VOL.4 ISSUE 4
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Memories of Mani Kaul JULY 2011
FILMS DIVISION BRINGS YOU th
12 MUMBAI INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL(MIFF-2012) for Documentary, Short & Animation Films 3rd to 9th February, 2012
Participate and win award worth Rs. 63.50 lakhs MIFF- 2012 will have following Sections: I) International Competition Section: Categories
In addition, following awards will be given from the Competition Entries: a. Best Debut Film of a Director b. Student Film Award c. Jury Award d. Critics Award e. Best Film / Video of the Festival Award (For Producer only) III) Information Section IV) Retrospectives / Special Packages V) Marketing Section
a. Documentary Film (upto 40 minutes) b. Documentary Film (above 40 minutes) c. Fiction (upto 70 minutes) d. Animation II) Indian Competition Section: Categories a. Documentary Film b. Fiction (upto 70 minutes) c. Animation
Films eligible are … 1. Entry in International Competition Section Only films made in India and Abroad in 16mm / 35mm/ Digital format between 1st September, 2009 and 31st August 2011 are eligible. 2. Entry in Indian Competition Section only film made in India by an Indian citizen in 16mm 35mm / Digital format between 1st September, 2009 and 31st August, 2011 are eligible. 3. Same film cannot be entered in both section. 4. Films entered / screened in earlier M.I.F.Fs and shorter versions / revised versions of films already entered will not be eligible. FOR MORE DETAILS & ENTRYFORM: You can access our websites www.filmsdivision.org , www.miffindia.in or you can obtain the Entry Forms from our nearest Offices and Branches of Films Division Please remember the cut-off date …… Last date for receipt of entry forms, entry fee and related documents / publicity material with Digi Beta (PAL only) /
DVD (All Code) for purpose of selection in Competition Section is extended to 17.10.2011 Note: (a) Entry by Indian Film Maker or Film entered within India only Non - Refundable Entry Fee of Rs.1,000/-(Rs.One Thousand Only) may be paid by Pay Order / Demand `Draft Only in favour of Accounts Officer, Films Division, Government of India, Mumbai payable at Mumbai (India) Entry fee will not be accepted in any other form. (b) Entry by Foreign Film Maker or Film entered from abroad only Non - Refundable Entry Fee of US $ 50/- may be paid by Demand Draft in favour of Accounts Officer, Films Division, Government of India, Mumbai payable in Mumbai (India) only or send by using SWIFT code mentioned below under intimation to Films Division, Mumbai. "State Bank of India, Pedder Road Branch, SWIFT Code No. SBININBB532 A/C No. 10366538051 - Pay and Accounts Officer, Films Division, Mumbai"
Please rush your entries to: DIRECTOR
MUMBAI INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL(MIFF) for Documentary, Short & Animation Films
FILMS DIVISION Ministry of Information & Broadcasting Government of India 24-Dr. G. Deshmukh Marg, Mumbai - 400 026, INDIA Tel.: 91 (22) 23513176, 23516931, 23513633 Fax: +91 (22) 23515308 / 2351 1008 E-mail: miffindia@gmail.com, miffindia@miffindia.in Web Site:www.filmsdivision.org , www.miffindia.in
In This Issue 21 A Requiem for Mani Mama “Jaipurwali ladki” TANUJA CHATURVEDI recalls the special bond that she shared with Mani Kaul at the Pune Film Institute and later in life.
25 His Last Assignment ARUNA VASUDEV and NEVILLE TULI recall the time that they spent with Mani Kaul and the contribution he made to the Osian Cinefan Film Festival.
30 Remembering Mani Kaul Mani Kaul may have been a visionary filmmaker but his warmth as a person touched all those who came in contact with him. Here friends and colleagues remember the simple qualities which made him such an endearing person. Memories of Mani Kaul Mani Kaul was a totally uncompromising filmmaker who never sought popularity but assiduously pursued his own vision of cinema. His own version of true cinema led to Kaul being admired by the more adventurous Indian and European critics and often adored by the film students he taught, but largely ignored by the public. Documentary Today pays homage to this visionary filmmaker who passed away on July 6, 2011, at the age of 66 years,
04 Mani Kaul will live through his students Noted Hindi poet, essayist, short fiction and script-writer UDAYAN VAJPEYI pays tribute to his guru.
08 Master of the visual PARTHA CHATTERJEE writes an obituary on the departed master of cinema and in doing so reveals several hitherto unknown anecdotes from his life.
11 The Invisible Man of Indian Cinema
35 Tributes Noted critics KHALID MOHAMED, GIRISH SHAHANE, DEREK MALCOLM and RADA SESIC pay rich tributes to the genius of Mani Kaul.
45 Chris Marker at 90 Chris Marker, the writer and director of such influential films as La Jetée (1962) and Sans Soleil (1982), turned 90 in July this year, but he shows no signs of slowing down. One of the great cineastes of our time, he is also one of the most private persons. He hates publicity and rarely makes public appearances. This is a rare interview of the legendary French filmmaker and photographer taken eight years ago.
50 A Scholar and a filmmaker Documentary Today pays tribute to Bhagwandas Garga who was an internationally-reputed film scholar and documentary filmmaker.
58 The Killing Fields of Sri Lanka
Indian audiences found his films too European while the foreign audiences found them too culturally-rooted in India. SRIKANTH SRINIVAS analyses the master's work.
Is the Channel 4 film on the mass scale ethnic killings in Sri Lanka doctored? DT reports on the raging controversy.
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Seven Days In August
Festival News
Mani Kaul was only one of the two Indians – the other being Satyajit Ray – invited to present their work at the prestigious Robert Flaherty Seminar. Curator L. SOMI ROY recalls the time he curated Mani's work at the Seminar.
Festival reports on the Kerala Film Festival, the Jeevika Livelihood Festival and the Festival of Emerging Cinemas.
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From The Editor’s Desk Documentary at MIFF 2010. And when he spoke he said something which delighted us. Recalling his association with Films Division Mani said, “Films Division was a place … (where)… we could show each other films, criticise and fight about cinema. It was an environment where documentary directors met and it provided a kind of platform where you were able to show your work, hear criticism, get together and think.”
Late Shri Mani Kaul was dear to all those who met him. He may have made some of the most difficult films in Indian cinema but the man himself was uncomplicated and simple. He had a good sense of humour which made him come up with some of the funniest remarks in a deadpan fashion – very typical trait of his personality. He had a special place at Films Division. We continued to produce his films and some of his greatest landmarks in documentary are with us. He made his first film with Films Division when he came out fresh from the Film Institute. He cut his cinematic teeth on Homage to the Teacher (1967), Forms and Designs (1968) and During and After the Air Raid (1970). And then came Uski Roti which established his reputation. He continued to make films for Films Division not making his technical colleagues conscious of his international reputation and stature. The Nomad Puppeteers (1974) followed and one could make out that he had found his stride. He continued to make films for Films Division (Chitrakathi in 1977) till he hit the high spot in the 1980s, making a series of brilliant documentaries which redefined the genre: Arrival (1980), Dhrupad (1982), Before My Eyes (1988) culminating in Siddheshwari (1989). Even after he went abroad he stayed in touch, turning up at the Mumbai International Film Festival which he had helped to structure and strengthen over the last two decades. We last met Mani when he accepted an invitation to speak at the seminar on Redefining The 2
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Giving hope for the future Mani said, “I think that, if you really want to empower documentary filmmakers then we need to open up and we need an institution and that institution, I believe, is Films Division. That's a place that is so beautiful and so big and it is meant to do this actually. It is meant for us, the filmmakers.” We are sad that Mani is not here to share this brilliant vision of the future with us. And indeed, we dedicate this issue to the man who showed us what cinema is really meant to be.
D.P.Reddy Editor D.P.Reddy, I.A.S. Executive Editor Sanjit Narwekar Assistant Editor Anil Kumar N. Publicity & Promotion A. K. Maharaja Production Co-ordinator Pankaj Ahuja Photographers S.S. Chavan, D.S. Naik Printed at Akshay Enterprises A1/221, Shah & Nahar Industrial Estate, S.J. Road, Lower Parel (W), Mumbai – 400 013 Tel. : 24948608/09/10 Published by Films Division 24, Dr. Gopalrao Deshmukh Marg, Mumbai – 400 026 Tel. : 2351 0461 / 2352 1421
Memories of Mani Kaul
Mani Kaul was undoubtedly the Indian filmmaker who succeeded in radically overhauling the relationship of image to form, of speech to narrative, with the objective of creating a 'purely cinematic object' that is above all, visual and formal. He was born Rabindranath Kaul in Jodhpur, Rajasthan in 1942 into a well-connected Kashmiri family. One of his uncle's was the well-known actor-director Mahesh Kaul. Another uncle was the stylised mainstream actor Raaj Kumar. Mani joined the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune initially as an Acting student but then switched over to Direction. He graduated from FTII in 1966. Mani began his film career playing a small role in Basu Chatterji's Sara Akash (1969) – probably as a tribute to his initial choice of career (acting) – and then made his first fiction film Uski Roti (1969). The film created shock waves when it was released as viewers did not know what quite to make of it due to its complete departure from all existing Indian Cinema, in terms of technique, form and narrative. After that there was no looking back. One brilliant film followed another: Ashad Ka Ek Din (1971), Duvidha (1973). All ahead of their times and now widely regarded as the first formal experiments in Indian Cinema. At that time, however, they were all violently attacked in the popular press for dispensing with standard cinematic norms and equally defended by India's aesthetically sensitive intelligentsia. When he could no longer get finance for his fiction films he turned his attention to the non-fiction format – in his mind, they were all cinema – and directed a series of brilliant genre-defining documentaries: Arrival (1980), Dhrupad (1982), Siddeshwari (1989). The fiction films continued to be made: Satah Se Uthata Aadmi (1980), Nazar (1990), Ahmaq (1992), Naukar Ki Kameez (1999). When he could not get finance for either he turned to teaching and garnered a huge following of students and admirers. The genius of the man just could not be contained till Death called a halt … The following is a humble attempt to capture an iota of the man they called Mani Kaul … DOCUMENTARY TODAY
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Mani Kaul will live through his students By Udayan Vajpeyi slow film. Seen from the perspectives of the cuts or narrative events, etc. such an observation seems to be not incorrect. But perhaps this is a wrong way of seeing or experiencing film. Mani in this and in his later films too, tried to invent various paces or what in music is called layas to bring out the nature or swabhav of his actors and also of characters. He was more interested in the nature rather than in the natural. Natural acting or the socalled natural pace of film depends critically on a certain notion of the nature. It is an idea about nature and not the reality of nature. Ritwik Ghatak … Mani Kaul's first guru.
1 To write on Mani Kaul in the past tense is an impossible task. He was my guru in the traditional sense of the word. It so happens that the Guru never dies. He remains alive in the being of his student. Mani, in this sense, is very much alive in the beings of his students. He will remain so as long as the vision that he inculcated in his students remains alive. He will go on living in his students of cinema, in his students of literature, in his students of music. In other words, he will continue to live in his students of life. He himself was somebody who always held his teachers in very high esteem. He would never forget to remember his teachers like Zia Mohiuddin Dagar or Ritwik Ghatak in almost every conversation that you would have with him. He felt extremely grateful to his teachers, something that his students always felt and will always feel for him. I write, whatever I do, feeling him somewhere inside me.
2 Mani's films have a reputation of being difficult. A strange common perception is that his films are difficult to understand. Such claims are made
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mostly by people who do not want to question their own mode or paradigm of understanding when they are faced with a unique work of art. I will, in my own way, try to propose what Mani's films try to do. This will be my own attempt to understand his cinema as a lover of cinema and not as a critic of it. It may sound strange but let me confess that, from my childhood, I have a deep love for cinema but have never wanted to make a film. Mani Kaul's films try to make the viewer “feel” what can be called Time. His is not, what Roberto Rossellini called, “the cinema of pretty images”. It is, I repeat, the cinema of Time. But this is not the chronological time of history frozen in some idiomatic form but the clay of which all the living and non-living things are made of. It is through the fibers of this time that the entire existence has come into being. He always attempted to bring the substance of time into the arena of the experience of his audience. His is the aesthetics of Time and not of space. In a sense his was not the cinema of spectacle of space but of the movement and experience of Time. Such an aesthetics was in place in his very first film, Uski Roti. It is known to be a very
Mani in his text, Bound/Unbound wrote: “Sensation as a material of preverbal perception follows a course of perennially coming into form but never reaching entirely formed state. This unformed condition is a reason why the in-describable workings of the preverbal deeply reflect the spontaneous nature of the subject/object they emanate from. It is inconceivable to act-out this unformed spontaneous charge…” To bring out the true nature of an actor or the ambience of the film, or what Mani called the pre-verbal experience of the actor or the space, the director has to invent various ways of weaving time or creating various configuration of the temporalities in an attempt to free the cinematic image from the burden of the linguistic formations. It is through these configurations of temporalities that the audience are able to experience Time, the clay of which this whole life is made of and not only life but death too. Is it a coincidence that the other name for Time is Kaal which also means Death. In other words, in Mani's films we experience our death, meaning thereby that there we feel our mortality and through it we come to realize that in us which is immortal, which remains itself in all of us.
3 A deep understanding of India's performing arts played a significant role in Mani's life and in the making of his films. He was not only a great teacher of Dhrupad music but was, in fact, a wonderful performer. He never gave a public concert but those who have heard him sing in private know what a wonderful singer he was. He learned Dhrupad from Zia Mohiuddin Dagar who not only taught him to sing and play the Veena but also taught him to teach music. Mani took a lot from the experience of his teacher and used it in the making of his films. I will cite an example. When he was young, Zia Mohiuddin Dagar was a part of the orchestra for one of V Shantaram's films. He used to visit the studio where the film was being shot and would often wonder why there were so many retakes in the shooting. And he was right – from the point of the music, particularly Dhrupad music, it is impossible to repeat there. When he told this to Mani, he immediately understood what Dagar Sahab was saying and from then onwards he never ever did the same shot in the same way twice. Then there were no so-called NG (“Not Good”) shots in Mani's shooting. All shots were potentially OK shots. NG shot went out of the lexicon of his film making.
Zia Mohiuudin Dagar (seen here in Dhrupad) taught Mani an important lesson which he adapted to cinema
4 There is significant place of the random in Mani's practice of cinematography. Random is what was not planned in the shot. Robert Bresson would create a mechanism and, while he took a shot, he wanted this mechanism to break open allowing space for something to take place of its own accord. In fact it was the breaking of the mechanism that he had created for the shot was what he considered to be the grace. Mani found his own unique way of allowing the divine to make its appearance in his shots. His way was
influenced by his own philosophical traditions. He would allow the random i.e. the unplanned in the shot to enter the shot of its own accord. Such accidents were of great significance to his film making because perhaps they allowed the unformed, non-idiomatic the so called unuttered but utterable to enter the shot and make it vibrant, to bring about that sensuous feeling that we experience in almost all of his films whether it is Siddheshwari or Dhrupad, whether it is Duvidha or Idiot, whether it is Satah Se Uthata Adami or Naukar Ki Kameez.
5 He was very fond of Van Gogh's paintings. He would see them for hours together. In fact, it was he who asked me to go and visit the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam a few years ago when I had gone to Rotterdam to stay with him. “You must see his works! He is not only a wonderful painter but has brought something unique to the tradition of painting!”
Van Gogh's Harvest … Seeing the “fieldness” of the fields
A few days later I went to the Van Gogh museum with one of his Dhrupad students (my Gurubhai) Dilip Ramanath and spent almost one whole day looking at Van Gogh's marvellous paintings. When I returned home, I was full of Van Gogh's electrifying brushstrokes. What I loved most was the manner in which Van Gogh applied his brush-strokes. It is because of such DOCUMENTARY TODAY
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the other to be able to create such music. It is truly, what in the tradition is called margi art. This word was first used by a tenth century musicologist Matang. He saw all arts-forms as either margi or deshi. Later margi forms were called classical and deshi were called folk. But if one goes into the etymology of margi, it seems to be more appropriate than 'classical'. Margi, this word has come from mrigaya which means hunting. Marg means the way or ways one takes for hunting (mrigaya). Now for hunting to take place, one has to invent new ways for hunting. Accordingly the margi art-forms are those which are incessantly inventive.
Nasir Aminuddin Dagar … another margi talent.
brush-strokes that he ends up painting not the tree but treeness, not the sky but skyness, not the field but fieldness. Van Gogh saw the world as made only of various processes and not of objects. I told Mani all this and he heard me with great interest as he usually did “Did you see the painting with Almond trees?” he asked. Many years later, I once told him that I had acquired DVDs of some of his films. Would he be interested in having copies of the films? “No!” He retorted bluntly. I was taken aback. I knew well that he had no DVDs or prints of any of his films. There was a silence for about thirty seconds on the phone and then he spoke. He told me that for his kind of films, the materiality of the films is as important as the illusion of film itself. It is between the materiality of the celluloid and the illusion that is carries that the film lies. For him the material on which the illusion is created is as important as the illusion. I immediately understood. Like Van 6
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Gogh, I thought! There, too, the painting lies between the materiality of the colours and the images that they give rise to. Once one makes the DVDs of works of filmmakers like Mani Kaul, the essence of the cinematic experience seems to be lost. Or at least gets diminished. This vision is in complete consonance with the relation of the earthly and the divine in Indian philosophical tradition, particularly in Adwaid Vedant where the materiality of the world is never discarded, as in Plato, because it is through this materiality, maya that the divine is incessantly making its presence felt.
6 The Dhrupad musician in Mani played more than one role in the making of the kind of films that Mani is known for. He was able to understand that the deeper form of Dhrupad can, to a great extent, help in inventing new ways of making cinema. Dhrupad is an endlessly inventive musical form. One has to go on inventing one chhand after
From this point of view Paul Klee is as much a margi artist as Kavalm Narayan Panikkar, Cezanne was as much margi as Nasir Aminuddin Dagar. Mani's cinema is a truly margi cinema because it always tries to find new ways of arriving at its form. Perhaps this is also one of the reasons why there are no fixed clues to understand such a kind of cinema. The viewer has to engage himself with the art all the time to be able to enjoy it deeply. Such a cinema is margi in another sense. It proposes new forms of temporalities in its texture. I have a feeling that Mani got this sense from his understanding of Dhrupad. In Dhrupad also various forms of the temporalities surface. There is no fixed direction in which it moves. The musician has to go on inventing various modes of its movement. In the similar way Mani's films do not have predestined notion of temporality in them. Therefore their form is usually quite fluid – like Dhrupad. You feel as if you, too, are participating in their making. He never ever presented a completely made cinematic object to his audience. Instead his style of filmmaking was such that the audience was the integral part of their being. And to my mind, this is a quality of a truly great artist. He/she create spaces in his/her works so that his/her audience is able to participate in its creation. Instead of presenting a complete form such artists
are able present 'potential forms', forms which seem be to arriving at their whole. Take for example Siddheshwari. It moves freely into the life and imagination and mythology of and a r o u n d t h e t h u m a r i s i n g e r, Siddheshwari Devi. It does not propose any rigid form to that life. Instead, it allows that life to flow freely in the cinematic space of the film. This allows the audience the freedom to weave his or her own Siddheshwari. It is amazing to see how many temporalities float freely in that film, creating as many chhandas as possible and thereby allowing various kinds of insights to emerge. What is presented here is not exactly the Siddheshwari as she was but Siddheshawari as she could be. It is not the fixed past of Siddheshwari that the Mani's film is proposing, it is the fluid future that it is allowing to unfold.
Shastra is somehow quite different from theory. Theory, in an extremely broad sense, tries to explain a work of art, tries to find the philosophical basis, if any, of the art whereas shastra tries to find the possibility of a new practice of art. Shastra has two levels. One is highly philosophical where it envisages the deeper philosophical connotations of art. There is other level too. This is the level where it tries to propose a new way or ways of practicing art. Whatever Mani has written on cinema is more of a shastra and less of a theory. All his discussions of art and cinema were attempts to arrive at a newer practice of cinematic art. Somehow I think that there were two great shastrakaar of cinema in last fifty years. One was Robert Bresson and other was Mani Kaul. Their films and writings on films open new ways of getting engaged with cinema as an artform.
7 It is often said that Mani Kaul was some kind of theoretician of cinema. Or that he loved theory. I do not think so. He was not a theoretician in the European (or call it, modern) sense of the word. He was, what in Sanskrit is called, a practitioner of shastra. I am using this word in the same way as it is used in Kaamshastra or Arthshastra.
8 Mani's filmmaking was such that it never lead to any kind of convergence (and therefore to any kind of climax) – neither in the way the image was formed nor in the composition of the sound track nor in the way the narrative of the film unfolded. His liking for Russian novelist Dostoyevsky was
precisely because of this: he, too, wrote in a way that the narrative did not converge on a certain end. Thus Dostoyevsky and Mani were able to undo the fixed notion of hope in their works. Their works are neither full of hope nor are with it. They are indifferent to the notion of hope. Instead of formatting their works in such a way that they gave rise to a certain hope which, in turn, would redeem all, their works attempted to underline the presence of the totality of universe in each of their actors/characters. From their point of view each person lives in a time and space of his/her own as Yogavashishta envisages. Mani's work only illuminates such a truth.
9 Mani was a great teacher as we have already noticed. This was so to my mind because he could evoke enrichment in his students. Enrichment or better still samriddhi, coincidently, is not transactional; it can neither be given nor be taken. It cannot be found in capital markets. It can only be evoked. Mani could and did evoke such an enrichment in his students and in all those people who met him. His films did the same with their audiences. They evoked enrichment, samriddhi of being in them. I feel that this enrichment is actually the presence of prakriti that we all carry in us. When we are faced with a great presence or a wonderful work of art, we start experiencing this prakriti in us, which means that we start experiencing that we are not only individual selves but the totality of the self which creates and experience the pleasure of creation, which is present in each particle of dust and irrigates each and every thing that exists or seems to exists.
Robert Bresson … a great “shastrakaar” of cinema.
(Udayan Vajpeyi is a noted Hindi poet, essayist, short fiction and script writer whose extended conversation with Mani Kaul was published under the title of Abhed Akash. An English translation of the monograph An Undivided Sky is under print.)
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Master of the visual By Partha Chatterjee MANI KAUL passed away on July 6, an hour past midnight. Cancer claimed him. He was a film-maker who swam against the (main)stream ever since he made his debut in 1969 with Uski Roti, based on a Hindi short story by Mohan Rakesh. It was splendidly photographed in black and white by K.K. Mahajan, a fellow student from the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune. Uski Roti was an idiosyncratic work but touched by passages of originality. The actors spoke in a monotone and in the eyes of many, used to the tempo of 'conventional' films, the pace was too slow and wholly inappropriate considering it was about the life of a truck driver and his wife. When first screened at the Regal Cinema in New Delhi in 1972, as part of a film festival featuring the government-run Film Finance Corporation's productions, it puzzled and even irritated many of the viewers.
photography, with a 32mm (probably Kinoptik) lens, and rendered all the more beautiful because of it, revealed an innate understanding of lenses and lensing, that is, the ability to capture on film the image seen in the mind's eye by the choice of an appropriate lens on the camera.
Seen through the mists of time, one remembers its emotion-laden images, for instance, that of the truck driver's beautiful young wife waiting with his food in the shade of a tree. The close-up of her enigmatic face, photographed against all the norms of classical cine
Kaul had the gift of creating emotion on screen simply by choosing the right lens and the right kind of light, natural and artificial. He would, in his charming manner, say that actors always tried to do too much in front of the camera because they forgot that
Uski Roti reveals an innate understanding of lenses and lensing.
Naukar Ki Kameez strikes a balance between spontaneity and subtlety.
