bresson in France and Yasujiro Ozu in Japan, Mani Kaul worked all his life on the margins of mainstream cinema. Right from his student days at the Film and Television Institute in Pune, he chose to run the risk of professional ostracism and penury to make films on his own terms. The standards he set for himself were so stringent that even in the eyes of those who were well-disposed towards him he was fated, sooner than later, to sink into oblivion.

And that is what came to pass. Except for his students in India, Holland and the United States – who adored him to the point of worship – he was for all practical purposes a non-person deserving little more than a footnote in the history of Indian cinema. His death, however, provided an occasion for critics and film-makers to revisit his contribution to the medium – an exercise that appeared to be a bit self-serving, an effort, so to speak, to make amends for years of neglect and indifference.

In his very first feature film Uski Roti, Mani, still reeling under the spell of Ritwick Ghatak, his mentor at FTII, made his intentions loud and clear: he would subvert the conventions, norms and conceits of an industry which equated success with box-office earnings, reputation with celebrity status and achievement with a nod of appreciation from the tsars and tsarinas who ruled the roost in the corridors of power and in the world of advertising.

His subversion however went well beyond the juvenile urge to cock a snook at the establishment. It was, after all, the Film Finance Corporation that produced his early works. What Mani did in the first place was to remain steadfastly aloof from the two reigning ideological passions of the day: Marxism with its claims of heady cosmopolitanism and provincial angst that some filmmakers cultivated as a riposte to ‘rootless’ modernity.

Mani drank at many sources: from the Upanishads to Jung and Freud; from the ornate style of South Indian temples to the minimalism of the Bauhaus; from medieval saint poets to contemporary Hindi fiction; from newspapers and magazines to Kafka and Dostoevsky. Not for him the distinction that is often made between the high brow and the low brow. He was par excellence in favour of the no brow.

This is how he would spot an interesting thing or two in Bombay’s masala films. On the other hand, his contempt for directors who chose the safe middle path was withering. In their efforts to avoid the clichés and melodrama of commercial films and in their zeal to convey a social or psychological message with a massive dose of ‘realism’ they were, in his considered opinion, merely arty. That way they could remain grata with the box office and the circuit of international film festivals – an ambition that left Mani cold.

What drove Mani was the compelling need to treat film primarily as a medium to explore form – not purely in a visual sense but as a distinctive ‘language’. That explained his interest in directors like Bresson. The French master believed that cinematic ‘language’ meant creating forms that would enable him to express his thoughts, no matter how abstract, just as in an essay or novel. That way alone would cinema jettison, slowly but surely, the ‘tyranny of the visual’ and the ‘dictatorship of the anecdote.’

The most lucid exposition of this approach is to be found in Susan Sontag’s seminal essay on Bresson published in the early 1960s: ‘Some art aims directly at arousing feelings; some art appeals to the feelings through the route of intelligence. There is art that involves, that creates empathy. There is art that creates reflection.’ This latter art, she adds, ‘promotes distance, disinterestedness, impartiality. Emotional involvement is always, to a greater or lesser degree, postponed.’

If the stories that Mani told did not follow in a strict chronological order, if his characters did not act, if his stunning visuals left even the sentiment of awe suspended in mid-air, it was because he wanted his spectators to think of the medium differently. He wanted them to rise above the tiresome debate over form and content to discover that form in itself was a narrative experience – and not only in a plastic sense. The exploration of form, he cautioned time and again, should not be construed in terms of style – another bogey that, in his eyes, had stunted the evolution of film.

These are admittedly complex issues. But the privileged few who had grasped what Mani tried to do were in absolute thrall of his work. They grasped that his main fount of inspiration were not theories about cinema but music, especially the dhrupad which had learnt over several decades. The dhrupad singer or musician plumbs the depth of every note to express its subtlest nuance so that music retains its sovereign authority without having to convey any ‘meaning’.

I should know. For more than forty years of our friendship, I was privy to Mani’s bonds with dhrupad music. That accounts for the fact that in his life as in his films he was a compulsively contemplative man. However, in the company of close friends, he would let himself go. Indeed, his laughter – a cascade of guffaws – was the perfect counter-point to his serene, poised, elegant and supremely self-assured work. It was, as I would tease him once in a while, ‘a Kaul of nature!’

How the coming generation will view his work is hard to tell. In today’s world of gloss, glitter and instant gratification, his films seem to belong to another planet – if one gets to see them at all. Yet, the standards he sought to achieve, the sheer scale of the scale and depth of the ambition that drove him have no parallel in this history of Indian cinema. That is why his work is unlikely ever to lose its shine and relevance.

Dileep Padgaonkar

 

* Dileep Padgaonkar, a former editor of The Times of India, was a friend of Mani Kaul and an unabashed admirer of his films. The last project that Mani worked on – but could not complete due to a painful and debilitating illness – was a film adaptation of the author’s book, Under Her Spell: Roberto Rossellini in India.