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Before My Eyes (1989)
My favourite Mani Kaul film
This is the Kaul film that left the strongest impression on me. I have been lucky to engage with it 3 times on 35mm.
Mani Kaul's films create a sensory construct around their use of a selection of sounds to create a specific sensorial effect and images to create volume instead of (as in Hollywood) their denotative element of space. His films usually attempt to create an aesthetic where language is used beyond its denotative aspect, into its suggestive and rhythmic tonalities based on Anandvardhan's 4th century text Dhwanyaloka about haiku like poetry forms and the aesthetic of suggestion they create known as 'Dhwani' which means 'suggestive sound.'
Kaul constructs his trademark suggestive sensory bags in possibly his most explicit way. Juxtaposing images of nature with shots of Dal lake taken through a shikara and landscape shots taken with a helicopter or hot air balloon, the centerpiece of the film is an alaap in Raga Shree in the austere form of North Indian music, dhrupad.
Kaul comments on the 'tourist film' nature of his project by having an American musician, Nancy Lesh, play a Western classical instrument, the cello in the austere dhrupad form in the Dagarbani style.
Kaul suggests the becoming through the inflation of a hot air balloon, its sound, the process of colonization as suggested by shots through the front of the Shikara representing the direction of colonization and a Bresson like sequence of horses with what seem to be their warrior- masters. The sensory collapse is denoted through a remarkable shot of the hot air balloon deflating which is where the Pakhwaj or Indian drum joins in. The text on the air balloon plays with a suggestive pun on the word 'Indra Dhanush' which means its textual meaning: (Lord) Indra's bow as well as its banal meaning:rainbow.
The film has a remarkable soundtrack with sounds of birds interspersed together with sounds of water, the hot air balloon and other natural sounds.
The film ends with what is my most memorable film experience: a gradual tilt up from a glacier to show the shadow of the helicopter from which the film is being shot. The delayed machinated sound of the helicopter fades into the credits.
A Desert of a Thousand Lines (1986)
Excellent Kaul rarity
I saw this almost unheard of film at the National Film Archive of India in Pune. Although IMDb lists the year as 1986, the film was completed in 1981 in between Kaul's masterwork Satah Se Uthata Aadmi and his remarkable documentary on the austere form of music, Dhrupad. The film is produced by ZDF and the text written by Vijaydan Detha (author of the text which became Kaul's best known film in the West, Duvidha (1973) and Kamal Kothari and is set in the arid desert of Rajasthan, a setting similar to Duvidha, where two rival clans face off one another in the desert.
The absence of representational detailing and storyline through event logic, makes this Kaul's singularly most difficult film matched only by his later work Maati Maanas (Mind of Clay,1984). Striking is the early sequence where Mani Kaul on the voice-over repeats the words or the utterances (much like 'Rosebud' in Citizen Kane) of 'camel' and 'desert', 'the camel in the desert' etc. The sensorial effect develops until in certain remarkable sequences separated by intertitles Kaul collapses the sensory effect he has carefully developed.
Kaul's studies in Dhrupad, the scale-based improvised form of music that destroys the object of music the raga unlike khayal which builds it or even fetishizes it, create an affected camera aesthetic. Whereas in Uski Roti and Duvidha Kaul moves the camera only 50 minutes or an hour into the film, here we see random wipes creating the impression of on-the spot improvisation, very similar to, but much before what Doyle and Wong attempted in Happy Together(1997).
The film is in between Kaul's remarkable Satah Se Uthata Aadmi and Maati Maanas in terms of film form, the proportion of interiority of the former giving way to the 'road-film' like nature of the latter as the film plays out. The most memorable shot: a pan down from the exterior to constructed interiority of the bed and mat.
It also seems to be an ode to the film technique of Sergei Parajanov
Satah Se Uthata Aadmi (1980)
Kaul's most obscure and most superior
Satah Se Uthata Aadmi is candidate alongside such other works as Chattrabhang and Maya Mrigaya as being one of the most obscure Indian films particularly in the contemporary DVD era. The film on the literature of Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, a left-leaning Hindi author from India's turbulent '60s and '70s, recreates Muktibodh's literary settings quite effectively. However the concerns in both the form and content of the film, including lines from Muktibodh's iconic poem Andhere Mein are adapted by the director to create a work very much in line with his previous masterworks Uski Roti(1969) and Duvidha (1973). In fact the work can be studied as a combination of the two distinct approaches, that of the pure object in Uski Roti and its sensorial effect on a constantly changing society in Duvidha. Kaul starts by appropriating the events according to the text but gradually reduces the narrative signifiers until in the gorgeous factory sequences the spectator is confronted with the written text itself. Kaul had begun his studies in the austere form of Indian music, Dhrupad and used its leading vocalist Ustad Zia Fariduddin Dagar to render (Raga) Bilaskhani Todi. Kaul transforms this form of music into a cinematic idiom where the form emerges first through exacting (calculating) and then by approximations (improvising) A remarkable film by Mani Kaul.