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other elements in the frame, like light, choice of the lens, other visible objects, not to forget incidental sound, the space thereby created through this harmony or the lack of it, were what made it so eloquent. He did not like loud acting, and when he did allow actors to 'perform', as he did in his warm, witty, touching comedy Naukar Ki Kameez (1998), his last film, he got them to find a balance between spontaneity and subtlety. He always wanted the actor to integrate into the mise-en-scene. Kaul could, despite his wariness of Hindi commercial cinema actors, appreciate those who were good. Long ago, sipping tea at the terrace cafĂŠ in Triveni Kala Sangam in Delhi, he had expressed his admiration for Geeta Bali, an actress from the Hindi cinema of the 1950s whose acting struck an effortless balance between pathos and humour. He thought she had an incandescent presence on screen. He had a particular vision of the cinema, and one remembers him observing in Hindi, more than a decade ago, film tees aur chalees ke beech banti hai (a film acquires its visual authority when it is shot between the optical range of 30mm and 40mm in 35mm or the 1:1:33 aspect ratio).
French film-maker Eric Rohmer, who passed away at 89 in Paris earlier this year, had expressed similar sentiments regarding the kind of visual language he liked to use in his films. Was Mani Kaul only a visual stylist or a master craftsman? One remembers being deeply moved by certain scenes in Ashad Ka Ek Din, based on Mohan Rakesh's play on the Sanskrit poet Kalidas' life and his love for Mallika. This black-and-white film, eloquently photographed by K.K. Mahajan, had a moving scene showing Mallika feeding milk to a deer. Even more moving was a scene towards the end when Kalidas, in late-ish middle - age, tells Mallika, who wants to “turn back the clock� that it was impossible do so because life was too immense to come in their grasp (Jeevan bahut bada hai, Mallika). The camera, caressing the faces of the lovers, moves up to the sky with scattered clouds adorning it. After all these years, another image also comes to mind, that of a horse seen from the top, through a small window, cantering away into the distance. The heart is wrenched at the thought of Mallika waiting in vain for news of her Kalidas, now a court poet of the king of Ujjain. Neither Uski Roti nor Ashad Ka Ek Din were commercially released. By then (1972), Kaul was a married man and a father and was desperate to work. Distinguished painter Akbar Padamsee came forward to help. He loaned him his 16mm Bolex camera with a 16/86mm Switar zoom lens and gave him just enough rolls of Kodachrome film, a very slow emulsion rated at 25 ASA (daylight) and 40 ASA (tungsten), to shoot Duvidha, his third feature film and his first in colour. It was based on a story by Vijay Daan Deta, a Rajasthani folklorist and writer. Duvidha, which came out in 1974, was one of the early feminist works in Indian cinema. It was about the young wife of a young merchant, who is away on his travels, sharing her home and bed with a ghost who is the spitting image of her husband. Kaul told his story with humour, elegance and an
underlying seriousness. The making of Duvidha also marked Kaul's parting of ways with Mahajan. Mahajan, who had won the National Award for Best Cinematographer in 1969 for Uski Roti, had declined to photograph the film because it was being shot on a Bolex and under amateur conditions. Kaul, stung to the quick, decided never to work with him again. It was perhaps then that Kaul supposedly made the acid remark, Mai toh kisi paanwale ko cameraman bana sakta hoon (I can make a cameraman out of any old paanwala). Vain as this remark sounded then, it was not far from the truth. He caught hold of Navroze Contractor, a fine stills photographer who happened to be passing under his window one morning. The making of Duvidha is a saga in itself. Kaul and his tiny unit landed up in Rajasthan with practically no money. Financial stringency forced him to improvise for all he was worth; he did so, brilliantly. He had four Sunguns, lights of 1,000 watts each, usually used for newsreel coverage. The reflectors were home-made and he taught villagers to hold them. The brightness of his lights was often affected because the voltage in rural Rajasthan was
very low. Unfazed, he went through the shooting with unbelievable confidence. He told Navroze Contractor, who had done projects for the Ford Foundation and was a stringer for Life magazine, that motion picture photography was but an extension of still photography and that there was nothing to worry about. Kaul turned every hurdle into an advantage. There was no money to do sound, so he reduced dialogue to a bare minimum and used the aesthetics of the silent cinema to great effect. He cast Akbar Padamsee's half-French daughter, who knew no Hindi, as the silent bride. He managed to complete the shooting and practically shamed the National Film Development Corporation into releasing Rs. 2,50,000 to complete the film. L.V. Prasad, a self-made man and owner of Prasad Productions and Prasad Film Laboratories in Chennai, was so impressed that he set up an Oxberry animation film stand for Kaul, who then proceeded to copy the 16mm Kodachrome footage frame by frame onto 35mm negative film himself and make a beautiful 16/35mm blow-up copy possible. Apart from its quiet, subtle narrative, Duvidha was widely appreciated for its visual quality.
Raisa Padamsee played the silent bride in Duvidha.
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Kaul had been a favourite pupil of the stormy petrel of Indian cinema, Ritwik Ghatak, when the latter was the Vice Principal at FTII. Perhaps Ghatak saw something of his own idealistic youth in the impetuous young Mani Kaul. Kaul once said: “Humne unki seva usi tarah se ki thi, jaise ek chela apne guru ki karta hai ” (I served Ritwik Ghatak with the same devotion as a disciple serves his master). He recalled going to Bombay (now Mumbai) once with Ghatak to meet Ravi Shankar, the great sitarist who was to compose the music for a Bhojpuri film that the former was to direct and which later fell through. Ravi Shankar was oiling his luxurious locks when Ghatak and Kaul arrived at his flat unannounced. Ghatak asked him to stop being so effete and virtually commanded him to play, which he did exquisitely for the next 45 minutes, until he broke a string. From Ritwik Ghatak, Kaul imbibed a mulish streak of stubbornness which became his greatest strength. He disowned a documentary on women that he was directing for the Films Division of India because a voice-over on a shot of women breaking stones by the wayside had been added without his knowledge.
Documentaries formed an important part of his oeuvre. For the Films Division he made Arrival, a film on migrant labourers from villages arriving in Bombay like so many sacks of potatoes. Those who accuse him of being apolitical ought to see it. Arrival startled many people who thought of him as a decadent aesthete. Its powerful visuals proved that he could indeed inspire the most cynical of hacks to rise to the occasion. The film's came rawork was done by a Films Division employee who kept calling Kaul for years after the film was made, to express his admiration. Chitrakathi, another Films Division production, is remembered with affection after so many years. Some of his later shorts and documentaries had brilliant patches but were too idiosyncratic to attract a wide audience. Mati Manas on terracottas had several poetic moments, including a tracking shot of terracottas standing on the ground filmed in reverse. Before My Eyes, made for the Jammu and Kashmir government well before things collapsed in the State, for promoting tourism, became in Kaul's hands a delightful visual poem both personal and abstract in intent. Siddheshswari, on the light classical
singer from Benaras, Siddheshswari Devi, did not work for this writer. It was too pretentious to be effective; it was neither biography nor fiction but Kaul's peregrinations into her life and music that led to a labyrinth. He made a most impressive comeback in 1998 with Naukar Ki Kameez, based on Vinod Kumar Shukla's novel. It was a comedy with serious undertones that had the drollery of the early Chekhov stories enlivened by a pinch of Dostoyevskian humiliation of the recently married protagonist, a minor functionary in a provincial government office. It is a great pity that the film was not released commercially for it would have had a fairly large audience in India and abroad. He was rueful about the way he, and other serious film-makers in India, including the stalwart Kumar Shahani, were treated by the establishment. Shaadi ho gayi, bacche ho gaye, bacche badey ho gaye, lekin hum ko ye log abhi bhi young filmmakers kehte hain (We got married, we've had children, the children have grown up, yet they still call us young film-makers), he used to say. With time, a certain mellowness had set in. Kaul taught cinema at Brown University in the United States in the 1990s and was very happy with his interactions with students, most of whom were from other academic disciplines and were pursuing film-making as an additional pleasure. He loved music and was a pupil of the rudraveena maestro Zia Mohiuddin Dagar, who lived in Bombay. He learned Dhrupad from the master of Dagarvani. A skin allergy prevented him from playing the veena, so he learned to sing Dhrupads tunefully. He made a long documentary on Dhrupad in the early 1980s. Mani Kaul is survived by his two former wives Lalitha Iyer and Miriam Van Lier, daughter Shambhavi and son Ribhu from his first marriage and son Rumi and daughter Neisha from his second marriage.
Arrival … its powerful visuals startled the audience.
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(Originally published in Frontline dated July 16, 2011)
The Invisible Man of Indian Cinema By Srikanth Srinivas you. The position is its meaning,” he says.
Too “Indian” for Europeans and too “foreign” for Indians … Mani Kaul (right) at the Berlin Film Festival. Behind on left is the German filmmaker Reinhard Hauff.
I guess Mani Kaul could be called, with qualifications of course, the invisible man of Indian cinema. The home audience might find his films too 'European', too alien, and too cryptic, and might prefer instead the realisthumanist works of an artist like Ray. Foreign viewers, on the other hand, might complain that they are too culturally-rooted, too alien and too cryptic, and instead opt for a 'universal' filmmaker like Ray. Indeed, neither Kaul nor his pictures make any claim to 'universality'. They are, undoubtedly, steeped in Indian classical art forms like how the Nouvelle Vague films were, with respect to the European classical tradition. Many of these films are adapted from literary works in Hindi, have a profound relationship with Hindustani music and exhibit an influence of representational forms from the country. In fact, his cinema, if not much else, is about these very forms, both in terms of subject matter and their construction. These films, to varying degrees, are literature (The Cloud Door), painting (Duvidha), architecture (Satah Se Uthata Aadmi),
poetry (Siddheshwari) and music (Dhrupad). Right from his early documentary Forms and Design (1968), which sets up an opposition between functional forms of industrial age and decorative ones from Indian tradition, Kaul makes it, more or less, apparent that is he is interested in the possibilities of a form itself more than the question if it can convey a preconceived thesis. Like Godard, Kaul starts with the image and works his way into the text, if any. Perhaps it is classical music, and specific strains of it, that exhibits strongest affinity with Kaul's cinema. The director has mentioned that the trait that attracts him to it the most is that there are elements that just don't fit into a system, notes that slip away and could find themselves elsewhere in the composition. Similarly, Kaul, admittedly, edits his films like composing music, moving a shot along the time line, beyond logic, meaning or chronology, till it finds its right place, in terms of mood, rhythm or whatever parameter the director has in mind. “And I know that when the shot finds its place, it has a quality of holding
He has, time and again, spoken elaborately on the systematization of fine art by European Renaissance and the need to find out alternate modes of expression free from its constraints. Convergence, be it in the perspective compositions of painting, the three-act structure of literature, or the climaxing of motifs in music, has always been an area of concern and investigation for him. (He admires Hum Aapke Hain Kaun (1994) for its insistence on spending a quarter hour fretting about a pair of shoes, at the expense of plot.) Consequently, fragmentation becomes the central organizing principle of his aesthetic. Like Robert Bresson, one of his greatest influences, Kaul prefers filming parts of the body – hands, feet and head – and positions his actors such that they are facing away from the camera or are in profile, thereby disregarding the convention that the face is the centre of one's body. (Kaul's sketches, in that sense, are direct antithesis to the portraits of Renaissance.) Accordingly, because the face is tied to the notion of a unique identity, Kaul's actors are stripped off all natural expression and behaviour and de-identified. Many of his shots are 'flat', without any depth cues or perspectival lines. (He traces this to 'perspectiveless' Mughal miniature paintings and cites Cézanne as another major influence.) None of the characters are Enlightenment heroes having a firm hold on their world. The narratives are decentered and distributed across multiple perspectives. This resistance to convergence principles of Renaissance has also led him to radically reformulate his relationship to the spaces he films. He believes that filmic and social spaces have been conventionally divided into 'the sacred' – the perfect realization of DOCUMENTARY TODAY 11
Made when he was 25, Mani Kaul's first feature Uski Roti (1969) is what one might call a poetic film about waiting. Kaul takes a simple premise for the film – a woman who goes to the highway everyday to give lunch to her husband, whom she, oddly enough, addresses using his full name – and strips it down to its skeleton, diverting our attention from what is represented to how it is represented. (Kaul likens this process to a painter emphasizing his brush strokes.)
Bresson's attention to close-ups inspired Mani Kaul … a shot from Pickpocket
an ideal, carefully framed and chiselled, with all the undesired elements out – and 'the profane' – accidental intrusions, random fluctuations and irreligious interruptions; that the moment a filmmaker looks through the viewfinder, he 'appropriates' the hitherto 'neutral' space to compose based a set of principles, polishes it and turns it into a 'sacred' space. Kaul, on the other hand, has increasingly been resistant to 'perfecting' an image or space, instead, treating space as something neutral and unclassifiable in itself and concentrating on the tone, feeling and emotion of a shot. (This is also what Godard does in his latest work, where spaces and images of all kind are given equal importance.) In his later films, he has asked his cameraman not to look through the viewfinder while filming. (This does not mean that one shoots blindly. The director has elaborated in his writings on how this could be practically implemented. “What needs to be determined by the director and the cameraman is the act of making the shot: attention being that aspect of time that deeply colours the emergent feeling in a shot.”) He has, admittedly, been open to intrusions and one can see stray elements, like cat mews appearing unexpectedly, in some of his 12 DOCUMENTARY TODAY
shots. Likewise, none of his “stories” converge, or even have a linear progression, and, in fact, keep diffusing and opening up new possibilities. The following are short notes on a few of Mani Kaul's films. Ashad Ka Ek Din is missing because I haven't seen the film. Also missing are his shorter documentaries, too numerous to be included. So then here goes …Uski Roti (A Day's Bread, 1969)
Bresson's influence is palpable in many aspects of filmmaking here: the delayed editing of shots that parenthesizes action, the de-dramatization of scenario, the atonal, unaccented line delivery by actors without forced expressions, the emphasis on objects rather than concepts, the numerous shots of hands and faces that have a grace of their own and, of course, the central, suffering woman. There is even a direct homage to Pickpocket (1959). Additionally, Kaul's own training in short documentaries seems to have made its mark here, given how keen the film is on documenting purely physical activities such as kneading dough, which becomes the central gesture. (This would be elaborated upon in the short A Historical Sketch Of IndianWomen (1975)). Utilizing a plethora of Ghatak - influenced wide
The face as landscape … Gurdip Singh in Uski Roti.
Bewitchingly shot like a Dovzhenko film (and composed like CĂŠzanne's still lifes), and impressively designed, with a simple yet striking interplay of red and white, Duvidha builds on both Kaul's feminist leanings and highly personalized aesthetic. Satah Se Uthata Aadmi (Arising From The Surface, 1980)
Duvidha ... a Godardian image of a woman in a red saree against a white wall.
angle shots, in high-contrast monochrome (if only the film had used European film stock, Pedro Costa would applaud), a hyperreal sound mix and a highly idiosyncratic grammar (horizontal asymmetry, characters facing away from camera, no reaction shots), Kaul makes an arresting if not totally underivative debut. Duvidha (In Two Minds, 1973) Kaul's most acclaimed film Duvidha (1973) opens with a rather flat, Godardian image of a woman in a red saree standing in front of a white wall, staring determinedly into the camera, as high-pitched Rajasthani ethnic vocals grace the audio. Like the frozen image of Truffaut's juvenile delinquent, it suggests a predicament addressed to the audience. Based on a folk tale, Duvidha speaks of a love that is beyond time and space. The presence of the ghost, which falls in love with the new bride, is not an exotic delicacy served to us but a given. And so is the 'story', which is read out verbatim to us by the narrator, freeing the film from the burden of storytelling, so to speak, instead allowing it to experiment with the imagery. Employing a number of photographs, freeze frames, jump cuts and replays, which illustrate the film's
central notion of temporal and geographical dislocation (and save on the budget) and manipulating time like an accordion player, Kaul weaves a narrative where the past, the present and the future are always in conversation. (The ghost is simply referred to as 'Bhoot' (ghost), which is, of course, the word for 'past' as well). The predicament of the title, then, involves a choice between the spiritual and the material, the bride's past and future, her childhood and adulthood, her freedom and honour and her love and security.
Satah Se Uthata Aadmi (1980) begins with a shot of a serene lakeside landscape being abruptly shut off from view by a closing window, following which camera gradually withdraws deeper into the eerily empty rooms of a dilapidating house where the central character of the film – a poet – resides. This notion of the artist being far removed from reality, and retreating further into himself, resonates throughout the film. Based on the deeply personal texts of Gajanan Mukthibodh, Satah Se Uthata Aadmi presents a world where the revolution has failed, idealism has died out in the name of practicality and the role of intellectuals and artists has been vehemently questioned. Rekindling the question of theory versus practice, the film attempts to examine if residing is certain social frameworks to make a living amounts to a sellout of oneself. (Like GodardTruffaut, Ghatak-Ray, does Kaul have anyone in mind?). This fragmented,
Satah Se UthataAadmi withdraws deeper into eerily empty rooms.
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Nazar has the same stylisation as Bresson's Une Femme Douce … Shekhar Kapur and Shambhavi Kaul in Nazar
post-socialist state of society that the film depicts – through its vignettes of urban Indian individuals – is reflected in the Malick-like disunited voiceover which spans three characters and which conversely, unites the narrative together. A remarkably sustained tone poem, with brooding surreal passages (including a hypnotic documentary sequence inside a factory and an unabashedly allegorical finale) and minor experiments (sections from Muktibodh's texts displayed on screen), reminiscent of Godard's work of the 90s, rife with strong verticals and perspective compositions (which is odd, given Kaul's resistance to it), Satah Se Uthata Aadmi is both Kaul's most stringent and most affecting work. Dhrupad (1982) Dhrupad (1982) finds Kaul studying the eponymous classical music form, specifically the Dagarvani variation of it practiced by the Dagar family, with whom the director has close associations. Apparently, the music the film examines is one without any form of notation since, reportedly, many of the tones don't fit into existing notational systems and the transmission of tradition is done purely orally. (The vocal performances that we hear exhibit such malleability of human voice that one is convinced that
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no instrument can aspire to emulate its timbre.) This trait of not conforming to the systematized models of Renaissance is of special interest to Kaul, who has long been aware of the need to discover non-reductive, discursive modes of expression. Likewise, Dhrupad, like many of the director's pictures, eludes categorization or compartmentalization. Part historical study, part religious documentation of performances, part experiment with cinematic time (the sublime shot that spans a sunrise invokes contemporary 'landscape filmmakers' like Benning) and part exercise in thematically conglomerating classical Indian art forms – music, sculpture, architecture, painting and cinema – the selfreferential film gives a vivid picture of what makes Dhrupad so striking, with its numerous mise en abymes and fractals. Like in the films of Resnais, with whom Kaul shares an affinity for 'fragmentation', the camera glides through the Mughal style corridors and courtyards, in which the veteran artistes of the Dagar family perform and teach – while the soundtrack takes off on its own – evoking a sense of history that is living and breathing. Siddheshwari (1989) With Siddheshwari (1989), Kaul turns the typical artist-profile film (produced
by Films Division) on its head. Not only does it eschew straightforward documentation of the titular singer's artistry, but it almost completely does away with basic biographical details to arrive at something more exhilarating and revelatory. Instead of presenting music, the film presents the idea and experience of music. A bona fide avant-garde feature that amalgamates multiple timelines, geographies, realities and narrative modes, Siddheshwari brings together various art forms like literature (the chapterized film opens with a table of contents!), music (shifts in ragas, reflected in the filmmaking with hue and rhythm changes) and theatre (both in its production design and its emphasis on role-laying throughout). The camera is perpetually moving – dollies and cranes galore – as if reading an ancient scroll and acts like a force of time that moves Siddheshwari Devi through landscapes and times. The soundtrack, similarly, is a dense network of speech, whispers, vocal and instrumental music ad recited poetry. Siddheswari Devi is portrayed by a number of women, including some who enact her biography, some who depict her sensorial experiences and Devi herself. This is only one of the reasons I'm reminded of Hou's The Puppet master (1994). One of them is Mita Vasisht, whom we see at an archive, at the end, watching tapes of Devi singing, possibly to prepare herself for the role. Like The Taste of Cherry (1997), fiction and reality bid adieu, with Kaul restoring things back to their original places, as though returning what he borrowed to create his greatest work. Nazar (The Gaze, 1989) Adapted from Fyodor Dostoevsky's short story, Nazar (1989) bears natural resemblance to Robert Bresson's shining adaptation of the same, A Gentle Creature (1969) in its characteristically stylized direction of actors and the sacrificing drama for rhythm, mood and an intensity of observation. Kaul replaces the generally bright interiors of Bresson's version of the couple's high-rise housing, which cordons them off from
the rest of the world and which is emphasized continuously in the film, with a low-lit (barely any artificial light) semi-dungeon marked dominated by black-blue and brown shades, suggestive of the moral malaise that marks both the psyche of the male character and the space the pair lives in. The ever-wandering camera hovers over characters who appear to be stationed in space – with barely any movement – as if frozen in time. Kaul's ultra-minimal chamber drama, too, starts off with the suicide of a woman (Kaul's daughter Shambhavi, an avantgarde filmmaker herself), although it is only alluded to by her husband (noted director Shekhar Kapur), who tries to recollect to us what might have moved her to commit this act. Kapur's stream-of-consciousness delivery of lines is exceptionally fragmented, as if he's trying to wrestle information from deep recesses of 'actual and convenient' memories. This narrative within the narrative is the man's way of vindicating himself; of blinding himself to the fact that 'ownership' is what that mattered to him all along and that he is, like the antiques that he sells, a man stuck in time. Naukar Ki Kameez (The Servant's Shirt, 1999)
Naukar Ki Kameez (1999), as it appears, is a 'conventional' narrative film, by the director's standards, with that generally-revered 'naturalistic' acting and speech, its relatively generous use of musical score and a general willingness to present a string of events, if not a plot. However,it is also one of Kaul's most experimental features (Kaul couldn't ideally be classified as an experimental filmmaker) and employs a fragmented narrative structure (which keeps spreading out to new directions) with constant chronological jumps back and forth, an absurd, magic realist tone (which reveals a tenderness towards his characters and his geography) and a potpourri of filmmaking modes (including canned laughter of sitcoms and internal monologues of low-end TV dramas). Set at the fag end of the 60s, Naukar Ki Kameez, which centres on a lowermiddle class clerk, Santu, in a government office, and his wife, for most part, is a simple metaphorical tale of upward class mobility and its psychological and social impediments. Santu is a bundle of contradictions; he is conscious of class divisions and the need for revolution and yet harbours hope for social-climbing, he recognizes the need to respect the
other, yet casually oppresses his wife, whom he genuinely loves as well. Like Aravindan'sOridathu (1986), it gives us a nation with an identity crisis: one caught between extreme Westernization and dreams of a revolution – between tradition and modernity – posing a question to itself: To wear or to tear? Een Aaps Regenjas (A Monkey's Raincoat, 2005) More fascinating than the fact that A Monkey's Raincoat (2005) revitalizes the age-old question of purpose of art and its relationship to the real world is that low-end handheld DV, which the film is shot on, helps put nearly all of Kaul's theoretical principles and inclinations into practice: the idea of not looking through the viewfinder while shooting, the rejection of the dichotomy between “sacred” and “profane” spaces, the notion of camera as an extension of one's body and movement and a deep-seated interest in the experience of filming over filming itself. Adopting a loose, instinctive and continuous mode of shooting, Kaul inquisitively records an assortment of young painters at work at two places – Biennale, Venice and at their residency in Amsterdam, Netherlands – often interacting with them as he works. We see that Amsterdam is something of a dream destination for budding artists, a melting pot of cultures, where they can at least hope to find an audience. Though never taking potshots at art or its reception, Kaul's film gently mocks an art scene where artists seem to be fond of 'playing' artists, with a set of personalized eccentricities and selfimposed clichés. As he samples their creations, he wonders in the voiceover if there is any purpose to art at all, given that it has been able to solve not one of the world's problems. Kaul realizes that the question is moot and questions if art for humans is what a raincoat is for the monkey: it might not stop the rain but at least it helps you to recognize it and shield yourself from it.
EenAapsRegenjas (A Monkey's Raincoat) revitalises the age-old question of the purpose of art and its relation to the real world.
(Originally published in his blog The Seventh Art/June 2011) DOCUMENTARY TODAY 15
Mani Kaul at Flaherty
Seven Days In August Four of Mani Kaul's films were shown at the Robert Flaherty Seminar between August 6 and 12, 1994 thus making him the second Indian to be presented at the prestigious seminar – the first being Satyajit Ray in 1956. L.SOMI ROY, who curated the films at the seminar, recalls the seven days he spent in Mani Kaul's company. Pages from his diary ‌
Mani Kaul photographed with students at the 1994 Robert Flaherty Seminar.
Saturday, August 6, 1994 I see Mani Kaul across the room. It is the hospitality lounge of the 40th Flaherty Film Seminar held at Wells College in Aurora, upstate New York. We exchange pleasantries: I inquire about his room, talk about cashing travelers checks, tell him about Go Takamine, an Okinawan filmmaker from Japan, another guest at this Flaherty, I thought he would like. I tell him Flaherty has no screening schedule. All 130 participants see every film screened, in three sessions starting at 9 in the morning and ending around midnight. There are lengthy and sometimes impassioned discussions after each film. Pleasantries are 16 DOCUMENTARY TODAY
good, I tell myself, before breaking to him that Federal Express has not been able to trace the prints of his films Dhrupad and Siddeshwari, which were coming in by from India. I cannot gauge his reaction. I realize I do not know him very well. I had met him a couple of time before, the last in New York in the Fall of 1992 when I asked him if he would attend the Flaherty Film Seminar I had been asked to program. There are speeches at the opening night program, and in the Flaherty tradition of paying tribute to past guests who have passed away in recent years, we screen Marlon Riggs' Tongues Untied and Sadgati (Deliverance) by Satyajit
Ray. The program brings together Eric Barnouw and Patricia Zimmerman's retrospective of films from the 40 years of the Flaherty and my program on films and videos from Asia and the Asian Diaspora. I am touched by Eric's recollections of the 1956 Flaherty when a young Satyajit Ray created a stir by screening his first film Pather Panchali (1955) and, for the first time, his latest film Aparajito (The Unvanquished, 1956). Sadgati comes on. One of Ray's two short films he made for television, it is rarely seen. It is about an Untouchable who dies after being forced to do some back-breaking chores for a Brahmin. The film is powerful, showing a more engaged Ray. Mani leaves the auditorium. He
has seen the film, I think. It is also a completely different kind of Indian cinema, I tell myself, recalling Ray's negative reaction to Mani's films. Later, Mani tells me he does not feel very well. He has not been taking his medication for the last few days. I am alarmed. Will he want to go back? I tell him to rest and get an early night's sleep, but not to miss Go Takamine's film in the morning. Sunday, August 7, 1994 One package has arrived in Memphis. The papers for US customs are not in this package and it cannot be cleared. We don't even know how many other packages there are. Films Division, the producers of both films and Federal Express in India have given different answers. And the computers are down in India. I am glad that the Flaherty does not publish a schedule. I want to introduce Mani's films with the music film Siddeshwari. I schedule it for Tuesday, together with his latest The Cloud Door (1994) a short film from the German series Erotic Tales to give more time for the shipping to be worked out. I start my program with Takamine's Untama Giru (1989). Mani is elated by it. A real filmmaker, he says of Go Takamine. What a gift to his people, he
The Cloud Door ‌ part of the Erotic Tales series.
exclaims when he learns that Okinawa isn't at all like in the film and Takamine had made it all up. He is feeling much better. Film seems to have restored him. But still anxious about his health, I tell him he doesn't have to attend all the films, but that he should see Leaving Bakul Bagan in my first Asian Diaspora program evening, a video by Sandeep Ray, a young Indian American. Mani seems to trust my recommendation. He loves it. See what our young people can do, he says to me. Listen to an older man, he later tells
Sandeep Ray, Listen to what my teacher told me: Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani... How can you make great films with timid, weak names like those? Hear my name -- RIT-WICK GHA-TAK! Take my advice and use your middle name, Mani goes on. From now on you will be Sandeep BHUSHAN Ray! And you will not be confused with the other Sandeep Ray, the filmmaker-son of Satyajit Ray, I add referring to the filmmaker-son of Satyajit Ray. Most people seem to like my program so far. But I wonder about the people who withhold their comment. I wonder about their silence. Monday, August 8, 1994 Federal Express confirms there are only two packages in the shipment. At least one film is here. I hope it is Siddeshwari. But they still cannot get it through customs. How about opening with Uski Roti? Mani is uncertain. I made it twenty-five years ago; I was only 26 then! he cries. To make matters worse, the print has no English subtitles.
Uski Roti ‌ indulgent and irrelevant?
Uski Roti (A Day's Bread, 1970) was extremely controversial when it was first seen in India. A complete departure from anything in Indian cinema, it is a non-narrative, DOCUMENTARY TODAY 17
discussion, One must work with one's instincts. But he is not entirely convinced by video. An art form must ultimately be about itself, he says. I tell him to wait until he sees the videos by MakoIdemitsu from Japan, to be shown later in the program.
The real life Siddeshwari ‌
experimental first film made by a 25-year-old Mani Kaul. The film was almost universally denounced as selfindulgent and irrelevant. I myself remember it as rather boring when I saw it in college twenty years ago. Did such a film have a place in Indian cinema? Another new cinema was emerging in India, led by Mrinal Sen's Bhuvan Shome (1969), Girish Karnad's Samskara (1972) and Ankur (1973) by Shyam Benegal. Largely inspired by the realism of the great masterworks by Satyajit Ray in the 1950s and early 1960s, and reacting to the formulaic commercial Hindi film from Bombay, these films aspired to social relevance, artistic integrity and commercial viability. Uski Roti was the complete antithesis to this New Indian Cinema. Even Ray, whose films always broke even or made some money, came down on the side of commercial viability as a benchmark of relevance. Would not the taxpayer's money spent on Uski Roti been better used bringing electricity to even one village in India? Mani had been asked at one point. It was a cruel and hurtful question, Mani says to me, As if I did not want the people of India to have better lives. I haven't seen Uski Roti in ten years, Mani says, I cannot go through that again. 18 DOCUMENTARY TODAY
I tell him, rather hopefully, that Siddeshwari might still make it in time. Mani would rather wait another day, till Wednesday, rather than start with Uski Roti. I consider it. I can change the schedule as I go along. I show some more work by young Asian artists in the US and Canada. Mani likes ShaniMootoo's tapes and I Blink ... Three Times and The Island with the Striped Sky by the young Korean video artist Seungho Cho. I agree with him, Mani says after the
In the cafeteria, hallways, by the lake, I start getting some critical comments about my program. Most seem to like the program but are missing that Flaherty experience of critical discourse leading to a group intellectual catharsis. I am too formal; I am not directing the discourse enough; the Asian Diaspora artists selected are too young and unformed; what did I understand by the term "Diaspora"; there aren't any second or third generation Asian Diaspora artists; there are too many gay and lesbian works. I say the choices are very personal. I say that I am not trying to document the Asian Diaspora but to express it through these filmmakers. I say I am trying to give younger artists a chance to attend the Seminar that I am not interesting in regurgitating a "Golden Hits" of Asian or Asian American film and video. I remember deliberately and consciously programming new and relatively unknown Asian American and Asian Canadian artists alongside
‌ and the one recreated on celluloid by Mita Vashiht.
more mature and established Asian filmmakers. I don't quite remember why. I join Mani and a group of filmmakers in the lounge that night. We talk into the night. At 3 in the morning, I call Federal Express, pleading, threatening and cajoling, for them to bend the rules and release the package they have. I rejoin the group. Someone in the group has brought down a boom box. A cassette of tanpura music emerges from somewhere. The drone from the Indian instrument fills the room and Mani begins to sing. It is beautiful; I feel I am one with a moment of pure creation. Mani pauses. A young Asian American filmmaker asks if he is singing for himself or for the group. Mani is stunned. We are all stunned. You won't even allow me my little fantasy? Mani asks. I am only trying to deconstruct it, says the filmmaker, a recent graduate of an American film school. I realize he does not know Mani Kaul. All the filmmaker guests have screened at least one film, except for him. I decide I cannot wait until Wednesday. I will screen Uski Roti the next day. Tuesday, August 9, 1994 Good news, bad news. The package is here. It is Siddeshwari. But the last reel is in the other package. We consider our options. Show the last reel on tape? Show it incomplete? We decide to stick with Uski Roti. At least it will be chronological. As we walk up the hill to the auditorium, Mani does not want to talk about the film after the screening. I tell him the audience here has seen a great deal of experimental film and video. He is still unsure. I introduce Uski Roti. I give a brief story line and describe the film's innovations in flashbacks, the use of lenses and the stretching of time. Mani is up in the projection booth. The print is gorgeous. K.K. Mahajan's black and white photography glowed in hues of black and silver. One or two people leave in the first ten minutes. The rest stay. I watch, rapt, waiting with the
Dhrupad ‌ capturing the moment of creation.
young heroine of film as she waited by the roadside for her husband to pick up his lunch as he drives by in his bus. I enter her mind as the film folds and unfolds upon itself. Reality, imagination and memory fuse. I do not hear Mani come into the auditorium. He sits behind me. That's John Abraham, the director, as the beggar, he whispers. He was my first assistant. I took that shot. That's my voice in this shot; I dubbed it. It is the excitement of a twenty-five -year- old. The film ends. The audience applauds. Mani stands up and says he would like to discuss the film later. Questions start anyway. I give in. This, after all, is the Flaherty Film Seminar. What was the story about, shoots George Stoney. He is pacified with a written synopsis. Then the other comments start: I didn't understand a word of it but I felt I understood it. I don't care if I did not understand it, it was so beautiful. I was mesmerized by the film. It was like poetry. Mani is still apologetic. He recounts the negative reception the film received in India twenty-five years ago. He notes that his film did not make it into Eric's book on Indian cinema. He even ends with a selfdeprecating joke. Mani leaves amid applause.
One young writer approaches me, furious at Mani's joke. It was unnecessary, the film was beautiful, he says, defending Uski Roti from its creator. In the lounge that night, I see Mani surrounded by young filmmakers, artists, teachers. I do not know what they talked about. I call the shipper at 2 a.m. The second package will be here in the morning. Wednesday, August 10, 1994 Both Dhrupad and Siddeshwari are here. I decide to screen Dhrupad next and close the seminar with Siddeshwari. We screen more work by Go Takamine and Mako Idemitsu. My program has begun to take a shape, an organic character as a whole. The Flaherty catharsis has not happened yet.I feel I am not delivering. According to Flaherty folklore, a film or video maker cries about this time after presenting a work. Maybe the programmer will weep at this seminar, I say. That will be a first, says Kathy High. I decide to move The Cloud Door to a late night screening by itself. It is short, but I can't believe it took a year to DOCUMENTARY TODAY 19
now young artists know more than they do. A young filmmaker says, I know I will not make your films. They are very different from the work I do, but there is something beautiful, something in your work that I want very much. She trails off, unable to find the words. You don't need my permission, Mani says to her. If you feel you need it, you have it. Later, I go up to the filmmaker who had asked that question and she bursts into tears. So, a filmmaker did cry after all, I say to myself, but from inspiration, not from having her work savaged in critical discourse. And I remembered why I had programmed young emerging filmmakers with great experienced artists.
Music echoes through the ancient fort of Gwalior ‌ a still from Dhrupad.
make, says Mani. There has been some comment that the retrospective and the Asian programs are working like two different programs. Patty, Eric and I move films and videos to form a new program drawn from the retrospective, Asian Diaspora and Asian short works. If some issues need to be discussed still, we decide this will be the chance. This will be for Thursday night. I talk with all the filmmakers. Nick Deocampo advises me that I should direct the discussion and elicit responses with a defined goal in mind. I go to bed early, convinced. Thursday, August 11, 1994 I wake up, sure that this was not what I wanted to do. I felt films had too much mystery for me to try to fit them into an intellectual discourse with an objective that I was very unclear about. I also learn at breakfast the Flaherty experience had happened the night before, much like a birth after very long labor. It was during one of the retrospective programs. I feel a burden lift from me. And I had slept through it. We screen Dhrupad. No subtitles again but it is even less of a problem. The music of the Dagar Brothers enthralls the audience. The camera sweeps 20 DOCUMENTARY TODAY
through the deserted halls of the Gwalior, expressing the curves of the architecture of the ancient fort of Gwalior. Mani discussed his camera techniques and colour theories. He sings for the audience, illustrating the music he has tried to capture on film. One person points out the resonance of the receding pillars with the scales of Indian music. Friday, August 12, 1994 I am about to introduce Siddeshwari. Eric motions me over and asks about Mani's earlier comment about being excluded from his book on Indian cinema. I point out that the book was written in 1963 before Mani made his film. But I did mention him in the revised version, he says. Later in New York, I look it up and discover it is in a footnote. Siddeshwari unfolds quietly. Watching this film about Siddeshwari a legendary singer of thumari I recall Mani's earlier comment and realize it is also a film about film. It is perfect. The audience loves the film. Mani discusses his film. (Bresson?) I remember Spottiswoodes's textbook on cinema from my student days, now terribly outdated, he says. But I remember something from the preface, he continues, and that is: An artist does more than he knows. It seems to me
I would like to repeat something Mani told me earlier this morning, I begin to say. But Mani jumps in. My films have been shown in almost all major film festivals. But today, after twenty-five years, he says, I feel I have finally found my audience for my films. But I am a little frightened, he adds hastily, for it is good for a filmmaker to have a little bad reputation. Mani gets a standing ovation. Only two Indian filmmakers have been so honored and received at the Flaherty Film Seminar. One was Satyajit Ray, the other is Mani Kaul. In India, Mani's films have been criticized by many people including Ray, all these years. Ray came to Flaherty in 1956, the year this Flaherty programmer was born. It seems fitting yet ironic that the 1994 Flaherty Film Seminar opened with a tribute to Satyajit Ray and ended with a standing ovation for Mani Kaul. But I still wonder what happened to film discourse in those 38 years? (Son of the noted Manipuri litterateur M.K.Binodini, L. Somi Roy is a New York based arts producer working on transnational media projects on regional cultures. As a film and media curator, he specializes in international filmmakers exchanges and Asian, Asian-American and nonfiction film. He divides his time between New York City and Imphal, where he runs IMASI, the trust in honour of his mother.)
A Requiem for Mani 'Mama' By Tanuja Chaturvedi Track in zoom out, zoom in track out… Mani Mama, Mani Mama, Mani Mama… This ditty sung to the tune of a then popular Hindi film song from a Subhash Ghai film by all FTII students. It amused Mani no end. We were celebrating just one of the shots in Mani's vast oeuvre. Images jumble and leap… Leaping orange flames from a log fire, the high-pitch tremolo of the crickets, the speaking silence of the wilderness. Sitting smack in the middle of the Ranthamabor forests where I lay my eyes on this large man with big deep eyes for the first time. Dental Dilemma, a silent exercise we cut on pic-synch. Tall actor performing toothache. Walking to the girl's hostel in FTII and this tall, striking, vital man walking
with his band of chelas/ admirers. And he sets eyes on me and rumbles, “Jaipur ki ladki. Kaisi hai tu?”(The tu being an acknowledgement of our common muluk). Later it would turn to aap now in acknowledgment of my typical-film school-student-duh question. His voice sonorous, deep. The large, patrician nose. The handsome, powerful profile, the drawl,“Main swaant sukh ke liye film banata hoon.” Then turns full face and gazes into my eyes, “Swaant sukh samajhti hain aap? Tulsidas kahte hain jis sukh ka ant swayam mein hi ho.” And there would be a silent ripple. He turns back to profile shot, slinging one arm carelessly on a vacant chair. Large, muscular arm.Big hands.The perfect pose.Charisma oozing. I suspected he was a bit of an actor still. Mani wearing a tomato red shirt post his Amsterdam life, sitting crosslegged at our house, regaling us with
his endless repertoire of self-digs and flashes of his observation about life. To use words about a Man who only spoke the language of visuals is rather daunting and tough. In my little koop-mandook (the frog's well), the name of Mani Kaul first filtered from Fateh Singh Rathor, the Tiger man. Fattaji, as I called him, nursing an unconcealed crush on him spoke and spoke about his school friend from Jodhpur who 'makes movies.' When I look back now, his school friend Mani and he shared a lot in common. A vitality, stylishness, both performers, both passionate. Mani about his Cinema. Fateh Singh about saving his Tigers. Both these adbhut men have been felled by cancer. Fateh Singh went before him. My Father was posted as Collector Sawai Madhopur and after his office hours we would drive down 6-8 kilometers and be in the deep jungles of
The fount of all cinematic knowledge … the Wisdom Tree on the FTII campus.
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would be fine. What clinched going to FTII was their supreme confidence as they assuaged the fears of my Father. Film Institute is a nice place, nobody will eat her up. And then Bhaiya is there to keep an eye on her. Imagine! Mani Kaul keeping an eye on the latest Jaipur export! But Maa ke gaaonwala Mama hi hua na? 'Mama' Mani became and that's how he stays for me.
Shooting films is a tedious job … Mita Vashisht in Mati Manas.
Ranthamabor. I was studying for my 12th boards, having recently lost my Mother. Papa and I couldn't stick being inside a house in evenings. Fattaji felt there was no future in studies and I should go into movies like Mani Kaul. And one evening Mani was there. Mani was very wan, distant, aloof. Fattaji told me later that he was having a lot of trouble putting together a movie…. which later got made: Duvidha. But once the daaru started flowing, Mani and Fateh Singh sang their childhood songs, limericks, ditties. The orange flames leaping, the long shadows of the trees dancing. Calling Mani 'Mama' is a very personal feeling for me. We came from the same state. The same city, Jaipur. The city till then had sent 2 people into the haloed doors of the Film & Television Institute of India. Mani Kaul and Asrani, they would say with huge pride. My Father was getting good bad-vibes from all our relatives at my decision to join FTII. Then one day Papa told me his buddies, two ladies, were coming to check out whether I would make the grade and also to assure him that I was not going to wolf-land. They were Mani Mama's sisters. On that sweltering afternoon, the older one drove down on her bike with the younger one. They had gone for the Rajasthan spell of his new film, Mati Manas. They confessed they were clueless about how films are made. That's how they 22 DOCUMENTARY TODAY
expressed it. “Bhaiyya stares at a place, location these people call it, for long. Then the camerawala puts the camera. Then Bhaiyya goes and looks through the view-finder. Then he goes back and stares for long. Very long. Then he shows with his hands where he exactly wants the camera. Then he shows with his fingers a bit down, a bit up… And then we have no patience and we go to have lunch.” Years later when I recounted this to Mani he gurgled with laughter and said, “Poor things! But after that they never asked me to come for a shooting.” His sisters told me films were dull affairs but seeing me set they assured me that if I wouldn't die of boredom, I
At FTII, Mani Kaul was GOD. Or the next best thing to God.If Ritwik Ghatak is the presiding deity of FTII, then Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani his most guni disciples. That he kept an eye on me I am not sure. But the tu and the Jaipur link which he would state kind of made me feel watched over. Years later when he had come down from Amsterdam, I made full shameless use of this link to invite him over for dinner. Rajasthani garlic sukha chicken and gatte ki sabzi for dinner. Gurpal gleefully told me what clinched the invite was 'gatte ki sabzi.' Mani enters in a tomato red shirt. Niranjan, who has been his Cinematographer team for Mati Manas with Venu, is calming me as I check my dishes, the booze. We are thrilled but don't know where the night would go. Initially it's all sober, formal. Then seeing my little baby boy crawling Maniasks “Ise kahaan sulati hai tu?” Between both of us. Mani rumbles with
Shah Rukh Khan … kuchh to baat hain usme. Woh star ban gaya.
amusement. “Kadwe tel se maalish karti hai tu?” Now I am uncertain where this is going. Yup, I say sheepish. Mani is delighted. He is a new Father. So he details how his western wife tried to put a cot, a video camera and alarm which goes off if the kid has peed in the nursery. Mani told her, let the baby sleep between the two of us. That is how we do it in India. And our babies carry the feeling of safety and security all their life. Did your wife agree, I ask? Mani nods, “Aankhein khul gayi!” The ice melts. We discuss techniques of bathing babies, massaging them with oil…vehement that Indian system is far too good. Of course we talk of Cinema. We pester him to take the post of Director FTII but his only response is: “If they will let me pursue my own film-making. I am not a clerk yaar. I need my freedom. Freedom…” Mani hums some dhrupad as he pats my baby to sleep. Cracks jokes about how the late L.V. Prasad in whose lab he was developing his picture negative told him, “You are such an interesting man. You talk such sense. So deep, so fine. Why do you make such boring films?” And Mani cracks up and we all high are giggling. He is rather proud of directing Shah Rukh in Idiot. “Wo star ban gaya na? Hai us ladke mein kuchh.” The myth and folk-lore of Mani is part of what we lived and breathed. Raaj Kumar, an actor and a fellow Kashmiri, tells him at a party, “Kya uski roti iski roti? Hamare saath aa jao jaani. Mil ke Paratha banayenge!” Rauf Ahmed, a film journalist wants to do a face-to-face with Mani Kaul, Manmohan Desai and an Art filmmaker, who makes films about social causes and issues. Mani and Manmohan Desai are damn keen to meet eachother. To do the interview. Both object to the Art filmmaker. They don't want him. Delicately or deliciously they say it. The trench field battles between Non-
Johny Mera Naam … its precise compositions and cinematography impressed Mani.
narrative and Narrative cinema was fought every day between the “arty” and the “commercial” crowd in FTII. Mani at that stage was someone the 'narrativewalas' loved to hate. Then one day, the biggest votary of Mainstream cinema, my pal comes and reads a passage from a book with a guess-who-said it. The book is Indian Cinema Superbazaar. (Malls had not come till then). He reads and I quote:“I was a very quiet child and my eyesight was weak… I never complained about that to my father. If I couldn't see a thing I would go very close to it. I remember very clearly that if I went to a film, it looked practically hazy. I saw life also like that… I remember that year, it was Mount Abu. By chance we were standing on the mountain top and my sister said, “look at the road. It runs like a ribbon”. “Probably because of my weak eyesight I lacked concentration. I was a lost child. My Mother seriously thought that … there might be some problem..retardation or something… suddenly it occurs to my Father and he takes off his specs… powerful in terms of lenses. I wore the specs and it was like a shock… I saw trees, leaves, rocks, mountains. It was too much for me…. After that I saw a film called Helen of Troy…and after that I could not think of anything else in my life except films.”
The image from out-of-focus coming to sharp clarity moved me. It was Mani Mama's experience which touched the souls of all of us, even the hardened baiters. The best, most honest, no phony interview of the book we declared. Later, I heard Mani comes to teach at FTII and sees Johny Mera Naam. Changes his teaching plan and shows it to the students pointing outits precise compositions, it's cinematography. Mani, as I grasp, never had a theory of Cinema that he tried to push to fit one single viewpoint. He grew, shared, lived, learnt. So tonight when I write my requiem to him I say with complete surety… Agree or disagree with his Cinema. There is nobody… NOBODY from FTII, who has not been affected by Mani's cinema. His vitality, his deep questions, his search for the 'image', his humour, his seeking, his showing. Niranjan always says that as a cinematographer he opened our eyes. No box or definition could contain him. Mani Mama is Free at last. Mani at last your going puts me in courage to say what I could never say to you: I know that Mani knew that we all knew that he was a very-very 'sexy' man.
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The Magic of Mani Kaul By Sudipto Chattopadhyay When I was a student at FTII, the community was sharply divided between those who ardently followed Mani and Kumar and those who made fun of their cinema. But as a raconteur Mani had the undivided attention of the entire student community. Kumar was more taciturn and sagelike. Mani was the exact opposite: always melodramatic and larger than life. Almost like a flamboyant film star. It was said that even the likes of Manmohan Desai would be entertained by hearing Mani speak. Those of us who were die-hard Mani acolytes would often joke about whether cinema was Money Making or Mani Making. That was the extent of Mani's charm.
academic debate and dissection about Mani's work now that he has passed away to become a legend. I will not dwell on that. I still vividly recall the most important lesson Mani had taught us as our Master. He emphasised the need to identify our own Swabhaba which loosely translated and correctly understood meant identifying the truth that is essentially our own, or the nature that is innate to each individual. It is this distinct individuality that separates us, our thoughts and our expressions from others and creates our individual and unique consciousness. He helped us evoke
nature that is innate in us as an amorphous mass. He taught us to give that amorphous mass shape and form. Today, I recall that precious pearl of wisdom that Mani shared with us while talking to us about the tradition of Dhrupad. That was Mani Kaul for me. That will always be a rare gift that I shall hold close to my heart till my dying day. That is precisely how I remember him as flames consume his mortal remains. I trust no flame can destroy the legacy he passed on to us. (Sudipto Chattopadhyay is a FTII graduate.)
He strode like a colossus and shaped our cinematic consciousness. Whether or not you liked his brand of cinema, you could not but be charmed by the effervescent spirit of the man. The witticisms, the twist in the phrase, the innate ability to scoff at his own brand of cinema. He taught us to throw caution to the winds and be self deprecatory, a trait that most Indians lack. The then Mohican of Indian art house cinema, Satyajit Ray, had rubbished Mani Kaul's brand of cinema calling it anaemic in his famous book Our Films, Their Films. Ray belonged to a certain tradition of narrative cinema from which Mani's work was a distinct departure. With all due respect to Ray's brilliance, I suspect the apathy to Mani's work stemmed from the fact that Mani was the favourite student of Ritwik Ghatak, possibly Ray's biggest rival. I think Mani inherited his irreverent spirit from Ghatak who showed him life from the gutters to gloss. There will undoubtedly be much
24 DOCUMENTARY TODAY
Satyajit Ray rubbished Mani Kaul's brand of cinema.
Mani at Osian
His Last Assignment
Ms Sheila Dikshit, Chief Minister of Delhi, presents the Lifetime Achievement Award to poet-filmmaker Gulzar, at the 11thOsian Cinefan Film Festival watched by Vishal Bharadwaj and Mani Kaul on the right. At extreme left is Neville Tuli.
In April 2009 Mani Kaul took over as Creative Director of Osian's Cinefan Film Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema, succeeding film critic Aruna Vasudev whose brainchild it was and who had retired after the 10th edition of the festival in 2008.Characteristically, he changed the structure of the festival and re-defined his new assignment in a press statement issued on the eve of the festival,"Irrespective of its independent or mainstream origin, we will strive for a dispassionate portrayal of new and bold cinema. Our programme will range from uncompromising experimentation in films, to an archival kind of cross reference between cinemas of the world, to an articulation of an emerging, thinking new stream cinema in India." The 11th edition of the festival was held from July 17 to 26, 2009 at the Siri Fort Complex in New Delhi and Mani was diagnosed with prostate cancer soon after. Though he began treatment immediately to spread the cancer's spread, not many people in the Mumbai film industry were to privy to this information since he had moved to Gurgaon in order to be close to Osian. Even the grief-stricken Aruna Vasudev who had in the preceding months worked alongside him wailed, “I knew him for 40 years. I still cannot fathom how this happened.â€? In the following articles Aruna Vasudev and Neville Tuli, his colleagues at Osian, remember the man that he was ‌ DOCUMENTARY TODAY 25
The Solitary Artist By ArunaVasudev into a highly original form of documentary. In his view, the line between fiction and documentary was non-existent. In Dhrupad, for instance, he shows the similarity between music and architecture in the organisation of volume and space.
Mani Kaul, Neville Tuli and Aruna Vasudev at an Osian event,
Mani Kaul to the end remained the iconoclastic, uncompromising, individualistic creator he had been from the start. It was variously said of him that he was deeply influenced by Bresson, Tarkovsky, Ritwik Ghatak. Influences yes, to some extent, but what he created was a singular idiom which was neither imitative nor imitable. “Cinema for me is a plastic, not a performing art,” he said. “It should be direct sculpting in time”. These were notions of cinema that awed people but didn't bring in audiences. Audiences remained flummoxed, critics spoke of him with reverence. The reaction to his first film Uski Roti in 1970 was one of shock. That shock remained unchanged to the end — even with Idiot, which had Shah Rukh Khan in his first film role. It was made as a four-part series for Doordarshan and edited down to three hours for theatrical release, but was too far ahead of its time for audiences to be able to grasp. “A new thought — that is the purpose of my films,” he said. “If the film is to show you something that is already known, not only by the filmmaker but also by the audience, where will it lead us?” Television for him was anathema. “The world we are exposed to on television is killing the 26 DOCUMENTARY TODAY
capacity of wanting to understand. It feeds you… as if you have no capacity for chewing … What food is to the stomach, thought is to the mind.” What would he have to say about the world today and the information overload that leaves no time for boredom, boredom out of which imagination takes wing? He won awards and accolades, he became an iconic figure nationally and internationally, but the possibility of making films remained restricted. The Film Finance Corporation, as it was then known, was the saviour for the graduates of the film institute — he was one of the first Film and Television Institute of India graduates — but with no chain of smaller theatres to exhibit the films they made, funds slowly began to dry up. He made some of the most memorable films in the history of Indian cinema — after Uski Roti came Ashad Ka Ek Din, Satah Se Uthata Admi, Duvidha, Idiot, and much later, his last film, Naukar Ki Kameez. In between came the documentaries: Dhrupad, Siddheshwari, Mati Manas. He did not believe in structure, narrative, characterisation — even for feature films. For him each shot was treated as a whole, complete in itself. The shelving of plot and drama took him
With a wonderfully self-deprecating sense of humour, he reveled in the good things of life, but could be — and was — extremely ascetic in the way he lived. Painter and musician in addition to filmmaker, he was happy singing his beloved dhrupad, or painting his abstract canvases or teaching enraptured students about cinema, about life and — more and more in recent times — music. His most avid audience was of young people not yet corrupted by market forces. Many years ago he came to give a lecture at the Film Appreciation course we held in Delhi. Four hours later, he was still talking, still exchanging ideas, responding to his young audience's thirst for understanding the unique ideas being thrown at them by this charismatic figure. But deep down he was a loner. Cinema demands collective effort, and all who worked with him became his chelas for life. But music and painting are solitary acts and the very fact that he found joy and fulfillment in both shows the essential quality of Mani Kaul the individual artist, immersed in the thoughts and images and sounds and that arose within him and for which he found the highest forms of artistic expression. The irony is that now, 15 years after the making of Naukar Ki Kameez, he was about to start shooting a feature an Indian-Italian co-production Under Her Spell, about Rossellini in India based on Dileep Padgaonkar's book. This was not the time for Mani Kaul to go. (Aruna Vasudev is founder of Cinemaya, the Asian film quarterly.)
To Mani with love by Neville Tuli I cannot say whether our relationship with the death of others, loved ones or distant, has fundamentally changed over the past decades. On one level, our eternal stranger who comes knocking once has now gained such extensive media coverage that a certain immunity feels to be setting into the collective human consciousness regarding the passing on of others. Once upon a time to read about a car accident killing a family of three would demand us to think, reflect and maybe care. Today, even the passing away of hundreds elicits minor mind-space. Unless a loved one is involved we are becoming immune. Maybe a 'celebrity' linkage creates a few tears of endearment and a sense of loss, but even then the inner dialogues are superficial. To some extent we all dream to live a long life and recent genetic manipulations will probably give us extra decades in years to come. Yet, sooner or later we all also yearn for death to visit, especially when the physical pain reach unbearable highs or the monotony of existence wishes to see no hope. The passing away of Mani Kaul this morning, eminent filmmaker and a dear friend, again brings to boil one's daily dialogue with Death and its joyous inevitability. Mani was in pain not only because of the cancer, but also because of the general public apathy towards certain values. That this material world does not sufficiently respect intellect, integrity, creativity and honesty with anything tangible had made his life, as with most intellectuals, a continually joyous struggle in many ways. It is obvious that we are creating a world which is by and large respectful of the popular and mediocre, the superficially glamorous and the inane far in excess of what history will feel just in years to come. That the
standards of history themselves are being manipulated so as to allow ourselves greater comfort and complacency with our current beliefs is another ongoing deceit in motion. Human institutions are re-calibrating our standards of excellence so low, that the aspirations and idealism essential in every young mind are being choked before given a chance to breathe, let alone live. Mani loved nurturing and sharing ideas with young minds, trying to make them question in that ancient philosophic sense which today few teachers even bother to explore. He seemed lost in his world of ideas and like with most thinkers found it difficult to come to terms with the harshness of the systems we are creating on our daily binge of action. His journey of nurturing one's freedom so as to continue to ideate and not having to find any acceptance from the general public was an inspiration to many. Generations of filmmakers during the 1960s to the 1980s considered Mani this iconic director, who did it his way and implicitly scorned the mediocre majority. That the popularity and adulation of the majority path was somewhat missed, was a hiccup which
no original thinker can avoid. I was introduced to Mani with much laughter and in those moments the deepest of intellectual burdens appeared graceful as a result of existentialist humor. Thus his humor, wit and jokes remain clearest in my mind. Mani was a master on telling his own jokes on himself. Unless you have heard one of the great Mani Kaul film jokes, narrated by him, you have not tasted the best of selfdeprecating humor. One classic goes like this: Mani's new landlords, an elderly couple invited him upstairs to dinner one night. The husband was very keen to introduce Mani to his wife, proud of having such an iconoclastic film-maker as his tenant. During conversation the husband told his wife “Did you know that Mr Kaul's new film is about this man waiting at the bus-stop…” “No, no, please do not tell me the story and spoil my joy.” she immediately tells her husband. Mani calmly smiles at both and says “I am sorry he has already told you the story.” How we both laughed when he first told me this anecdote as an introduction to his work. Another nugget suddenly emerged, seeing my receptiveness to the black humor. Mani begins: “My uncle used to
Mani Kaul and Neville Tuli at the 11thOsian Cinefan Film Festival. DOCUMENTARY TODAY 27
What is Creativity? By SaurabhM.Vanzara My Diploma film was in International Competition at Oberhaussen. One of the organisers of the festival, Werner Kobe liked my film immensely and invited me over with my film to Frieburg Film Fetival of which he was the organiser, and was taking place the next week. When I went there I got to know that they were also having a retrospective of Mani's films.
Mani Kaul among the paintings before an Osian auction.
be this famous actor Raaj Kumar, and one day we met at some filmi party. He shouts out from across the room and calls me to him and his friends: “Hey Jaani, Mani, what is this I am hearing? You want to join films and that you are making a film, and that it is called Uski Roti. What is this? A film on roti, woh bhi uski roti, no one will see it. Come with me, join me, we will make a film together, we will call it Apna Halwa. What do you say?” Mani mimicked the famous Raaj Kumar voice so beautifully you forgot about all the subtle tones, all the art cinema and mainstream differences, the choice to pursue happiness or wisdom, the lone struggle or the group orgies, the triumph of success or integrity, on and on you could read meaning in the mundane. In a way these two anecdotes best summed up the essence of the great intellectual. His ability to create something from nothing, to dwell on the simple act of waiting, like many before, to concoct a creative energy from just understanding the moment: why are we here, what is our purpose? That it is all within us; that nothing of consequence lies beyond, that the outer are but minor triggers to dig deep into one's infinite inner angst which can be as joyous as destructive. Yet it can liberate if it possesses a deep empathy with humanity. 28 DOCUMENTARY TODAY
If we genuinely feel their pain, our pain, we will find purpose to move forward, even if it becomes a most selfish and lonely journey. For in sustaining that journey compassion does emerge, and death indeed becomes our long lost friend found knocking the door besides and so happily invited to visit us tomorrow or whenever convenient. Maybe the dispassion which is entering humanity has selfish roots, and maybe our inability to feel for too long the loss of strangers transforms itself into a deeper love for our loved ones. Constantly we all search for such resolutions. That the search is no longer feverish enough is a bit sad. The distractions of life are doing their job well. We believe that there will be plenty of time to think of death in later years, and yet that is so untrue. Death should be our daily companion, our friend with whom we dialogue on all matters, so dissolving any fear of meeting this dear tourist. In those moments there is nothing but love with all around and all within, there is a deep sense to share and communicate, there is that unity that we all are here only to elucidate that eternal inner spirit, omnipresent for centuries, and will continue to be, and is trying to extricate itself with daily joy, with humor, for humor alone must outlast all else. Humor alone takes integrity home.
When Werner told Mani that I was there and that my film was to be screened Mani apparently was very happy and told him that I was his student. And the next thing I know is my stature was elevated in leaps and bounds in everyone's eyes. Here was Mani's student with his diploma, the student showcasing his work with his master. And when the screening of my film took placed, squeezed in between his films since it was a last minute inclusion, the hall was jam packed. There were people in the aisle, blocking the entry, all over. And the post film discussion had almost everyone attending for more then half an hour. Such was the respect that he commanded out there. And then he took me for dinner, and discussed about what he had told me when I had taken him to Studio 1 (at FTII) where I had 'put up' a set for my Dialogue Exercise. One look at the set and my basic thought of the script and he said: “Your thinking is symetrical, very clinical, structured.” I asked him if it was bad since creativity should flow, take its own form, discover itself, not fall into a pattern. He just smiled and said, “When you honestly express what you have a desperate urge to express, and if that is in sync with your soul, you are truly creative.” Its been twenty odd years since that interaction and every time I try to evaluate my thought process, I realise he had summed me up in that one sentence. RIP Mani. (Saurabh Vanzara is a FTII graduate.)
Ode to a guru By Bina Paul July 6 and we woke up to the distressing news that Mani Kaul had passed away after a prolonged battle with cancer. Mani was a fighter; his films reflect the lonely journey of an artiste who created works that were never popular. We grew up in a cinema, where Mani Kaul was considered a dirty word but for all who knew him, Mani was truly a guru. One could sit at his feet and listen to him hold forth on music, literature, and cinema. His sense of humour and that twinkle in his eye have touched everyone who has ever known him. Mani has been a figure of veneration for many reasons; his last avatar was as Festival Director at Osian. He is the first, or perhaps the only film festival director, who organised a Dhrupad concert at 4 a.m. for visiting filmmakers and festival guests. They all arrived bleary eyed, not wanting to displease their host, to listen to this concert while Mani chuckled and said jhelene do (let them put up with it). The selection of films was criticised but Mani believed that as festival director, the films he liked were the films to be shown! In 2009, a few of us shared an apartment in Cannes. One afternoon we went for a walk and bumped into Subhash Ghai. He and Mani were classmates at the Film and Television Institute of India. It was a hilarious meeting in the middle of the road in Cannes. Truly a meeting of art and commerce!
Columbia and lived for a while in Holland. Some thought we had lost an artiste. Mani was unapologetic. John Abraham who worked on Uski Roti as an assistant director jokingly called him 'Public Money Kaul.' He made most of his films for Government agencies such as FFC (now called National Film Development Corporation) and Films Division since no private producer was willing to back him. This is also a great reflection of the 70's when the Government still backed good cinema without an eye on the box office. Films such as Uski Roti, Ashad Ka Ek Din, Duvidha, Sateh Se Uthata Aadmi, Mati Manas and Dhrupad were all made because of public funding. Today these films are cinematic experiences that are almost unparalleled in Indian cinema history. Beginning from his first film Uski Roti, Mani made a huge departure from the Indian Cinema “tradition” both in terms of narrative and form. Uski Roti was the start of a body of work which was truly Indian in inspiration but with an aesthetic that was not till then seen in Indian cinema. 'Duvidha,' based on a Rajasthani short story, with its stunning imagery and style captured the essence of the dilemma of the lonely bride. The traditional narrative was transformed to be a cinematic exploration.
Mani acknowledged Robert Bresson as the guru of his cinema. Mani's intense engagement with music, particularly Dhrupad, was the abstraction that he extended to cinema. It was not story telling but experiencing with patience and concentration that Mani sought. He worked with a variety of talented actors and technicians and each one of them acknowledge that it is the Mani Kaul film that taught them more about cinema than any film school. The late Bharat Gopi who was cast in Sateh Se Uthata Aadmi always spoke about the experience of actually acting by not acting. Mani's films are not easy to watch and the last time we spoke he laughed and said “Bina Yaar…I'm suddenly very popular…because nobody's seen my films!” Indeed the tragedy is also that many of the films cannot be seen. In his last days he was also engaged in trying to restore and get new prints of these almost lost works. Mani died, cared for in his last days by a group of students. Through those dark days they tell me, it was still music and cinema that was on his mind. Mani is no more but apart from his films he has left behind a bunch of inspired students. (The author is Artistic Director of the International Film Festival of Kerala.)
Bina Paul
In Thiruvananthapuram, we all remember the Aravindan Memorial lecture where just listening to him speak with so much passion was such a pleasure. A born teacher, whether it was cinema or music, he had this knack of inspiring and stirring up the intellect. In the nineties, Mani went through personal experiences that took him away from India. He taught at DOCUMENTARY TODAY 29
Remembering Mani Mani's “Tamil Teacher” By RamchandraBabu
Lalitha as his Tamil teacher! Ravi Menon who was my batch mate at the Institute had done the lead role in Mani's Hindi film Duvidha before he made his debut in Malayalam films with M.T Vasudevan Nair's National Award winning Nirmalyam for which I was the cinematographer. Ravi used tell me a number of interesting incidents from his shooting experience with Mani Kaul's team. I lost touch with Mani for a number of years after I relocated to Thiruvananthapuram. A few years back I happened to meet him during the International Film Festival of Kerala and that was our last meeting. He passed away on 6 th July 2011. I have lost an old friend and great soul and Indian Film Industry had lost a Master Film maker! (RamchandraBabu is a FTII-trained cinematographer.)
Camera practicals at the FTII … the girl with the umbrella is Jaya Bhaduri and the boy holding the reflector is Ramchandra Babu.
While many Film makers made compromises for their existence, Mani Kaul till the very last breath remained an uncompromising, individualistic creator of films. His films were far ahead of their times which will be always cherished by connoisseurs of good cinema. I was a student at the Poona Film Institute when he had come there to screen his debut film Uski Roti in 1970. The film was really something we have not seen before on the Indian screen, consisting of lengthy static camera shots and used only one 28 mm lens for the whole film. Many of us didn't like it at all in the first viewing , because of the static lengthy shots and slow pace of the film. But a repeated viewing made us to study the film more deeply, made us to think and not remain as passive viewers. The carefully composed images of light and shade created by K.K.Mahajan in Black and White was another factor that contributed much to the film. I got introduced to him after the screenings and soon became a friend. During his visits to the Institute, which were quite frequent we used to meet along with K.G.George and other friends under the Wisdom tree or at the canteen. You are sure to find him always surrounded by admiring students. Such was his magnetic personality. At that time he was having a love interest with a Tamilian girl Lalitha, (whom he later on married) and he asked me to teach him a few words in Tamil so as to impress her. He used to write down words like " Naanunnaikadhalikkeren " ( "I love you ") on a piece of paper and memorize it with proper pronunciation. Later on I have also visited his house "Janaki Kutir" at Mumbai and enjoyed his and Lalitha's hospitality. Though he was my senior, he introduced me to his wife 30 DOCUMENTARY TODAY
The Magic of Ashad Ka Ek Din Arun Khopkar During the shooting of Mani Kaul's Ashad Ka Ek Din, I was an outsider to cinema -- though I was interested in other arts. The youthful unit that worked on the film had Vishnu Mathur, Surinder Dheer as Mani's assistants for direction. Hemanto Bose, the editor was also present during the shoot. Narinder Singh was the sound recordist and K. K. Mahajan was the cameraman. The shoot was in Kasauli in winter. The budget was really low, rooms small and shared. One Ambassador car at times carried about 8 to 10 persons. If you could breath comfortably, it meant someone was left out. The cold of the Himalayan winter made an adequate consumption of the Holy Water necessary and it formed spiritual basis for new friendships. Hemanto Bose had taken it upon himself to initiate me into the mysteries of filmmaking with everyone else chipping in. In the film, the relationship of the framing was to be maintained with the Ajanta frescoes. Framing was done very carefully and actors moved through previously defined distances, marked like musical scales. Shot after shot Mani used to get excited and shout, 'Hit ho gaye', sometimes once, most times again and again. Then would come KK's characteristic drawl, “Hit hi hote jaoge ya dusra shot bhi loge?” Then, laughing, we would move onto another shot. I was utterly fascinated by the bounce boards which KK was using and tried to observe what they did. Then one day I witnessed the Miracle of Light. The shot was a mid-shot of RekhaSabnis, the heroine of the film. It was to be taken to precisely synchronise with the setting sun, so that one part of
it would be with the sun setting in the background and the remaining part with the engulfing darkness. Rekha was my classmate at the Elphinstone College and I had seen her face hundreds of times. It was a pretty and familiar face. But as I watched the shot being taken, the everchanging light of the dying sun and the glow of KK's bounceboards that made the face assume a different life under the constantly increasing darkness. Rekha was almost immobile but the changing light animated her into a thousand images. This was no longer the Rekha of everyday life that I knew. It was someone revealed to me in a divine, magical light. If man is made in God's own image, this was it. I was captivated, almost impaled to the ground, with my eyes almost unblinking, devoured the magical transformation that happened under my very eyes. It was masterminded by Mani and K. K. All our evenings together and all the bonhomie had made me suspect the magician in K. K. but here was a proof. I'll remember this moment as long as I live. Like a flash of lightning reveals the whole landscape in one instant, K. K. revealed to me the wonderland of cinema. From the location, I applied to FTII and decided to spend the rest of my life chasing this rainbow called cinema. (Arun Khopkar played the lead role of Kalidas in Ashad Ka Ek Din. He graduated from the FTII, Pune in Film Direction in 1974.)
Mani is a cinema genius By Navroze Contractor Mani is a cinema genius. He stands alone. Strong words but true. His style of functioning depends entirely on what subject he is tackling. Mani had seen a lot of my still work done in Punjab when he was scouting locations of Uski Roti. We would have long discussions about B&W, lenses, movements, light and concepts. Very little technical stuff. More of ideas and things like that. I am not a technical geek, nor is he. Technical stuff can be solved as and when we faced
Navroze Contractor
problems. Anyway, those days we had very little means and so had to make do with very little, too. It is from these evenings and showing him locations for his film that he promised I would shoot, if he ever made a color film. He stuck by his word. That's how I got to be on Duvidha. It was my first ever film. The first thing I noticed was that he never had a script. It was all in his head. Most he had was the short story that he would privately consult when in doubt. Mani had studied Rajasthani miniature paintings so he had selected such locations and we made them as flat as we could, to get that perspective. Mani is also a very serious student of Indian classical music. I too have studied classical music but not as much as him, so often when a camera movement had to be made he would sing in my ear, that was my speed, rhythm of the shot. This was real fun, as no one else except the two of us knew what was going on with the camera. I remember the night scenes well. We shot Duvidha on Kodachrome Reversal film. Daylight was 25 ASA and artificial was 40 ASA. Today no one can imagine such slow stock. The village in which we shot could not take the load of lights. So all the sequences were shot only with two sun guns and oil lamps. The film was so slow we had to place the lights very close to the actors, often so close we thought the clothes would catch fire. Whatever we did, the results were beautiful. Oh yes, he said he was influenced by Bresson but I think except for working the actors, I didn't notice anything else. (Navroze Contractor spoke to Oorvazi Irani in an interview published by Dear Cinema, 24th February 2010)
Mani's Humane Qualities By G.S.Bhatia During the course of working with him there were many incidents.I will touch upon two of them.One describes the quality of embracing anything that was helping the film that he made and the other touches upon his humane qualities.He wanted to share things with his unit members. When I was at B.R.Sound & Music and had the privilage to mix his film Sateh Se Uthata Aadmi. I was supposed to transfer the title music of the film from Nagra tape recorder. The original recording was at 7.5? per second. By mistake I played it at 3.75 ” per second. It was obvious that the music was playing very slow. He did not react but listened to it very intentively. When I realised my mistake and wanted to play the same at the right speed he said, “No. Don't do that. The slower speed sounds good and goes very well with the visuals.” I thought he was joking. No he was not. We recorded the music with the slower speed and everybody appreciated it. This shows that he had a very open mind. On another occasion I was mixing a documentary which he made for a German television channel. He had a reasonably DOCUMENTARY TODAY 31
good budget for the job we were doing. After the mixing job was satisfactorily done he said to me, “Yaar Bhatia ek gadbad ho gayee.” I asked him what was it. He said, “You have finished the job too quickly. What do I do with the money that is left “I told him “Share it with your unit members”.He smiled and he sure did share the money with his unit members. This brings out the humane part of the man called Mani. Mani was never greedy about money.I will forever miss him and his beautiful smile and his hearty laughter. May his soul rest in peace. (G.S. Bhatia is a FTII graduate of sound recording of the 1962-1965 batch.)
A Bizarre Introduction By Ayub Khan-Din It was a very bizarre introduction to the way Mani thought and worked. He'd just been in New York where he'd seen me in a film and decided that I was to be his Idiot. He was so enthusiastic about his idea that he stopped off in London to meet me. I was performing in a play at the National Theatre when I was given a note and an address to go and see a director from Mumbai who wanted to meet me. Of course, I had immediate visions of singing, dancing and running around trees. That is, until I met Mani. He told me about the project and seemed totally unfazed by the fact that I spoke not a word of Hindi or Urdu, Punjabi - nothing! Again another great insight into how Mani worked. He said, 'I don't care about that, I saw your film and you're my Idiot. We'll worry about the dialogues later. We'll make sure you have the script months before.' So I ended up in Mumbai three months later, still without a script, filming Idiot. It was one of the most exciting acting experiences I've had. So different to the way I'd worked before. It was disciplined yet casual at the same time. Mani has a wonderful way with actors. He knew how to get the best from them without telling them exactly what to do. It was unlike any filming experience I had ever had. Particularly as I would normally have had a script.
'Ayub, don't worry, you'll get the dialogues,' Mani reassured me. It felt completely chaotic. But it seemed amongst this tornado was the calm Mani. He seemed to thrive on it. He would constantly be thinking of things to do with the film. I remember one very long tracking shot. He decided that rather than go back to start the scene again, we would start the camera at the top position and work back. (From an interview by SubhashJha.) (Ayub Khan-Din is a British-Pakistani actor-playwright, who is best known for his performance as Sami in Sami & Rosie Get Laid and as the writer of East Is East and West Is West. Two-time winner of the Laurence Olivier Award, Ayub has also shared screen space with Shah Rukh Khan in Mani Kaul'scelebrated adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot in 1992.
Mani & SRK: The Seventh Wave By Karan Anshuman Mani Kaul was a man with a sense of humor. In that, his exterior was little like the films he made. Inside the mind, however, lurked a genius, sensitive and sympathetic to the world. Of all the memorable talk when I met him the one time, there was one question I had to ask him on behalf of all followers of contemporary mainstream Hindi films: “Shahrukh Khan has gone on about you asking him to 'act' like the seventh wave while shooting a scene on the beach in Idiot. He wasn't very amused, and later claimed that even though he had no idea what was expected of him, he only took such instructions because it was early days in his career. So what exactly was expected of him? Why particularly the 'seventh' wave?” Mani Kaul laughed. He'd heard about it and that it was even mentioned it in his biography. It was nothing like that, he said, no deep philosophy about the 'seventh wave'. He just wanted his actor to hold an expression of anticipation long enough. With the sun behind the camera and over the sea, it was only a matter of quantifying time as SRK counted the number of waves in his head. The camera rolled. And Kaul got the look he wanted. Mystery solved!
Ayub Khan-Din
He was a hero to all of us By Rajat Kapoor The first time I met Mani Kaul was when I was a student at FTII. He used to come very often and take random classes for us. It's impossible to convey the joy that Mani used to bring with him every time one met him. He was constantly making jokes about himself and his films; he never took himself seriously. I'm missing him very much. He made Siddeshwari when we were still studying, a film that blew my mind, and later a film called Nazar in which I assisted him. RafeyMehmood assisted the acclaimed cinematographer Piyush Shah and we 32 DOCUMENTARY TODAY
worked together for a year. Those were our first lessons in filmmaking. We learnt immensely from him. We worshipped him, he was a hero to all of us. There was something so macho about him. And so much love that always came from him. The thing that astounded me about him was his total lack of bitterness. Here was a genius of a man who couldn't find producers for his films or get his films released. He was the butt of jokes for all the 'successful' mainstream filmmakers who joked about how the best punishment was repeated screenings of Uski Roti. He even joked about it. It makes me terribly sad that we keep talking about new cinema and new India and on the other hand we have filmmakers like Mani and Kumar Shahani who are not allowed to make films. Yet, once they die, we call them geniuses and organise retrospectives of their films, but when they are alive we do not allow them to make films. There is no one who is ready to invest even Rs. 10 lakh to allow them to make a film. Mani had not made a film in eight years and Kumar hasn't made one in over five years. It's something we should all be ashamed of. After all, the only way we know filmmakers like Mani is through their work. And the best thing we can do for them is allow them to work. (RajatKapoor is a noted actor and director whose first film as a director starred Mani's daughter Shambhavi. He is a graduate from the FTII and Mani Kaul's student and assistant.) (Interviewed by NirmalaRavindran and published in India Today dated July 18, 2011.)
He wanted to film my novel By Vinod Kumar Shukla I met Mani Kaul for the first time when he had come to Bhopal for the launch of Satah Se Uthata Aadmi which was based on Muktibodh's novel. When my book Naukar Ki Kameez was published, he wanted to make a film on it and would communicate this to me every time we met. But to make a film is difficult, and he eventually made it. He was a learned filmmaker; he had invented a creative language which could not let a habitual viewer be. The viewer was transformed and transported into another world with his films. He, like Ghatak had set off on a different road with his creativity. That road appears empty to me now. He experimented with the medium of cinema to express himself. His aim was neither to make money nor to earn fame through his films. He persevered despite all the criticism; but never got the kind of success he deserved. Mani Kaul wanted to make a film on my story Deewar Mein Ek Khirkee Rahati Thi . Few months before he was diagnosed with cancer, he had sent me the script based on the film and I had mailed him back the Hindi translation of it. He told me that he was getting the team for this film ready. But 3-
Vinod Kumar Shukla
4 months back, he called to inform that he was severely ill and would not be able to make the film. The last words I spoke to him were—“I'm sure you will be able to make the film”. And this morning I heard about his demise! (Vinod Kumar Shukla is a noted Hindi novelist.)
He was an institution to me By Pankaj Sudhir Mishra I was born and brought up in the town of Bhilai in Chattisgarh. The first time I came to Mumbai was with Mani Kaul for the shooting of Naukar Ki Kameez. I stayed with him during the one year that Naukar Ki Kameez was filmed. During the course of the film, I told him that I was not interested in acting and that I wanted to learn filmmaking. He told me that I was free to learn whatever I wanted to. He had realized that my interest lay in filmmaking and then he asked me to be a part of the editing process of the film. He has been my only teacher in filmmaking. More than a director, he was always a teacher to me. I feel I was too young at that time to understand a person like him and his passion for cinema. He was an institution to me. This is a mail that he once wrote me: “Are you now Dheeraj, Pankaj or Sudheer? Mishra is certain. Is there anything to a name? I wonder if I ever told you a story about Shatrughan Sinha. Like you, Shatrughan had no work, freshly out of FTII (or FTI as it was called then) he used to spend his time running between studios. He was a little uncertain about his name too. He thought he would become a villain in the film industry and following the tradition of a then popular villain K.N. Singh, imagined that his own name should be S.P. Sinha (Shatrughna Prasad Sinha). I immediately told him, drop Prasad from your name and make the Sanskrit Shatrughna into Shatrughan and call yourself Shatrughan Sinha. He told me that was a long name, difficult to pronounce. I said, try for a few months, if it works good, if it does not drop it. Somehow my suggestion stuck in his mind and he began to call himself Shatrughan Sinha in DOCUMENTARY TODAY 33
Pankaj Sudhir Mishra.
He was not against commercial cinema By Gurwinder Singh I was Mani Kaul's teaching assistant when he took a workshop for Direction students at the FTII in 2005. I have recently made my first feature film funded by NFDC and was asked to pick a mentor which naturally happened to be Mani Kaul. I chose him as my mentor and I shared my script with him. But it all happened at a time when he was bed-ridden. I visited him with my entire crew and spent a couple of days with him at his Delhi residence. I showed him my rushes. This was about a month back.
studios he began to visit from the next day. Within a week he got a single shot assignment. He had to enter a room and say a line. That's all. That little part was a total success. He never looked back. A rosy story! Difficult to repeat. But there is something to a name even if Shakespeare disagrees with us. Nothing superstitious – just practical. It is a sound. Not a meaning. And that sound carries a reverb. It seems like a long suggestion for something quite small. Things take their own time. When time appears to bring about change there will be a hundred intimations from the void within your being. Have courage and continue!� (Pankaj Sudhir Mishra acted in Naukar Ki Kameez and now works as a creative director in television.)
It was afternoon, and he started playing some music which one of his students had composed. I was listening to it and felt that it would go beautifully with my film. When he finished, I told him that I thought I was listening to the soundtrack of my film. That's exactly what I thought you would say, he said. That was him; he would open up things for you, he really valued your individuality. He never wanted his students to make films like him. He wanted them to discover themselves, and make films their own way. It is wrongly understood that he was against commercial cinema. You could be his student and yet want to be an ad filmmaker. He would tell you how you could do that better. He really understood the pulse of his students. (Gurwinder Singh was a teaching assistant to Mani Kaul and a filmmaker in his own right.)
Mani Kaul was executive producer of Anhey Ghore Da Daan, the Punjabi film directed by Gurwinder Singh.
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The determined outsider By Khalid Mohamed He was the uncompromising outsider. He refused to genuflect to commercial diktats, sticking stubbornly to his individualistic — frequently nonlinear — form of filmmaking. Down four decades, he was identified with what is variously termed as “art”, “new wave” and “parallel” cinema. To know Mani Kaul, who passed away at the age of 67 after battling a terminal illness, was to know a mercurial, larger-thanlife man. As a film director, he discussed the status of women (Uski Roti, Duvidha), crafted visually seductive documentaries (Arrival, Before My Eyes, A Desert of a Thousand Lines) and went through a spell of interpreting Fyodor Dostoevsky's masterworks. The Russian writer's short story A Gentle Creature inspired Nazar, shot in low, chiaroscuro lighting. Dostoevsky's classic novel Idiot was grafted to an Indian milieu with Ahmaq, which incidentally featured Shah Rukh Khan in a key role. Khan has recalled the experience of working with Kaul fondly, albeit with the rider that he could never understand what the film was all about. As a knee-high child, Mani Kaul, nephew of prominent B-town director Mohan Kaul, saw the world through foggy eyes. His eyesight was weak but he thought that's the way landscapes and faces look: blurred. It was only when he was around 12 that he wore spectacles and saw life in focus. “After that, I refused to change my vision,” he would laugh, bemused. Although his cinema was serious, groundbreaking and contemptuous of amassing profits, he did not take himself seriously. His booming laughter and a saturnine smile a la Jack Nicholson were his calling card. In person, he would captivate an everenlarging group of admirers with his bagatelles, and impromptu Hindustani classical music soirees, at his home on Mumbai's swishy Altamount Road.
Kumar Shahani and Mani Kaul … Ideologically bonded. (Photo by KV Srinivasan/The Hindu)
The apartment belonged to his wife, Lalitha, who doted on him as if he was her third kid after Shambhavi and Ribu. If his temper was provoked, there could be storm and thunder. Once, a Delhi ministry bureaucrat, over the phone, was bamboozling him to fly to an international festival in economy class. Kaul reasoned that he wasn't interested in going anyway. Yet the bureaucrat persisted. Crrrrrrash! The reluctant traveller pounded his fist into a glass-topped coffee table. End of phone call. A graduate of the Pune film institute, circa 1969, he went on to become a cult figure in the campus. Students down the years have been intensely influenced by him. Others, obsessive about Bollywood cinema, have been dismissive about Kaul, saying, “But who sees his Uski Rotis?” The rest of the world did — practically every one of the 25 documentaries and features he made were showcased and saluted at Berlin, Venice and Locarno. He painted abstract canvases and had acted in Basu Chatterjee's Sara Akash. Deeply influenced by Ritwik Ghatak, who helmed the Pune Film Institute
during the mid '60s, Kaul had a healthy disrespect for middle-of-the-road cinema. Kumar Shahani, a fellow traveller in filmmaking, was one of his closest friends. Despite an ideological argument over which they came to blows at a cafe, the bond between Shahani and Kaul persisted. Both had a tough time securing finance from the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC), for which they had directed the most-treasured films in its repertory. As it turned out, it was a losing battle with the NFDC changing its priorities to market-friendly cinema. Shahani moved to New Delhi to teach. Kaul set anchor in Amsterdam, where he remarried, had two more children, before returning to Mumbai. His last film was A Monkey's Raincoat and his last job was as the creative director of films at the Osean's. The mercurial filmmaker shifted eventually to New Delhi. Once he had phoned to inquire if M.F. Hussain would allow him to shoot a documentary on his art and life. That was not to be. Mani Kaul had become near-reclusive but his pair of spectacles were always in place. His vision never altered. DOCUMENTARY TODAY 35
Shoot First, Mumble Later By Girish Shahane 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 avantgarde 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 AndrĂŠ 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
Picasso's Les Demoiselles D'Avignon faced the same criticism as Uski Roti.
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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 ShyamBenegal and GovindNihalani 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 ShyamBenegal 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 MatiManas, 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 AnuAgarwal, 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.
MANI KAUL SPEAKS
Communication is not necessarily the raison d'etre of a work of art. I am not preoccupied with communication while making a film. What interests me is involvement. With involvement, you arrive at newer concepts. If finally the film communicates, nothing could be a happier situation. Time in cinema for me must necessarily correspond to time in life. In its juxtaposition of segments, however, cinema has a right to shatter our normal perception of time. Which is why I claim that in Uski Roti there are no flashbacks or flash forwards. I was concerned with the actuality of this woman Balo and what we may call her mind life. What happens in her life is not memory, nor is it anticipation. It is also an actuality. 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. Rather than try to define what is fact and what is fiction and divide films into documentary and fiction categories, I find it more useful to first debate the nature of the cinematic idiom itself. A statement that Jean-Luc Godard made years back seems appropriate to cite here: cinema is not representation of reality but reality of representation. If once we understand that the truth and untruth of reality lies first in how it is represented by the filmmaker, we can take the second step: we can know that in certain cases (that I call re-presentational) where a thing or a being stands for another thing or another being, like a real human being (an actor, for instance) re-presents another (imagined) human being called a character, well, that will be often characterised as fiction. Whereas in certain other cases (that I call presentational) where a thing or a being stands for itself and not another and then presents a reality, the work will be mostly thought of as documentary. Artists who compromise lose depth. They don't want to extend into metaphor, or ellipses that spark thought, vision. From the unknowable, unnameable, indescribable they come to the surface, as all commodities in the market must be superficial, reduced to an unthinking sensation. By naming the unnameable they merchandise it.
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The Infinite Possibilities of Cinema By Ashish Avikunthak Mani Kaul began his career as a bespectacled 27-year-old graduate from the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in 1969 with Uski Roti, arguably one of the most cerebral debuts in the history of cinema. It is a placid, minimalist and profoundly composed film, making it Indian cinema's most rigorous experiment with the representation of moving images. Uski Roti gave birth to a cinematic expression that invoked the structural elements of cinema to collapse the dichotomy of time and space. It not only challenged the obscene spectacle of commercial cinema but also was a scathing critique of Satyajit Ray's neorealist idiom. Based on a short story by Mohan Rakesh, it became the radical cinematic text of the Indian New Wave. Soon Kaul made Ashad Ka Ek Din (1971), followed by Duvidha (1973), both of which dexterously pushed the bounds of representation and were an erudite articulation of cinema's infinite possibilities of making meaning. Born in a middle-class family in
Duvidha dexterously pushed the bounds of representation.
Jodhpur in 1942, he went to the FTII when Ritwik Ghatak was the vice principal (1966-67). Greatly influenced by the non-conformist epistemology of Ghatak that challenged the celebratory exuberance of a partitioned nation, Mani Kaul delved into the world of traditional Indian philosophy, thought and practice. His later films – Satah Se Uthata Admi (1981), Dhrupad (1984), Mati Manas
(1988), Siddeshwari (1989) and others - emerged from this painstaking engagement with pre-modern Sanskritic epistemic universe and his disciplined training in dhrupad under Ustad Zia Mohiyuddin Dagar. Mani Kaul's cinema is spectacularly complex and enormously intuitive and therefore requires a disciplined and rigorous practice of viewing. Kaul's films demand an exemplary audience, one that is as meticulously attentive to the moment in the frame as the scrupulous impulse of the director who made that moment. It is very easy to affect an audience with jocular emotional histrionics and vulgar poignancy – the staple diet of Indian cinema. Instead, Mani Kaul had perfected the art of deeply moving his audience cerebrally by meticulous philosophical exposition. His films effortlessly employed temporality to create a deep spatial landscape in which human emotions oscillated with an incendiary provocation. This cinematic gesture was so subtle that if one were not attentive the meaning would be lost.
Satah Se Uthata Aadmi … his later films emerged from a painstaking engagement with pre-modern Sanskritic epistemic universe. 38
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That happened with even the most astute of Indian filmmakers, Satyajit
Ray, who after a rather gross misreading of Duvidha blurted: "Kaul's wayward, fragile aestheticism has led him to the sick-bed." Mani Kaul was born with myopia and saw the world as a blurred haze until he was advised to wear spectacles. Yet as a filmmaker he was a master of lensing. Kaul's demise marks an end of a fecund period in Indian film history, where inventive genius of aspiring filmmakers was patronised by the state (however grudgingly). With the opening up of the economy in 1991 state support for cinema was crushed. So in sharp contrast to the productivity of the first twenty years of his career, Kaul was only able to make one feature film in the last twenty years of his life. The sadness of his death is exacerbated by the insipid state of a selfcongratulatory Indian film industry, which spends crores producing a dim-witted circus but cannot spend few lakhs on cinema that transforms souls. Mani Kaul's death also marks the distressing state of film archiving in our country. Kaul spend the last few years of his life trying to orchestrate support to preserve his films. He was greatly disenchanted with the National Film Archive of India run by apathetic bureaucrats rather than by film archivists. In my last meeting with him he poignantly informed me that that negatives of his landmark films likeUski Roti and Duvidha were lost forever.
MANI KAUL FILMS 1965: Shraddha (15 minutes) 1966: Yatrik (20 minutes) 1967: Homage to the Teacher 1967: 6:40 pm 1968: Forms and Designs 1969: Uski Roti (A Day's Bread, 110 minutes) 1970: During and After the Air Raid 1971: Ashad Ka Ek Din (A Monsoon Day, 143 minutes) 1973: Duvidha (In Two Minds, 82 minutes) 1974: The Nomad Puppeteers (18 minutes) 1975: A Historical Sketch of Indian Women 1977: Chitrakathi (18 minutes) 1979: Ghashiram Kotwal 1980: Satah se Uthata Aadmi (Arising from the Surface, 114 minutes) 1980: Arrival (20 minutes) 1982: Dhrupad (72 minutes) 1985: Mati Manas (Mind of Clay, 92 minutes) 1986: The Desert of a Thousand Lines 1988: Before My Eyes (23 minutes) 1989: Siddheshwari (90 minutes) 1990: Nazar (The Gaze, 124 mins) 1992: Ahmaq (Idiot, 184 minutes) 1994: Die Himmelspforte (The Cloud Door, 26 minutes) in Tales of Erotica 1996: Lette Gevandter (Light Apparel, 5 minutes 23 seconds) in Danske Piger Viser Alt (Danish Girls Show Everything) 1999: Naukar Ki Kameez (The Servant's Shirt) 2002: Ik Ben Geen Ander (I Am No Other) (Netherland) 2005: Een Aaps Regenjas (A Monkey's Raincoat) (Netherland)
(Hindustan Times, July 06, 2011)
WRITINGS Exploration in New Film Techniques, in NCPA Quarterly vol 2, no 1, 1974 Communication, in a symposium on The Cinema Situation no 74, 1977 Towards a Cinematic Object, in Indian Cinema Superbazaar, Vikas Publishing, 1983 Seen from Nowhere, in Concepts of Space: Ancient and Modern, Indira Gandhi National Centre for Art, Abhinav Publications, New Delhi, 1991.
(Ashish Avikunthak is a filmmaker and teaches films at the University of Rhode Island )
An Approach to Naukar Ki Kameez, Cinemaya, Winter 1996 Beneath the Surface : Cinematography and Time (Indian Horizons, 2008)
However, the legacy of Mani Kaul's cinematic metaphysics is not dead. Contemporary filmmakers like Amit Dutta, Kabir Mohanty, Vipin Vijay, Arghya Basu and myself continue to keep it alive.
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Mani Took The Hard Road By Derek Malcolm Those who think of Indian cinema as the glitz of Bollywood on the one hand and the eloquent classicism of Satyajit Ray on the other miss a third important strand, manifested best by the radical director Mani Kaul, who has died from cancer aged 66. Kaul was a totally uncompromising film-maker who never sought popularity but pursued his own concerns, influenced by RitwikGhatak, his Bengali teacher and a great director in his own right, and by Robert Bresson and Andrei Tarkovsky among the foreign giants of the cinema. Watching Bresson's Pickpocket (1959), he once said, was one of the formative experiences of his life. He was, however, entirely his own man, who understood Indian art, music, literature and theatre as much as film. He was a stern critic of orthodox storytelling and especially the modern gyrations of Bollywood. "If film shows you something you already know," he once said, "where will it lead us?" His own version of true cinema led to Kaul being admired by the more adventurous Indian and European
Bresson's Pickpocket was a formative experience for Mani Kaul.
critics and often adored by the film students he taught, but largely ignored by the public. Recently, opportunities were few and far between. In his last year, when he was fighting illness, he had a chance to direct a film about the Italian director Roberto Rossellini's
Duvidha copied the Rajasthani miniature style of painting. 40 DOCUMENTARY TODAY
visit to India in the 1950s. The screenplay was to be based on DileepPadgaonkar's book Under Her Spell, but Kaul was too ill to start the shoot. He was born in Jodhpur, in Rajasthan, to a Kashmiri family. His uncle was the actor-director Mahesh Kaul. Mani studied at film school first as an actor and then as a director. His first feature, Uski Roti (Our Daily Bread, 1970), became one of the key films of the new Indian cinema of the time. It tells the story of a woman who waits for her truck-driver husband every day with his food. When he doesn't appear, she begins to doubt his loyalty and finds out that he has a mistress in another town. The film is not an orthodox narrative, dealing instead with silence, mood and imagery. It caused a huge stir, even being lambasted in the Indian parliament by a member who said it was so boring she would never forget it. Kaul took the intended insult as high praise. His most famous film was Duvidha (In Two Minds, 1975), an adaptation of a
folktale from Rajasthan that visually copied the Rajasthani miniature style of painting. The story is simple. A merchant's son returns to his village with his bride but has to go away on business. She is left alone and a "ghost", possibly the product of her fertile imagination, assumes the form of her husband. When the real husband returns, the ghost is tied up in a leather bag, much to the woman's distress. The film, beautifully shot, was shown widely in European arthouses. But India had and has no such cinemas, one of the main reasons why the films of Kaul, his fellow radical Kumar Shahani and many other talented filmmakers could never make a real mark. Though funded by the Indian government's Film Finance Corporation (FFC) and given the promise of a screening on national television, the films of the Indian new wave were essentially on a hiding to nothing. They could not be shown in the huge cinemas where Bollywood's successful epics attracted full houses, and were often considered abstruse and uncommercial. Kaul's group of documentaries, very unlike those put out by the FFC with sonorous, often English voiceovers, were as distinctive as his features. The best known is probably Dhrupad (1982), in which he examines one of the purest forms of Indian classical music. The film argues that both folk and classical idioms were derived, over
some 2,000 years, from tribal music and the celebration of nature and the cycles of life. In the last shot, which extends for some six minutes, the camera pans eloquently over the skyline of Mumbai, looking at the slums and skyscrapers, accompanied by the Dhrupad form, to bring pattern and meaning to the chaotic existence of the sprawling city.
“One of the pioneers of the new wave in Indian cinema who explored new language and expression in his films, Kaul, through his innovative imagery, vocabulary and experimentation started a new movement in Indian cinema. His untimely death has left a void in the film industry, which would be very difficult to fill."
Although Kaul's body of work was considerable – he made two films, Nazar and Idiot (both 1991), based on the work of Dostoevsky – his inability to finance the films he wanted led him to teaching film in India, Europe and America, and also to studying the Indian music he loved. He became an accomplished singer in the process.
Ambika Soni, Minister for Information & Broadcasting, India.
Although he took the hard road as a filmmaker, achieving, at least latterly, far less than he deserved, his influence was considerable. It was once said of Kaul that he refused to be a passive carrier of the national artistic tradition and, with equal vehemence, was unconcerned with importing into India the western avant-garde experiment. Now that he has died, as is often the case in India, his work may well be studied with added appreciation. But not by the famous Bollywood director who once met him and said afterwards: "I simply didn't know what to talk to him about." (The Guardian, UK, dated Thursday 14 July 2011)
Importing the Western avant garde … Shambhavi Kaul in Nazar.
I first come to know Mani when I received a call in 1978 about making a film on the work of Muktibodh. Mani tried to free situations from the proverb of cinema and do his own thing. His search was for purity in cinema. He always made classical cinema without caring for what people felt, and often told jokes about this at his own expense. He made films based on classic writings and made them watchable. He stuck to his own style, giving cinema the kind of sanctity that a classical art deserved. He was not a popular filmmaker, but a successful one. Ashok Vajpayi, Chairman, Lalit Kala Akademi Mani Kaul was truly a pioneer of new Indian cinema and we deeply mourn his loss. He was a legend whose loss will be mourned by all film connoisseurs and students of cinema. We at NFDC have had the privilege of closely working with him in Ashad Ka Ek Din and Duvidha where he was the producer and Uski Roti and Nazar, both of which he directed for us. His bond with NFDC grew stronger over the years and he was in the forefront of encouraging young talented filmmakers. He was a mentor and creative producer for Anhey Ghorhey Da Daan, which is in post-production. We were truly looking forward to our involvement as co-producers in his new directorial venture. With his demise NFDC has lost a guiding force and the country has lost an iconic filmmaker. Nina Lath Gupta, Managing Director, National Film Development Corporation DOCUMENTARY TODAY 41
I carried his films in my heart By Rada Sesic director named Mani Kaul. Soon after that, at the London film festival, I saw Idiot. I did not know who Shah Rukh Khan was. I had also forgotten Nazar. I was totally taken by the film and was overwhelmed by its intensity. Only much later did I read that it was made by the same director: Mani Kaul. Idiot became a film that I carried with me, in my heart, for a long time.
The minimalist kammerspiel … Shekhar Kapur and Shambhavi Kaul in Nazar.
My first encounter with India determined, in a way, my whole life. I had come to India with a very small crew from Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina – at that time Yugoslavia – to make a film on Satya Sai Baba, or more precisely, on people who need Sai Baba in their life. Instead of one month we stayed for four months and instead of one film we ended up making three films. While preparing for this new documentary, we were camping in Chennai, then called Madras. It was 1991 and the International Film Festival of India was being held there. At the international festival, I had the chance to see many Indian films and discovered for myself a new, different, magical, inspiring world of cinema. The great maestro Aravindan was there as well – attending what would probably be his last international festival. I watched his movies, remembered them well and got extremely uplifted by their style. At the same festival I saw Mani Kaul's film Nazar and after an hour or so walked out of the film. I couldn't take it anymore. The characters and intensity were penetrating my body and soul so much that I couldn't bear it. I was in love with someone at the time and things didn't fall together in a positive 42 DOCUMENTARY TODAY
way. I felt deeply disturbed and overwhelmed by the relationship in the film; it was all so painfully strong that I couldn't live through it. This minimalist kammerspiel, had such a claustrophobic set-up that the psychology of the main characters in the film was overflowing onto the spectators' reality with great intensity, like cooked milk boiling over on a hot stove. I still remember the mood of the film and my personal feeling so well but the story of the film faded away. That was the day I first heard of the
Coming from Eastern Europe, Dostoevsky's work is known and important to most of us. We respect his ability to paint the psychological nuances of the characters, especially of the problematic ones. However, Mani's characters were something very different, very fresh – they had a new dimension from the ones Dostoevsky wrote of. Mani's characters were enriched by their Indian-ness. I haven't noticed that the film was long (by European standards). It didn't feel that way at all, Once again I remember my own experience while experiencing it. About the same time, and again at the London Film Festival, I discovered another Indian director that spoke to
Mani Kaul came to terms with his adopted country with I Am No Other.
my soul so closely. Kumar Shahani. His Khayal Gatha won my heart and mind over. These two directors were somehow always able to disturb my intellect and even more, my soul. I deeply believe that cinema is much more a matter of emotional strength than intellectual. However, the films of these two directors have the ability to stimulate both with the same intensity – as in the case of Sokurov's films Other Circle and Mother and Son. But even more than his films, it was Mani Kaul's personal presence which impressed me the most. I had the privilege of knowing him while he was living in The Netherlands. His calmness, his smiling face while talking to young students of music, who were all the time with him during the International Film Festival of Rotterdam, made me understand how much a real guru cared for his pupils. We would meet regularly at the Rotterdam Festival, discussing films, often Indian. We never got to talking about how he felt in The Netherlands, how he managed his life under different circumstances, in a country with lots of rain and little sun. That's why I sort of re-discovered Mani again in his documentary Ik Ben Geen Ander (I Am No Other) (2002). In this documentary he surprisingly spoke on his own feelings, his Dutch family, the way of Dutch life and place in society. This time, his private side, however intimate, shaped within an intriguing cinematic approach. To that, I could relate myself very well – also being foreign in spite of having a Dutch passport. After living in The Netherlands for some five-six years, I had also made a film that concerns my private feelings towards myself within the society, questioning whether someone could be the same person after changing almost everything in his/her life conditions, including surroundings, friends and family. After watching Mani's intriguing, almost painfully honest, personal documentary, I felt connected. Serious and funny at the same time, witty in arranging himself within the Dutch landscape, society,
Danske Piger Viser Alt.
relations, with a flavour of self irony, this film hit me hard. I felt somewhat similar, though differently. My family situation and reason for moving out of my country was different, but the alienation was similar. I believe that all dislocated and displaced people, have something in common. Some very strong bond is established. After that, mostly during my programme of “Hinglish” films that I put together for IFFRotterdam, we met again and again but never talked about our common experience of being “the other”. Somehow, Mani had exorcised this feeling much earlier, before moving to Holland, by creating a very strong character of a boy in his fiction film The Servant's Shirt. There, the young employee belongs to the office, to his house and his lovely wife. He is devoted and passionate about all and yet, he has difficulties to truly feel being part of it. My understanding of The Servant's Shirt was a given outfit that one was expected to wear no matter how one feels having it on. Mani returned to India, talking passionately about the upcoming film academy in Mumbai, film screenings of independent films, films that stimulate viewers mind and soul. He was planning to work on all fronts at the same time and to bring about a change. He did bring about a change – for many and for me as well. His films matter. They are etched in our minds and souls. His films leave an imprint on their audience. As Wim Wenders says, “I
enter the cinema as one person but I want to leave it as another.” Many of us are “another” person after watching his Siddheshwari, Uski Roti, The Idiot, Nazar or The Servant's Shirt. To mention another great director – Peter Greenaway – who ponders on why cinema is the only art that we consider it sufficient to be experienced only once. When we listen to some music, we listen to it many times in our life over and over, we watch the same painting, we read the same book in different stages of our life. Why is it that for a film that we know, we simple say, I watched that one already? Mani's films are certainly those which many of us want to watch over and over again. I watched Siddeshwari during many stages of my life and when I was thirty I understood it very differently than at my last screening a few years ago in Kolkata. I also watched The Servant's Shirt many times – each time with similar excitement, each time experiencing it in a more complex way. I wish I could watch Nazar and Idiot again. I am curious to know how I would now understand the complexity of the human relationships in Nazar or the performances in The Idiot – after being brainwashed from seeing many masala films starring Shah Rukh Khan. I remember that there, in Mani's film, he was remarkably strong. Mani left, but Mani stays with us too. (Rada Sesic is a filmmaker, lecturer, curator and a film critic from Croatia/Bosnia and Herzegovina, now settled in The Netherlands.)
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“He was one of the finest film makers in India; He shouldn't have died so early. His thought process, as far as film making goes, was quite remarkable.” - Mrinal Sen.
"Immediately after Ray, Ghatak and Sen, a crop of different film makers hit the scene. Mani was surely one of them. While living in Mumbai, there were so many producers around him. But, he was never allured by the commercial kind of films. That was unique about him. There were also people like ShyamBenegal and Kumar Shahani. Together with them, Mani refused to compromise with the system." - Buddhadeb Dasgupta.
“He was one of the last mohicans of Indian creative cinema. This is a great loss in these days of flat onedimensional Indian cinema.” -Goutam Ghose. “Mani Kaul was one of the greatest auteurs of New Wave Indian Cinema. His films reflected his personal creative vision. Kaul was a man with a
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luminous mind who pioneered the parallel cinema movement in India. His films explored a new language and expression. Innovative imagery, vocabulary and experimentation were his forte. His debut film Uski Roti was a landmark film in Indian cinema. He was deeply influenced by Robert Bresson, Andrei Tarkovsky and RitwikGhatak, though he made a mark of his own.” -Arin Paul
“Indian cinema will never get another director like Mani Kaul. I had once asked him how he teaches cinema to his students and he had said: "It's simple. I just ask them to buy eight Ritwik Ghatak movies." That was Mani Kaul.It's rare for a director to remain untouched by Bollywood and continue with his own style of film-making.”Bappaditya Bandopadhyay.
“Mani was not only a filmmaker, but also a film academic. He taught films in Duke University and Harvard University. His films were not as recognised by Indians as much as they were appreciated among international viewers.” - Shyam Benegal. “One of India's great filmmakers; Unfortunately Europeans are more familiar with his work than are Indians." - Anurag Kashyap. “He was great friend, giver, serious, yet
full of humour. At FTII, despite getting a nominal honorarium, he never refused to take classes and workshops.” - Kundan Shah.
“Though the film industry respected him for his genius, there used to be a clear divide between him and commercial filmmakers. If one met at a public space, one didn't know how to communicate with him.” - Mahesh Bhatt.
"The passing away of friends reminds you of the value of this moment. RIP Mani Kaul. Friend.Director. A life passionately dedicated to exploring the outer edges of the art of film. Will be missed." - Shekhar Kapur “The first time Mani Kaul called me I was in Berlin. I was so excited n nervous that I couldn't talk. Our last meeting when I showed him I Am at Anurag's office and he told me warmly that he was happy to see a few of us making different films.” - Onir
Chris Marker at 90 By Samuel Douhaire and Annick Rivoire
The legendary French filmmaker and photographer, Chris Marker, turned 90 in July this year, but he shows no signs of slowing down. He has just completed two years in the trains of the Paris Métro to shoot Passengers, a marvellous photo-essay of more than 200 colour photographs of people in transit. Using a concealed camera, Marker captured intimate moments between couples and family members, as well as a diverse mix of individuals in periods of reverie in a public place — occasionally digitally altering the images to make comparisons between the random passengers and classic subjects from the history of art. The writer and director of such influential films as 1962's La Jetée, which Terry Gilliam remade as 12 Monkeys, and 1982's Sans Soleil, a meditative film about travel and memory, Chris Marker is one of the great cineastes of our time as well as one of the most private. He hates publicity and there are countless occasions on which he has not turned up after promising to make an appearance. He also does not allow himself to be photographed, preferring to allow his filmed images, rather than his image as a filmmaker, to speak for him. Less than a dozen photographs of Marker exist, and his interviews are even more rare. Eight years ago, the reclusive director agreed to an interview with the French newspaper Libération via an email do-it-yourself kit: four topics, with ten questions each. He did not respond to every question, but these "frankly Dostoevskian" answers should sum up his work. Chris Marker (Photo by Lars-OlofLöthwall)
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but it isn't always cinema. Godard nailed it once and for all: at the cinema, you raise your eyes to the screen; in front of the television, you lower them. Then there is the role of the shutter. Out of the two hours you spend in a movie theater, you spend one of them in the dark. It's this nocturnal portion that stays with us, that fixes our memory of a film in a different way than the same film seen on television or on a monitor.
Sans Soliel is an all-time Marker classic.
Cinema, photo-novels, CD-roms, video installations - is there any medium you haven't tried? Yes, gouache. Why have you agreed to the release of some of your films on DVD, and how did you make the choice? Twenty years separate La Jetée from Sans Soleil. And another 20 years separate Sans Soleil from the present. Under the circumstances, if I were to speak in the name of the person who made these movies it would no longer be an interview but a séance. In fact, I don't think I either chose or accepted: somebody talked about it, and it got done. That there was a certain relationship between these two films was something I was aware of but didn't think I needed to explain -- until I found a small anonymous note published in a programme in Tokyo that said, "Soon the voyage will be at an end. It's only then that we will know if the juxtaposition of images makes any sense. We will understand that we have prayed with film, as one must on a pilgrimage, each time we have been in the presence of death: in the cat cemetery, standing in front of the dead giraffe, with the kamikazes at the moment of take-off, in front of the guerillas killed in the war for independence. In La Jetée, the foolhardy experiment to look into the future ends in death. By treating the 46 DOCUMENTARY TODAY
same subject 20 years later, Marker has overcome death by prayer." When you read that, written by someone you don't know, who knows nothing of how the films came to be, you feel a certain emotion. "Something" has happened.
But having said that, let's be honest. I've just watched the ballet from An American in Paris on the screen of my I Book, and I very nearly rediscovered the lightness that we felt in London in 1952, when I was there with (Alain)Resnais and (Ghislain) Cloquet during the filming of Statues Also Die, when we started every day by seeing the 10 a.m. show of An American in Paris at a the atre in Leicester Square. I thought I'd lost that lightness forever till I saw it on cassette.
When your CD-ROM Immemory was released in 1999 you said that you had found the ideal medium. What do you think of DVD?
Does the democratization of the means of filmmaking (DV, digital editing, distribution via the Internet) seduce the socially engaged filmmaker that you are?
With the CD-ROM, it's not so much the technology that's important as the architecture, the tree-like branching, the play. We'll make DVD-ROMs. The DVD technology is obviously superb,
Here's a good opportunity to get rid of a label that's been stuck on me. For many people, "engaged" means "political", and politics, the art of compromise (which is as it should be because if
Une journée d'Andrei Arsenevitch was a tribute to his long-time friend Andrei Tarkovsky and documented his last year when he was dying of cancer.
there is no compromise there is only brute force, of which we're seeing an example right now) bores me deeply. What interests me is history, and politics interests me only to the degree that it represents the mark history makes on the present. With an obsessive curiosity (if I identify with any of Kipling's characters, it's the Elephant Boy of the Just-So Stories, because of his "insatiable curiosity") I keep asking: How do people manage to live in such a world? And that's where my mania comes from, to see "how things are going" in this place or that. For a long time, those who were best placed to see "how it's going" didn't have access to the tools to give form to their perceptions - and perception without form is tiring. And now, suddenly, these tools exist. It's true that for people like me it's a dream come true. I wrote about it, in a small text in the booklet of the DVD. A necessary caution: the "democratization of tools" entails many financial and technical constraints, and does not save us from the necessity of work. Owning a DV camera does not magically confer talent on someone who doesn't have any or who is too lazy to ask himself if he has any. You can miniaturize as much as you want, but a film will always require a great deal of work -and a reason to do it. That was the whole story of the Medvedkin groups, the young workers who, in the post-'68 era, tried to make short films about their own lives, and whom we tried to help on the technical level, with the means of the time. How they complained! "We come home from work and you ask us to work some more. . . ." But they stuck with it, and you have to believe that something happened there, because 30 years later we saw them present their films at the Belfort festival, in front of an attentive audience. The means of the time was 16mm silent, which meant threeminute camera rolls, a laboratory, an editing table, some way of adding sound -- everything that you have
The film on Alexander Medvedkin was a homage to the Russian filmmaker's cinematic genius.
now right inside a little case that fits in your hand. A little lesson in modesty for the spoiled children of today, just like the spoiled children of 1970 got their lesson in modesty by putting themselves under the patronage of Alexander Ivanovitch Medvedkin and his cinĂŠtrain. For the benefit of the younger generation, Medvedkin was a Russian filmmaker who, in 1936 and with the means that were proper to his time (35mm film, editing table, and film lab installed in the train), essentially invented television: shoot during the day, print and edit at night, show it the next day to the people you filmed (and who often participated in the editing). I think that it's this fabled and long forgotten bit of history (Medvedkin isn't even mentioned in Georges Sadoul's book, considered in its day the Soviet Cinema bible) that underlies a large part of my work -- in the end, perhaps, the only coherent part. To try to give the power of speech to people who don't have it, and, when it's possible, to help them find their own means of expression. The workers I filmed in 1967 in Rhodesia, just like the Kosovars I filmed in 2000, had never been heard on television: everyone was speaking on their behalf, but once you no longer
saw them on the road, bloody and sobbing, people lost interest in them. To my great surprise, I once found myself explaining the editing of Battleship Potemkin to a group of aspiring filmmakers in Guinea-Bissau, using an old print on rusty reels; now those filmmakers are having their films selected for competition in Venice. I found the Medvedkin syndrome again in a Bosnian refugee camp in 1993 -- a bunch of kids who had learned all the techniques of television, with newsreaders and captions, by pirating satellite TV and using equipment supplied by an NGO. But they didn't copy the dominant language -- they just used the codes in order to establish credibility and reclaim the news for other refugees. An exemplary experience. They had the tools and they had the necessity. Both are indispensable. Do you prefer television, movies on a big screen, or surfing the Internet? I have a completely schizophrenic relationship with television. When I'm feeling lonely, I adore it, particularly since there's been cable. It's curious how cable offers an entire catalogue of antidotes to the poisons of standard TV. If one network shows a ridiculous TV movie about Napoleon, you can flip over to the History Channel to hear Henri Guillermin's brilliantly mean DOCUMENTARY TODAY 47
only those by friends, or curiosities that an American acquaintance tapes for me on TCM. There is too much to see on the news, on the music channels or on the indispensable Animal Channel. And I feed my hunger for fiction with what is by far the most accomplished source: those great American TV series, like The Practice. There is a knowledge in them, a sense of story and economy, of ellipsis, a science of framing and of cutting, a dramaturgy and an acting style that has no equal anywhere, and certainly not in Hollywood.
Marker's all-time science fiction classic La Jetee was the inspiration for …
commentary on it. If a literary programme makes us submit to a parade of currently fashionable female monsters, we can change over to Mezzo to contemplate the luminous face of Hélène Grimaud surrounded by her wolves, and it's as if the others never existed. Now there are moments when I remember I am not alone, and that's when I fall apart. The exponential growth of stupidity and vulgarity is something that everyone has noticed, but it's not just a vague sense of disgust -- it's a concrete quantifiable fact (you can measure it by the volume of the cheers that greet the talk-show hosts, which have grown by an alarming number of decibels in the last five years) and a crime against humanity. Not to mention the permanent aggressions against the French language. And since you are exploiting my Russian penchant for confession, I must say the worst: I am allergic to commercials. In the early Sixties, making commercials was perfectly acceptable; now, it's something that no one will own up to. I can do nothing about it. This manner of placing the mechanism of the lie in the service of praise has always irritated me, even if I have to admit that this diabolical patron has occasionally given us some of the most beautiful images you can see on the small screen (have you seen the David Lynch commercial with the blue lips?). 48 DOCUMENTARY TODAY
But cynics always betray themselves, and there is a small consolation in the industry's own terminology: they stop short of calling themselves "creators," so they call themselves "creatives." And the movies in all this? For the reasons mentioned above, and under the orders of Jean-Luc, I've said for a long time that films should be seen first in theatres, and that television and video are only there to refresh your memory. Now that I no longer have any time at all to go to the cinema, I've started seeing films by lowering my eyes, with an ever increasing sense of sinfulness (this interview is indeed becoming Dostoevskian). But to tell the truth I no longer watch many films,
La Jetée inspired a video by David Bowie and a film by Terry Gilliam. And there's also a bar called "La Jetée," in Japan. How do you feel about this cult? Does Terry Gilliam's imagination intersect with yours? Terry's imagination is rich enough that there's no need to play with comparisons. Certainly, for me 12 Monkeys is a magnificent film. There are people who think they are flattering me by saying otherwise, that La Jetée is much better. The world is a strange place. It's just one of the happy signs, like Bowie's video, like the bar in Shinjuku (Hello, Tomoyo! To know that for almost 40 years, a group of Japanese are getting slightly drunk beneath my images every night -- that's worth more to me than any number of Oscars!), that have accompanied the strange destiny of this particular film.
...Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, starring Bruce Willis.
The film was made like a piece of automatic writing. I was filming Le Jolimai, completely immersed in the reality of Paris 1962, and the euphoric discovery of "direct cinema" (you will never make me say "cinema verité") and on the crew's day off, I photographed a story I didn't completely understand. It was in the editing that the pieces of the puzzle came together, and it wasn't me who designed the puzzle. I'd have a hard time taking credit for it. It just happened, that's all. You are a witness of history. Are you still interested in world affairs? What makes you jump to your feet, react, shout? Right now there are some very obvious reasons to jump, and we know them all so well that I have very little desire to talk more about them. What remains are the small, personal resentments. For me, 2002 will be the year of a failure that will never pass. It begins with a flashback, as in The Barefoot Contessa. Among our circle in the Forties, the one we all considered to be a future great writer was François Vernet. He had already published three books, and the fourth was to be a collection of short stories that he had written during the Occupation, with a vigor and an insolence that obviously left him little hope with the censors. The book wasn't published until 1945. Meanwhile, François had died in Dachau. I don't mean to label him as a martyr -- that's not my style. Even if this death puts a kind of symbolic seal on a destiny that was already quite singular, the texts themselves are of such a rare quality that there is no need for reasons other than literary in order to love them and introduce them to others. François Maspero wasn't wrong when he said in an article that they "transverse time with only an extreme lightness of being as ballast." Because last year a courageous publisher, Michel Reynaud (Tirésias), fell in love with the book and took the risk of reprinting it. I did everything I could to mobilize people I knew, not in order to make it the event of the season but
The cat has been Marker's favourite alter ego who he calls Guillaume. He has also made a film called The Case of the Grinning Cat.
simply to get it talked about. But no, there were too many books during that season. Except for Maspero, there wasn't a word in the press. And so -failure.
supermarkets force out the corner stores. That the unknown writer and the brilliant musician have the right to the same consideration as the corner store keeper may be too much to ask.
Was that reaction too personal? By chance, it was paired with a similar event, to which no line of friendship attached me. The same year, Capriccio Records released a new recording by Viktor Ullman. Under his name alone, this time. Previously, he and Gideon Klein had been recorded as "There sienstadt composers". For those not in the know, There sienstadt was the model concentration camp designed to be visited by the Red Cross -- the Nazis even made a film about it called The Führer Gives a City to the Jews.
Have your travels made you suspicious of dogmatism?
This record is astounding: it contains lieder based on texts by Holerlin and Rilke, and one is struck by the vertiginous thought that, at that particular time, no one was glorifying the true German culture more than this Jewish musician who was soon to die at Auschwitz. This time, there wasn't total silence -- just a few flattering lines on the arts pages. Wasn't it worth a bit more? What makes me mad isn't that what we call "media coverage" is generally reserved for people I personally find rather mediocre -- that's a matter of opinion and I wish them no ill. It's that the noise, in the electronic sense, just gets louder and louder and ends up drowning out everything, until it becomes a monopoly just like the way
I think I was already suspicious when I was born. I must have travelled a lot before then! You generally use the symbol of the cat to represent yourself. You have even made a film called The Case of the Grinning Cat. What relationship do you maintain with Guillaume, your feline alter-ego? Guillaume was a real cat who adopted me. He was my advisor, my confidant, my friend, my other halfand the only person I accepted near me when I was editing. I could tell by the direction his ears pointed if he agreed with what I was doing or not. And then he went to cat heaven. Some time after, he reappeared before me as ghost. He really wanted to get involved, and he had ideas about practically everything. While I was listening to the news in the morning, he arrived with a comic strip bubble, and that's how he connected with actuality. I am only the medium. Like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Guillaume is everything I am not: he's a show-off, an interventionist, an exhibitionist, he just loves to be the talk of the town -- we complete each other perfectly. (Originally published in Libération, March 5, 2003.) DOCUMENTARY TODAY 49
NEWS A Scholar and a Filmmaker film, Storm Over Kashmir (1948), with a hand-held camera and using leftover newsreel raw stock. (A copy of the film is available with the National Film Archive of India in Pune.) Simultaneously he made a reputation as a Film Historian of repute writing extensively on Indian Cinema in magazines like The Illustrated Weekly of India, Filmfare, Seminar and other journals.
B.D.Garga receives the V. Shantaram Lifetime Achievement Award from filmmaker Mrinal Sen at MIFF 1996. At extreme left is Pramod Navalkar, then Maharashtra Minister for Cultural Affairs.
Noted film historian, documentary filmmaker and winner of the first V.Shantaram Award for Lifetime Achievement Bhagwan Das Garga died in Patiala in the wee hours of July 18, 2011. The octogenarian was suffering from general weakness followed by jaundice and had been admitted in a Patiala hospital four to five days before his death. He was 86 years old and is survived by his wife Donnabelle Garga and daughter Nicole O'Hara. Born in 1924 in Lehra in East Punjab (now in Pakistan), he was sent to an English medium school run by Christian missionaries in Lahore. An early interest in photography earned him recognition from the Illustrated Weekly of India, which published some of his photographs. His father's wish that he attend medical school was soon undercut by Bhagwan's expulsion from Lahore because of his political activities during the independence movement. In 1943 Garga moved to Bombay and completed a short course in the photography department of St Xavier's College. In 1944 he joined V.Shantaram as a trainee and worked with him till 1946.He also fell under 50 DOCUMENTARY TODAY
In 1953 Garga's practical and scholarly interest in the cinema took him to Britain, where he worked at a variety of jobs: voicing commentary for the Hindi/Urdu section of BBC, occasional jobs for film units and writing articles for film journals.He became involved with British Film Institute and frequently visited Ealing studios to watch directors at work.
the influence of K.A. Abbas, a leftwing journalist and one of India's best informed film critics, who was then coscripting Shantaram's biographical classic Dr Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani. Abbas encouraged the young film enthusiast to begin writing a history of Indian cinema for Abbas's recently founded Urdu-language journal Sargam.
He also travelled to France and struck up lasting friendships with Georges Sadoul and Henri Langlois, director of the famed archive Cinémathèque française and clearly a man after his own heart. Writing in Filmfare after Langlois' death in 1977, Bhagwan referred to him as “world cinema's greatest benefactor”.
In 1946 he returned to Lahore to direct a feature film. There, when the madness took over, a man clutching a knife that he had used and not bothered to clean, made a terrified Garga and his Muslim cook recite the kalma to prove they were not kafirs. Thanks to his fluency in Urdu, Garga passed the test, but it broke him. Days later, he too was part of the caravan, getting on to a plane and flying to the safety of Bombay. Many years later he recalled the incident, "I was certain that I would be able to return to Lahore one day. That this did not happen was heartbreaking. The sense of loss is hard to describe because it is associated with so many memories – of streets, trees, friends, food etc."
During his time in Europe Bhagwan once again met up with his mentor Abbas and worked with him on Pardesi (1957), an Indo-Soviet co-production about Afansi Nikitin, a Russian traveller who discovered India a decade before Vasco da Gama. This took him to the Soviet Union where – his writings having been translated into Russian – he was welcomed into the charmed circle of film historians and archivists. He was able to persuade the authorities to arrange for a private screening of the banned second half of Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible (1958), which he wrote about for Sight & Sound on his return. While in Russia he also wrote a book on Indian cinema, Kino Indiski, which was published by a Russian publisher.
Unable to make a headway in feature films he gravitated towards documentaries, shooting his first short
In spite of innumerable problems he and P.K.Nair, then Curator (later
Director), National Film Archive of India, organized the first comprehensive retrospective of Indian Cinema with over sixty films at the Cinematheque Francaise's Musee De Homme basement theatre in Paris in 1964. Back in India he began to write on the history of Indian cinema and make documentary films with equal passion. Garga's best-known films include Dance of Shiva, Sarojini Naidu, Writing of the Raj and Road to Friendship. His most shown documentaries today are his films on film history: Glimpses of Indian Cinema and Satyajit Ray in the Creative Artists of India series. In the same series he made a film on Amrita Sher-Gil. In 1996, Garga received the first V Shantaram Award for Lifetime Achievement in the realm of documentary films at the Mumbai International Film Festival. In the same year he published his magnum opus So Many Cinemas. Garga's book on documentary films, B.D.Garga
After many years of collecting, making, researching and writing about films, Bhagwan and his wife Donnabelle (a formidable film researcher in her own right) moved from Bombay to Goa in 1992. This was no retirement, however, and despite failing health and eyesight he maintained a strict daily working regime. During this time he produced the beautiful So Many Cinemas: The Motion Picture in India (a history which used much of his own archive material), From Raj to Swaraj:The Non-Fiction Film in India, The Art of Cinema: An Insider's Journey through Fifty Years of Film History and a soon to be published Pictorial History of Indian Silent Cinema. True to form, Bhagwan put the final touches to the manuscript just days before he died.From Raj to Swaraj: The Nonfiction Film in India won the National Award for the Best Book on Cinema in 2009. His latest, 'Pictorial History of Indian Silent Cinema' is due later this year.
Celebrating Hussain
M.F.Hussain
Three films made by the legendary painter M.F.Hussain – Meenaxi: The Tale of Three Cities, Through the Eyes of a Painter and a documentary on the artist Laurent Bregeant – were screened alongside the Master's art, murals, toys, photographs, drawings and archival documents at a retrospective which takes a holistic look at Husain's legacy. The showcase, called Celebrating Husain, was created by the Delhi Art Gallery, a prestigious art house with one of the largest collections of the artist's works dating back to the late 1940s. "This is the first ever retrospective of Husain in India since he left the country in 2006. The art works we are displaying cover nearly 60 years of his career; from 1949 to his recent works. After he stopped painting film posters, Husain began to design and craft toys as an employee of a children's furniture company. We have brought out a large collection of his toys, rarely seen before," Kishor Singh, who is head of the exhibitions and publications department of the gallery. Another Homage to Hussain was paid by Gallerist Payal Kapoor, the owner of Arushi Arts, who dedicated her third annual showcase Harvest to Husain with works by nearly 80 artists, including those by Husain, his peers at the Bombay Progressive Artists' Group and several young contemporary artists who were encouraged by Husain. The attempt was “to show the continuity of Husain's art into the present”.
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th
58 National Awards (Non Feature Films) Campus films dominated the non-feature section of the National Awards in 2011 with Snehal Nair's Germ (diploma film, SRFTII, Kolkata), Prateek Vats' Kal 15 August Dukan Band Rahegi (diploma film, FTII, Pune) and Nagraj Manjule's Pistulya (made as part of a college project at Ahmednagar New Arts College) bagging awards in the three top non-feature and short fiction categories. The films were judged by a jury chaired by veteran cinematographer-director A.K.Bir. FILM AWARDS Best Non-Feature Film (Swarna Kamal) Germ (Hindi) Producer: Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute Director: Snehal R. Nair
and how it has affected their lives. The jury appreciates it for the courageous, yet poetic exploration of the subject from the ethnographic perspective. Best Biographical Film (Rajat Kamal) Nilama dhaba (English) Producer: Films Division Director: Dilip Patnaik
Citation: Through abstract visualization and endearing black & white tones, the film depicts the human existence, afflicted by cancer, in a very sublime and somber tone. Along with the perception and growth, from child to youth and by the curious collection of thrown passport photographs, the film maker presents the changing perspective of the vision of the modern growing world in a very engaging manner.
Citation: An intimate portrayal of the inimitable Sunanda Pattanaik, whose life is inseparable from contemporary Indian classical music. The film explores the inner spirit of the artist through evocative moments, pregnant with visual passages.
Best Debut Film of A Director (Rajat Kamal) Pistulya (Marathi & Telugu) Producer and Director: Nagraj Manjule
Best Arts / Cultural Film (Rajat Kamal) Leaving Home (Hindi) Producer and Director: JaideepVarma
Citation:It is a delightful exposition of the poignant life of a poverty-stricken child, who nurtures a dream of embracing the source of learning through education, with simplicity and fluency. The director portrays the spirit of adventure of the child, through fine performances.
Citation:It is an emotive and enthralling exposition of the passion and dedication of a group, bound by the spirit of music, who transcend the commercial boundary to embrace their original creative flair. Without compromising, the group led to the adventure with courage and guts. The film maker has journeyed through this adventure with dramatic sensibility and compassion.
Best Anthropological/Ethnographic Film (Rajat Kamal) Songs of Mashangva (Tangkhul, Manipuri & English) Producer and Director: Oinam Doren Citation: An insightful foray into the complex and layered life of a 'song' and all that it carries within it for a community. It inquires into the shared critical history of a community in the specific context of an overarching missionary presence
Best Environment Film (including Agriculture) (Rajat Kamal) Iron is Hot (English) Producer: Meghnath Bhattacharjee Director: BijuToppo and Meghnath Bhattacharjee
At the National Awards ceremony held on September 12, 2011: Nagraj Manjule receives the award for the Best Debut Film of a Director for Pistulya (left) and Meghnath Bhattacharjee receives the award for the Best Environment Film for Iron is Hot. 52 DOCUMENTARY TODAY
Arunima Sharma was awarded the Swarna Kamal for Best Direction for Shyam Raat Seher (left) while Tinna Mitra received the Rajat Kamal for Best Editing for Germ
Citation:The film is well documented with a forthright exposition of the grievous impact of pollution due to sponge iron industry on the inhabitants dwelling around that area. With clarity and veracity, the film maker is able to express empathy and concern on the acute prevailing problem over human existence. Best Educational/Motivational/Instructional Film ( Rajat Kamal) Advaitham (Telugu) Producer: K. Vijaypal Reddy Director: Pradeep Maadugula Citation: The documentary exposes the human apathy of class difference through casteism in a very evoking and natural style. Through fun-filled situations and distressing moments, the director portrays the anguished and tragic aspects of casteism effecting human value and relationship. Best Exploration / Adventure Film (including Sports) (Rajat Kamal) Boxing Ladies (Hindi) Producer: Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, Director: Anusha Nandakumar Citation: A sensitive portrayal of young aspiring talents in a country where sports as passion/ profession comes up against heavy social odds and family biases. The jury applauds the film for the restrained and elevating treatment of a crucial subject underlining the silent dignity of the characters involved. Best Investigative Film (Rajat Kamal) A Pestering Journey (Malayalam, Punjabi, Hindi, English & Tulu) Producer: Ranjini Krishnan Director: K. R. Manoj
Citation:The pet detective in a reverse act, an emotive documentary exposing not only stories of cruel impact of pest control on human health but also arrests out attention to a more fundamental question – who is a pest ? Best Science & Technology Film (Rajat Kamal) Heart to Heart (Manipuri & English) Producer: Rotary Club of Imphal Director: Bachaspatimayum Sunzu Citation: A very well constructed reality with an engaging dramatic sensibility, that depicts the grimness of natural health maladies. It guides the viewer through emotions and playful spirit of the child. With the help of medical science, it enlightens the viewer with awareness of Congenital Heart Defect and its promising treatment. Best Promotional Film (Rajat Kamal) Ek Ropa Dhan (Hindi) Producer: Meghnath Bhattacharjee Director: BijuToppo and Meghnath Bhattacharjee Citation:A succinct and well researched film looking closely at an innovation applied effectively in the farming of rice. The film engages successfully with the issue and makes a strong case for the promotion of the practice called Ek Ropa Dhan. Best Film on Social Issues (Rajat Kamal) Understanding Trafficking (Bengali, Hindi & English) Producer: Cinemawoman Director: Ananya Chakraborti Citation:To cross the line of limit, becomes an issue of indifference. Along this line, the documentary projects the serious social issue of human trafficking in a very thought provoking manner through stark and gravitating images. It airs an intriguing atmosphere of concerns through dramatized and realistic imageries. DOCUMENTARY TODAY 53
Best Short Fiction Film (Rajat Kamal) Kal 15 August Dukan Band Rahegi (Hindi) Producer: Film and Television Institute of India Director: Prateek Vats
Citation: Does one hear the cry of the pest? In between the sound of the real and evoking music, the ensuing silence tells us the stories beyond.
Citation: With energy and vigour, the documentary records very interesting images of a group of young students, who are trying to relate, with ideology of freedom and the stifling authoritarian reality. In the process, the life is entangled with intrigues and doubts.
Best Editing (Rajat Kamal) Tinna Mitra for Germ (Hindi)
Best Film on Family Welfare (Rajat Kamal) Love in India (Bengali & English) Producer: Overdose Director: Kaushik Mukherjee Citation: Explores and deconstructs the traditional and orthodox landscapes of love, sexuality and conjugal relationships and the dynamics of emerging sexual politics and value systems in contemporary India with clarity and insight laced with subtle humour. INDIVIDUAL AWARDS
Citation: The abstract visualization and endearing black &white tones are very effectively punctuated with fine editing, and in the process it maintains a very subtle and flowing rhythm and pace to carry forward the cinematic work. Best Narration (Writing) (Rajat Kamal) Nilanjan Bhattacharya for Johar : Welcome to Our World (Hindi & English) Citation: A seamless powerful narrative about the symbiotic intricate relationship, the tribals of Jharkhand have with their forests and their struggle for existence against mindless aggressive development and flawed conservation policies, told with empathy and sincerity.
Best Direction (Swarna Kamal) Arunima Sharma for Shyam RaatSeher (Hindi)
Special Jury Awards (RajatKamals) Shiny Jacob Benjamin (Director) for Ottayal (One Woman Alone) (Malayalam)
Citation: Intelligent articulation of a shared urban angst in a powerful cinematic style and well constructedmise-enscene. The maturity of the director is reflected in the balanced approach to all the elements that blend to create an impression in the viewers mind.
Citation: It is a heart-warming portrayal of the woman Dayabai, who trades along a challenging path in quest of truth. The director, delves into the spirit of the woman to understand the theology of liberation, with sincerity and intelligence.
Best Cinematography (Rajat Kamal) Murali G. for Shyam Raat Seher (Hindi & English) Laboratory Processing: Film Lab
Ronel Haobam (Director) for The Zeliangrongs (Manipuri & English)
Citation: Imaginative yet minimal, a balanced and evocative cinematography creates a character out of a city night atmosphere, setting the space and mood for the living characters in their journey beyond the real, nearing mythical.
Citation: It is a well-researched endeavour to reflect a composite group of ethnic communities of common origin and socio - cultural back-ground, which highlights the rich cultural heritage and the tribes' traditional way of life, which is on the brink of extinction.
Best Audiography (Rajat Kamal) Harikumar Madhavan Nair (Re-recordist of the Final Mixed Track) A Pestering Journey (Malayalam, Punjabi, Hindi, English & Tulu)
Suraj Pawar (Child actor) for Pistulya (Marathi & Telugu) Citation: Under distressing situation and harsh reality, Pistulya, the child protagonist, displays the authenticity with vibrant and emotive expression.
Three talents were singled out by the jury for Special Jury Awards (from left) Ronel Haobam for his film The Zeliangrongs, Suraj Pawar for his role in Pistulya, and Shiny Jacob Benjamin for her film Ottayal.
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New film on Diana's death contempt of court,” says Allen. “I openly question the impartiality of a coroner (Lord Justice Scott Baker) who had sworn an oath of allegiance to the Queen yet was sitting in the Royal Courts of Justice, presiding over a case which involved the monarchy. “I also ask why he repeatedly refused to call members of the Royal Family to the inquest. Diana did write a note alleging Prince Charles was planning an accident to her car. “Yet that note was not revealed by the Metropolitan Police to the public and press – or the French police who first investigated the crash – for six years,” he adds.
Director Keith Allen poses a few pertinent questions regarding Princess Diana's death.
Producers of a new film that claims that Princess Diana was murdered on the orders of the British Establishment Unlawful Killing have been told that unless they cut 87 scenes from their hard-hitting documentary, it cannot legally be screened in Britain – prompting further speculations of a possible cover-up.The film was financed by Mohammed Al Fayed, the former owner of Harrods, whose son Dodi, 42, also died in the crash.
Allen was not fully convinced but then he met barrister Michael Mansfield, who later represented Al Fayed at Diana's inquest. “He persuaded me that there were suspicious circumstances surrounding the crash and signs of a cover-up. My film is supposedly in
The film premiered at Cannes June and US distributors are lining up for the rights. Since the film cannot be shown in Britain the producers will now release the film in Galway, Ireland, which is outside Britain's legal jurisdiction. The film has found interested buyers across the world and deals are being worked out and it won't be long before the film hits Indian shores.
The film's director, actor Keith Allen, however, insists that the British public has a right to see the full version of his 90-minute film. Keith Allen's ground breaking documentary recreates key moments from the inquest and demonstrates how vital evidence of foul play was hidden from public scrutiny, how the Royal Family were exempted from giving evidence and how journalists, particularly those working for the BBC, systematically misreported the events and in particular, the verdict itself. “This is the story of how the world was deceived,” says Allen. At first even
Police examine the wreckage of the car in which Princess Diana and Dodi were killed.
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SANAD Grants for 14 docus, 9 features narrative or documentary projects. SANAD supports films at two key stages of the production process: development (up to US$20,000 per project) and post-production (up to US$60,000 per project). Each year, SANAD issues two open calls for applications (one cycle closing on February 15 and the other on July 1) and awards a total of US$500,000 in development and post-production grants.
SANAD-funded Death For Sale, directed by Faouzil Bensaidi (inset), will be premiered in Toronto.
Fourteen documentaries and nine feature films have been selected to receive financial support from SANAD, the Abu Dhabi Film Festival's fund for filmmakers from the Arab world. Each year, SANAD awards a total of $500,000 in development and post-production grants to feature-length narrative and documentary projects.
andMy Brother (Kamal El Mahouti, Morocco/France). Launched in April 2010 SANAD (which means “support” or “help” in Arabic) provides Arab filmmakers with support for their feature-length
SANAD is an integral part of the Abu Dhabi Film Festival's commitment to independent, auteur and original filmmaking in the Arab world. Much more than just a film fund, SANAD is dedicated to providing year-round support and advice to grant recipients. The SANADLab works closely with SANAD grantees, running workshops and panel discussions, and scheduling meetings with film experts and mentors for them during the Festival. “We are proud that, by means of SANAD, we are able to lend a hand to some of the region's most talented filmmakers, both newcomers and veterans. Independent Arab cinema
Several films produced with the help of SANAD have gone on to critical acclaim at international festivals. Leila Kilani's On the Plank (Morocco) was selected for the 2011 Directors' Fortnight in Cannes. Death for Sale by Faouzi Bensaïdi (Morocco) and In My Mother's Arms by Atia and Mohamed Al-Daradji (Iraq) are both set to celebrate premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival next month. Both films have also been selected for ADFF's upcoming fifth edition (October 13-22, 2011). Other SANAD-funded films to be released in 2011 include In the Last Days of the City (Tamer El Said, Egypt/UK); Mohammad Saved From the Waters (Safaa Fathy, Egypt/France)
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SANAD-funded On The Plank, directed by Leila Kilani (inset) was in the 2011 Directors' Fortnight at Cannes.
SANAD Winners 2011 DOCUMENTARY Development Iraqi Odyssey, by Samir, Switzerland/Iraq/Germany Miss Hissa Hilal, by Stefanie Brockhaus, Saudi Arabia/Germany My Love Awaits Me by the Sea, by Mais Darwazeh, Jordan No Direction Home, by Guy Brooks and John Hollingsworth, UAE / Palestine / Jordan Woman in Mediterranean Sea (working title), by Jocelyne Saab, Lebanon/France Yasmina and Mohammed, by Regine Abadia, Algeria/Lebanon/France The Pirates of Sale, by Merieme Addou and Rosa Rogers, Morocco/United Kingdom The Wanted 18, by Amer Shomaly, Palestine/France/Canada Post-Production As If We Were Catching a Cobra, by Hala Alabdalla, Syria/France El Gusto, by Safinez Bousbia, Algeria/Ireland/France In Search of Oil & Sand, by Philippe Laurent Dib, Egypt After the Last Goal, by Mahdi Fleifel, Lebanon/United Kingdom Lebanese Rocket Society: The Strange Tale of the Lebanese Space Race, by Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Lebanon/France Tahrir Square 2011: The Good, The Bad & The Politician, by Amr Salama, Ayten Amin and Tamer Ezzat, Egypt
NARRATIVE Development I Am Nojood, 10 Years Old and Divorced, by Khadija Al Salami, Yemen Mettou, by Abderrahmane Sissako, Mauritania/France Origins, by Malek Bensmaïl, Algeria Poisonous Roses, by Fawzi Saleh, Egypt Nothing Doing in Baghdad, by Maysoon Pachachi, Iraq/United Kingdom The Wall, by Faouzi Bensaïdi, Morocco 99, by Hicham Lasri, Morocco The Guest, by Naji Abu Nowar, Jordan Post-Production When I Saw You, by Annemarie Jacir, Palestine/Jordan seems to be coming into its own and we have been witnessing a remarkable transformation that has encouraged filmmakers and audiences to move away from timeworn formulas to explore new directions. It's a trend we have been thrilled to come across and share with audiences at the Festival,” said Peter Scarlet, the Festival's Executive Director.
In 2010, SANAD awarded development and post-production grants to 27 productions, 11 of which were debut features. Altogether, 20 narrative and seven documentary films received SANAD grants. Of these, five post-production projects were shown at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival 2010 (October 14-23).
Here Comes the Rain, directed by BahijHojeij (Lebanon), won the Festival's Black Pearl award for Best Narrative Film from the Arab World as well as the award for Best Director at the Oran International Arab Film Festival 2010 in Algeria. OK, Enough, Goodbye, directed by Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia (Lebanon), won the Black Pearl award for Best Narrative Film by a New Director from the Arab World. Qarantina, directed by Oday Rasheed (Iraq-Germany), and Sun Dress, directed by Saeed Salmeen (United Arab Emirates-Syria), were both selected for the Festival's New Horizons / Afaq Jadida competition. Qarantina received a Special Jury Award at the Oran International Arab Film Festival 2010. Mohamed AlDaradji's new film In My Mother's Arms (Iraq) was screened as a work-inprogress. In 2009, prior to the launch of SANAD, the Festival supported the postproduction of three feature films: Son of Babylon, We Were Communists and Port of Memory. After its world premiere in Abu Dhabi, Son of Babylon, by Iraqi director Mohamed Al-Daradji, won numerous awards at festivals around the world and was chosen as Iraq's official entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Following the film's international success, Al-Daradji returned to Abu Dhabi to pick up Variety's Middle East Filmmaker of the Year Award at the Festival last October. We Were Communists, by Maher Abu Samra (Lebanon-France-United Arab Emirates), won the Festival's award for Best Documentary by an Arab Director or Related to Arab Culture in 2010. In November 2010, Kamal Aljafari's Port of Memory (PalestineGermany-France-UAE) and We Were Communists were screened at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York as part of Mapping Subjectivity: Experimentation in Arab Cinema from the 1960s to Now, a special program on which the Festival partnered with MoMa and ArteEast.
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The Killing Fields of Sri Lanka Devastating new evidence of alleged war crimes in Sri Lanka was the focus of a shocking new documentary unveiled on the Channel4 in June 2011. Sri Lanka's Killing Fields is an hourlong investigation into the final weeks of the bloody Sri Lankan civil war and features damning new evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Jon Snow presents a forensic investigation into the final weeks of the quarter-century-long civil war between the government of Sri Lanka and the secessionist rebels, the Tamil Tigers. Captured on mobile phones, both by Tamils under attack and government soldiers as war trophies, the disturbing footage shows some of the most horrific footage Channel 4 has ever broadcast. Disturbing footage in the film includes the apparent extra-judicial massacre of prisoners by government forces, the aftermath of targeted shelling of civilian hospitals and the bodies of female Tamil fighters who appear to have been sexually assaulted. Also examined in the film are atrocities carried out by the Tamil Tigers, including the use of human shields, and footage depicting the aftermath of a suicide bombing in a government
Are these horrifying scenes doctored? Scenes shot by mobile cameras in Sri Lanka's Killing Fields, broadcast by Channel 4.
centre for the displaced. A special show of the documentary was held for the United Nations Human Rights Council and was attended by a number of ambassadors from nations including the US and UK. A Sri Lankan delegation also attended. It was the first time they had seen the new alleged evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The film is made and broadcast as UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon faces growing criticism for refusing to launch an investigation into 'credible allegations' that Sri Lankan forces committed war crimes during the closing weeks of the bloody conflict with the Tamil Tigers. In April 2011, Ban Ki-moon published a report by a UN-appointed panel of experts, which concluded that as many as 40,000 people were killed in the final weeks of the war between the Tamil Tigers and government forces. It called for the creation of an international mechanism to investigate alleged violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law committed by government forces and the Tamil Tigers during that time.
Mass scale ethnic killings were alleged by Sri Lanka's Killing Fields.
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This film provides powerful evidence that will lend new urgency to the panel's call for an international inquiry to be mounted, including harrowing interviews with eye-witnesses, new photographic stills, official Sri Lankan army video footage, and satellite imagery.
Channel 4 News has consistently reported on the bloody denouement of Sri Lanka's civil war. Sri Lanka's Killing Fields presents a further damning account of the actions of Sri Lankan forces, in a war that the government still insists was conducted with a policy of Zero Civilian Casualties. The film raises serious questions about the consequences if the UN fails to act, not only with respect to Sri Lanka but also to future violations of international law. In the meantime the Sri Lankan Government has claimed that the video footage obtained by Channel 4 is false and that it had proof in the form of “original footage� that exposed the "malicious intentions" behind the British documentary. A spokesman for the Sri Lankan military said that the "unaltered" video suggested that what the documentary had presented as soldiers executing Tamil rebel prisoners actually showed rebels dressed in Army fatigues. Sri Lanka has persistently denied that there were any war crimes committed by its troops while battling the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) rebels, who were crushed in an offensive that ended in May 2009. It has also accused Channel 4 and Western nations of leading a campaign to discredit its human rights record by producing reports of alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Exploring a relationship It's never easy for a son to be talking about his mother's liason with another man. It's certainly quite a difficult task for him to be co-directing a documentary that stars his daughter in a role where she is trying to explore what went in the mind of this married man who indulged in a relationship with his mother. However, Jayabrato Chatterjee is not afraid to take up this challenge. He has already begun the research his documentary on Rabindranath Tagore's son, Rathindranath Tagore and his relationship with Jayabrato's mother, MeeraChatterjee. The filmmaker plans to complete his documentary by 2013, which also happens to coincide with the 125th birth anniversary of Rathindranath Tagore. Says Jayabrato, "Nilanjan Banerjee and I have begun to dig up material through letters that document the life of Rathindranath Tagore. Nilanjan has written a book based on the letters titled Aapni Tumi Roile Dure. Rathi jethu, as I call him, was an extremely controversial figure. He was accused by so many people around him for being in a relationship with my mother. But having seen Ma and Rathi jethu together and having grown up
with them in Dehradun, I know what this relationship meant. All his life, he was very lonely and finally he found a companion at the end. I want to explore the journey of Rathi jethu through the eyes of an actor, who incidentally also happens to be the grand-daughter of the person jethu was involved with. My daughter, Sahana, will be playing this character in the documentary." Jayabrato is, of course, aware of the whisper campaigns against his mother for having gone off to live in Dehradun with Rathindranath Tagore. "My mother was a favourite of Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore himself had directed her in RaktaKarabi and Notir Puja. But he never called her by the name Meera since his daughter also shared the same name. Instead, he addressed her as Rani Sudarshona. The relationship my mother shared with Rathi jethu was not something that Tagore was aware of. He died in 1941 while this relationship must have continued between 1948 and 1961 when Rathi jethu was deserted both by his colleagues in Santiniketan and his family members. There was a 30-year age difference between them and I would describe their relationship as being very tender." Priyanka Dasgupta
In an e-mail to the BBC, Channel 4 spokesperson Marion Bentley insisted that all the footage used in its documentary, entitled Sri Lanka's Killing Fields had been found to be authentic. She said it had been independently verified by experts in forensic pathology and video analysis and had twice been subjected to months of tests by audio-visual experts commissioned by the United Nations. "We stand by this excellent journalism and do not accept that the footage we broadcast has been doctored in any way," Bentley said. The Tagore family: (L-R) Daughter Mira Devi, son Rathindranath, Tagore, Daughter-in-law Pratima Devi and daughter Madhuri Lata
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FESTIVAL NEWS A Pestering Journey bags Kerala Fest Award Jury which also comprised Ayesha Kagal and Sofia Sivaraman. Eminent director Shyamaprasad headed the jury for Short Fiction, Animation, Music Video and Campus Films. A package comprising 19 films of women directors from countries such as Thailand, Afghanistan, Philippines, Iran, Jordan and India was also unspooled at the festival. The package was selected by the India Chapter of the IAWRT (International Association of Women in Radio and Television).
Documentary filmmaker K.R.Manoj receives the award for the Best Long Documentary from Kerala Chief Minster Oommen Chandy. Applauding are filmmaker Priyadarshan, chairman, Kerala Chalachithra Academy, and V.S Sivakumar, Kerala Minister for Transport and Devaswom.
A Pestering Journey directed by K.R.Manoj won the Best Long D o c u m e n t a r y w h i l e T h e re i s Something in the Air directed by Iram Gufran won the Best Short Documentary at the 4th International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala held at Thiruvanantpuram from July 31 to August 4, 2011.
Academy. The Competition Section was categorised into various sections: long and short documentary, animation, music video and campus films. Noted documentary filmmaker Arun Khopkar headed the Documentary
Mani Kaul's Duvidha and Chintha Ravi's Ente Keralam were screened as a homage to the two recently departed filmmakers. Arun Khopkar, the lead of Ashad Ka Ek Din, and Navroze Contractor, cameraman of Duvidha, shared their memories of Mani Kaul while Sasikumar spoke about his closeness to Chintha Ravi. The festival also included panel discussions in the Open Forum, interviews with film makers, discussions and seminars on New Frontiers in Documentary Film Marketing/Distribution and the need to popularize science on television
The festival, which is now a companion to the larger International Film Festival of Kerala, endeavours to catalyse a vibrant documentary and short film movement. Increasing accessibility and affordability of media technology has led to a boom in the production and scope of films. The festival aims to map and reflect the exploding nature of the medium in its many facets of creativity and resistance. Conflicts and realities in modern world was the focal theme of the festival. 200 films from 200 countries were screened in the five-day festival. More than 200 films from 25 countries were screened at the five-day festival which was organised by Kerala Chalchitra 60 DOCUMENTARY TODAY
Arun Khopkar, Navroze Contractor and Sashikumar speak at the homage to Mani Kaul and Chintha Ravi at the Kerala Film Festival.
THE AWARD WINNERS Best Long Documentary A Pestering Journey(K.RManoj) Citation: The award is given to K.R.Manoj for his searing and compassionate vision, linking the smallest organism to human life and the environment, through powerful and poetic images which express poignant beauty and the greed and brutality that blindly destroys it. Best Short Documentary There is Something in the Air (Iram Ghufran) Citation:The award is given to Iram Ghufran for her imaginative treatment of human suffering, through images and sounds that convey through suggestion the intensity of pain, rather than an offensive display of those who suffer. Best Short Fiction Kaveri (Shilpa Munikempanna) Citation: This outstanding film handles its delicate coming-of-agetheme with striking confidence and a lightness of touch – so that a simple story of two sisters is transformed into a moving experience. Best Animation Journey to Nagaland (Aditi Chitre) Citation: The film achieves a remarkable level of stylized animation as it journeys from the mythical past to a troubled present Best Music Video Sitaharan and Other Stories (Anusha Nandakumar) Citation: Using a magical combination of shadow play, masks, puppets and real people, this video probes the line between illusion and reality. Best Cinematographer (Documentary) Shehanad Jalal for A Pestering Journey Best Cinematographer (Short Fiction) Barun D. Jordar for Open Doors Special Jury Mention Sound Design: Aditi Chitre and Preetham Das for Journey to Nagaland Animation: It Is The Same Story (Nina Sabnani) Short Fiction: The Elephant (Renu Sawant) Short Documentary: Vertical City (Avijit Mukul Kishore) Long Documentary: Mullathiv Saga (Someetharan)& You Don't Belong (Spandan Banerjee)
Docu-drama on Guru Gobind Singh Thakur Ranvir Singh travelled 8,000 km and covered eight states of India -Bihar, Uttaranchal, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra to make In the Footsteps of Guru Gobind Singh. “We also covered 61 gurdwaras from Hemkunt Sahib in the Himalayas to Hazoor Sahib in Maharashtra following the actual route traversed by guruji himself,” he adds proudly. "It took us four years to make it. It really wasn't an easy task, but what kept us going was our admiration for guruji," says Singh. The film, according to him is “not a mere film but his sewa for Guru Gobind Singhji”. And yet, it does not promote any one religion, he claims. It's my attempt to build bridges between different religions," he says. This is the first time that a film is being made on the legendary 10th Sikh guru and, according to him, it will be the last time. Not because there is no reverence but simply because it is such a difficult subject. "In the past, there have been some special programmes and some general information dedicated to him, but this kind of treatment has never been given. This film is an encyclopedia on Guruji's life and brings out his glory. Written by Ranvir Singh and Kartar Singh Duggal, the two-and-a-halfhour-long film has been filmed on actual locations and uses paintings and pictures to depict Guru Gobind Singh. No expense has been spared to make the film authentic. The film has been made in three languages -- English, Hindi and Punjabi – so that it can reach out to the maximum number of people. Born in Kota, Rajasthan, the 74-yearold filmmaker has worked on film and television projects in Britain and the US. In his four-decades-long career, he made documentaries like Heart to Heart, Spring is Here Once More and Lions of Gir. He was also the executive producer of the first Hollywood-India co-production Shalimar. DOCUMENTARY TODAY 61
Contractor film bags top Jeevika Award
Vaishali Sinha receives the Special Mention Award from Adoor Gopalakrishnan at the Jeevika Livelihood Festival.
Navroze Contractor's Jharu Katha (2010/India) bagged the award for the Best Documentary at the Jeevika Asia Livelihood Documentary Film Festival, held at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi from August 26 to 28, 2011. Jharu Katha, made in Rajasthani and Hindi, draws extensively on the fieldwork conducted in remote corners of rural Rajasthan and the by-lanes of Jodhpur city. The 64-minute film engages in conversation with a wide spectrum of broom-makers. Their struggle for livelihood is intersected with different stories of the broom provided by women and ritual attendants of shrines, traders, municipal sweeper and garbage collectors. Through the counterpoint of their voices, the film covers wide ground in opening the contradictory values and beliefsystems of the broom. Ajay T G's Andhere se Pehle (2011/India), which bagged the award for the Second Best Documentary, documents how tribal land is routinely grabbed or illegally acquired by private companies in India in the name of development. In the Raigarh district of Chhatisgarh, farmers are caught in a search for justice against the Jindal Thermal Power Plant. Alongside testimonies by desperate farmers, this film documents their determined protest against an impending public hearing that will decide the expansion of the power plant in Tamnar. 62 DOCUMENTARY TODAY
Saika Mallick's Koh-I-Noor (2011/ Bangladesh), which was given the award for the Third Best Documentary, tells the story of 7-year-old Raqeeb from a nondescript Bangladeshi village named Chandpur, who is largely oblivious to the world of cinema house in. However, the grownups around him continuously try to imagine and construct young Raqeeb's world in their own terms. The film, named after the cinema house 'Koh-inoor', tries to capture whether those views conform to Raqeeb's own ideas. The Jury made a Special Mention of Made in India, directed by Rebacca Haimowitz and VaishaliSinha, which explores the human experiences behind the phenomena of “outsourcing� surrogate mothers to India. The film weaves together the personal stories of an infertile American couple and an Indian surrogate within the context of a growing reproductive outsourcing business. Akash Kamthan's Dekha Andekhi: Kaal aur Kala, which explores the hardships faced by the Sanganer Hand Block Printing industry, was named the Best Student Documentary. The Jury made a Special Mention of K. Harish Singh's Budhan Diaries, which documents the journey of Budhan Theatre of Chharanagar in Ahmedabad. The People's Choice Award was given to Amar, directed by Andrew Hinton.
'Our films never get shown.' 'We won't send the DVDs as they might get copied and for us our films are our survival.''It is amazing that the music video industry in the hills is a multi crore business!' These comments made us curious and jolted us from our complacency of defining popular culture in preconceived ways. We were intensely curious about what was out there and what insights we could gain from the various social, cultural, economic, political diversity in the films made in parts of the country without a long history of established film industries; hence the name 'emerging cinemas'. We started exploring and decided to go beyond the notions of high and low art, and look at works that were made with honesty and passion, that were true to the lived experiences of people. The idea got crystallised through the process of speaking to people, and finding and viewing films from different parts of the country. For example, through a couple of documentaries, we knew of a group in Malegaon, Maharashtra who had reworked Bollywood and Hollywood blockbusters and adapted them to their milieu. What we wanted to show in the Festival of Emerging Cinemas were not the films made on the Malegaon group, but a film made by them. Malegaon ke Sholay was made for the people of Malegaon; we wanted to see how a different audience, one in Delhi would respond to it. The films we came across were concerned with identity, aspiration, ritual heritage, migration and assimilation, and were often done with humour and pathos. We discovered there is an audience for these films that aim to mediate the past with the present. We felt that these films redefine the concept of popular culture and need wider viewing and dissemination. Important to mention here are the films on tribal communities that represented adivasis as people dealing with an array of complex problems in today's world, and not as 'exotic' and 'primitive' as has been the custom in the mainstream media.
Festival of Emerging Cinemas
A Cinema That Connects Small Town India The Festival of Emerging Cinemas, organised and hosted by the International Association of Women in Radio and Television and the India Habitat Centre between August 8-12, 2011, was a celebration of the diversity in creative expression of the cinemas that are emerging in the towns and villages of India. The idea was to showcase films that are made by people living in the communities they are speaking to and about. The curators were looking for films that had something to say, spoke in a local idiom, and were rooted in the region. In the following piece JAI CHANDIRAM and ANUPAMA SRINIVASAN talk about the genesis of the festival and its actual staging. Our final selection included features, short fiction, documentaries and music videos from Ranchi, Imphal, Leh, Niyamgiri, and Malegaon. Some of the filmmakers were social activists, some were Bollywood buffs; some were trained in institutes, others were selftaught practitioners. What they had in common was their love for cinema and irrepressible urge to talk about the lives and concerns of people amongst whom they lived and worked. Their films were different in identity, content, style and rhythm from what is generally seen in Delhi and other metros. The festival was envisioned as a platform for dialogues between the different Indias that coexist, but usually do not interact with each other. The festival was inaugurated on August 8 by Dr.Aruna Vasudev who shared her enthusiastic support towards this initiative, saying that this was a very different kind of festival and was offering a unique opportunity to viewers in Delhi who might not be aware of the range and depth of films being made in smaller towns and semi urban areas of the country. Festival Director, Jai Chandiram shared with the audience the concept of the festival and what they could look forward to over the five evenings. This was followed by the screening of Baha, the film that had in fact sparked off the idea for this festival. Noted documentary filmmaker Shriprakash's debut feature, the film is an exploration of the Jharkhand music industry, the film takes us through the struggle of a
young tribal man to become a singer in a casteist and exploitative society. It gently documents the technological transition from audio cassettes to CDs, and the aesthetic movement from folk music to a more commercialised, hindi film music inspired genre. The audience was amazed to see a 'hero' who looked so unlike ones seen in mainstream and even alternate cinema. The film was greatly appreciated for its honesty and simplicity even as it brought the complexity of the situation to the fore.
take on the bollywood classic, made on a shoe string budget by Nasir Shaikh. A wedding videographer, Shaikh was driven by his love for hindi films to undertake this magnum venture. He shot the film himself on a VHS camera and edited it shot by shot through a VCR. The story is the same, and the casting stays true to the original, but with small changes in the dialogue, some clever touches in the shot taking and the frequent use of bicycles instead of horses, the film becomes much more than an imitation piece.
The next evening, the packed house was thoroughly entertained by Malegaon ke Sholay, an innovative
Wednesday evening was dedicated to music, and the programme began with an interesting presentation on
Aruna Vasudev at the Festival of Emerging Cinemas.
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historical costume drama is a simple tale of a man who always speaks the truth, and the dilemma he faces when he falls in love. The inherent strength of the theme, and the honesty in the storytelling left the audience mesmerized.
A scene from Baha, directed by Shriprakash.
Garhwali music videos by filmmaker and Indian Ocean vocalist, Himanshu Joshi. He spoke about how coming from a purist background, he had initial reservations about this highly commercialised industry, and how he overcame his biases and tried to understand the reasons for the stupendous success of the music videos. He showed clips from some videos and said that by taking up diverse themes of environment, politics, religion, and romance in a single album, the producers were reaching out to all sections of society. This was followed by two music videos by activist filmmaker Surya Shankar Dash based in Bhubaneswar. Surya used to make advertisement films in Delhi and later worked for a news channel. Then he gave it all up to move to Orissa where he is now making selffunded films and training farmers to make their own films. The first video Lament of Niyamraja was set to a song of the Dongaria Kondhadivasi community about their mountain Niyamgiri that had been sold to a mining company by the government. Replete with visuals of the natural landscape, animals and people, the video and the haunting music was a moving experience for the viewers. The second film was a short piece called Zaroori Khwaab that made a 64 DOCUMENTARY TODAY
direct appeal to the audience to stand up and join the adivasis in their fight to save their land, forests, water and livelihoods. As a tribute to Meghnath and Biju Toppo, filmmakers based in Ranchi who have been making films in the region for more than a decade and a half, two of their films were shown. The first was Sona Gahi Pinjara, a short fiction film, the first of its kind in Kurukh, the language of the Oraonadivasis. Through the medium of songs, the film reveals the plight of people from tribal communities who are unable to join their families during the traditional festivities because the official set up does not recognize their festival as a holiday. The evening came to a close with Gadi Lohardaga Mail a lyrical documentary that transported the viewers to another world with its songs of longing and nostalgia, intertwined with the pathos of the peoples' struggle for survival and the end of a century old passenger train between Ranchi and Lohardaga. On the fourth day of the festival, we screened Tokskal, a wonderful film from Ladhak based on a traditional folk tale. Written and directed by Jigmet Omachik, and shot, edited and produced by Tashi Dawa, this
The festival came to an end on 12 August with the screening of two films by Manipuri directors. Dr. Raj Liberhan, Director, India Habitat Centre graced the occasion and expressed the hope that the Festival of Emerging Cinemas will be back next year with an equally engaging selection of films. The first film of the evening was a short fiction The Sun is Still Not Setting by a young filmmaker, Suvas Elangbam. It beautifully captured the rhythm of the lives of a young girl and her grandfather in rural Manipur as it slowly unfolded to its heart breaking finish. As the closing film we had an experimental documentary Brief Companion in a Capital City by Dorendra Waribam. Through out the festival we had been watching films whose defining quality was that they presented the gaze of an 'insider'. They were made by filmmakers who are living in the community they are speaking about. The last film was a reversal of that idea. It is about a person from the northeast who visits Delhi and looks at it through the eyes of an outsider. With his handycam he explores this big, bizarre city and the many 'outsiders' that inhabit it, recording their little narratives of confusion, joy and sorrow. The Festival of Emerging Cinemas was an experiment and turned out to be an amazing process of discovery for both the curators and the audience as it opened up a new way of looking at films. The viewing of the whole range of films raised many pertinent questions about popular culture, target audiences, activist filmma king, market pressures etc even as it offered people in Delhi an opportunity to connect with and understand people from different parts of the country through the medium of cinema.
FRAMES FROM A LIFE
Sara Akash (as actor/1969)
Uski Roti (1969)
Duvidha (1973)
Nazar (1990)
Dhrupad (1982)
Siddeshwari (1989)