Mani Kaul’s Satah Se Uthata Aadmi is an ‘obscure’ film if there ever was one. With a few film- society screenings across the country, one screening at Cannes and perhaps at a few other festivals in the United States of America, the film falls alongside recently resurrected Indian masterworks from the same period, which were otherwise lost in unknown film archives with one last print at the National Film Archive of India, such as Nina Shivdasani Rovshen’s Chattrabhang (The Divine Plan, 1976) and Kamal Swaroop’s Om Dar-B-Dar (Om in Exile, 1988). It points to other works yet to be rediscovered and part of this cannon such as Nirad Mahapatra’s Maya Mrigaya (The Deer of Illusion, 1984) and Sushant Mishra’s Indradhuna Chai (In the Shadow of the Rainbow,1992) .
In their tour de force work on Indian Cinema, The Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema[1] (popularly referred to as ‘Encyclopedia’ by researchers in India), Ashish Rajyadhyaksha and Paul Willeman give an exceptional review of the film, short on words and deep in analysis:
Kaul’s film addresses the writings of Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh (1917-79), one of the main representatives of the Nai Kavita (New Poetry) movement in Hindi. Muktibodh also wrote several short stories, one of which provides the film with its title, and critical essays. The film integrates episodes from Muktibodh’s writings with material from other source, including a reinvented neo-realism derived from Muktibodh’s literary settings. The narrative is constructed around 3 characters. Ramesh (Gopi) is one who speaks and enacts Muktibodh’s writings, functioning as the first-person voice of the text; his two friends, Madhav (Jha) and Keshav (Raina), are Ramesh’s antagonists and interlocutors esp. in the debates about the modernity. Kaul gradually minimizes the fictional settings until, in the remarkably shot sequences of the factory; the audience is directly confronted with the written text itself. Kaul had begun his studies of Dhrupad music, the classical North Indian music known mainly for its extreme austerity, and derived a number of cinematic styles from this musical idiom which have continuously influenced his films since, e.g. the continuously mobile camera, the use of changing light patterns and the importance of improvisation.
Unfortunately, that brief albeit conclusive paragraph is all that was ever written about the film other than some reviews and interviews in the magazine Hindi, Bhopal based magazine, Madhyam (they also published the entire script of the film) which I have as yet been unable to find.
Mani Kaul’s films can be described as being about the specific Indian sensorial experience that dominates cityscapes when they collaborate with nomadic nature which exists in India in its un-curated form. The films are about the affect of this sensory experience starting from an underdeveloped materiality surrounding nomadic nature and the strangely structured hierarchy of age, caste and most importantly class that dominates them. All his works but particularly his 1980 work Satah Se Uthata Aadmi elaborate on this pathology in between Leftist and Rightist ideologies between the working class and middle class in small town India.
At the time of the film’s completion, Kaul explained his attempt at the French Film master Robert Bresson’s aesthetic of breaking a film into separate blocks of information, both sound and image, (as opposed to Eisenstein’s aesthetic of integrating film through montage) by ensuring that each shot of the film is completely discontinuous with the next. The effect that this continuous effect of fragmented discontinuous time has within the logic of well known works by Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh is astounding (astounding being just another word, one must watch the film).
Kaul’s films generally come from a literary source. Instead of being faithful to the text, its background and subjectivities, Kaul alienates all the inessentials so that the text can serve to sketch the bodies in his image, the characters, as well as provide the lines (he lifted word for word from the lines from Mohan Rakesh’s short story Uski Roti(Our Daily Bread,1969) which he made into a film in 1969 and the same author’s play Ashad Ka Ek Din(A Rainy Day,1971) which he made into a film in 1971). Within the logics of this text Kaul uses the actors voice/body within the space to document it and create a unique perception of the space, what Gilles Delueze would call ‘perception-image’[2]. Bresson referred to this in an interview as being the one place the camera must be placed, which it was the metteur-en-scene’s job to find. Generally much like the text is devoid of subjectivity; the actor’s voice is devoid of expressionism so that much like in Bresson ‘the pace of the words is much more important than their respective meaning.’ In his 1980 work, Kaul took several of Muktibodh’s essays, poems, short stories as well as memoirs and treated all as uniform text, mediated through the voice as represented by Om Puri’s voice over, transforming them into language-utterances to create a purely improvised cinema.
1.1 Kaul and Muktibodh
At the premier of the film, a controversy was created amongst supporters of Muktibodh. A left-wing poet and author of the ‘70s, Muktibodh’s supporters were typically those who found solace in his representations where he used language for the function of explanation through extreme rhetoric. Muktibodh plays on an element which the reader generally identifies with and builds it in a way that an implicit anger is built alongside the narrative development. At the same time sentences are typically constructed with the function of showing both cause and its extreme effect and the author’s emphasizing/underlining of this effect. Kaul typically confronts and violates causality through his form, if not content in most of his works, and Satah Se Uthata Aadmi is no exception. He has time and again reiterated the problems with representational film. These problems according to Kaul stem out of the problem of the known which representation brings about. Representation allows for transformation of object into subject by allowing it to enter the realm of the ‘known’ whereas Kaul attempts explore the realm of the unknown.
This marked difference between Kaul and Muktibodh resulted in a huge rift in reactions to the film, between those who thought Kaul to be outstanding Cinematographer[3] in India ( with reference to Cinematography in Bresson, and not the act of shooting a film) and those avid readers of Muktibodh looking forward to a genuine adaptation of Muktibodh. Kaul’s film employ transcendental use of text be it Muktibodh’s or anyone else’s. This approach did not give enough importance to Muktibodh’s specific circumstances or subjectivities.
At the same time, there are several similarities between the two. Both have a fascination for fantasy; Muktibodh in his essays is questioning the role of art in society and its creation of space whereas Mani Kaul’s quest is for the film ‘that plays like a dream.’ In different ways both are interested in abhivyakti or perception, whereas Muktibodh searches for a unique/correct perception of his space and the appropriation of himself through his characters in the space; Mani Kaul attempts to create what Gilles Deleueze would call perception-image, which I would define as that point where the space perceived by the viewer meets the psychotic mental space of the character without trying to recognize its meaning. This results in the creation of a sign as opposed to a signal which Delueze talks about in his doctorate, Difference and Repetition[4]:
By ‘signal’ we mean a system with disparate size, endowed with elements of dissymmetry; by sign we mean what happens within such a system, what flashes across the intervals when a communication takes place between disparates.
Mani Kaul began his search for the indeterminate which enters through flashes, like in his debut feature Uski Roti, where Kaul tries to capture only space that exists in between sensory and motor perception. This approach is reminiscent of the Robert Bresson’s approach to text, be it Dosteovski’s or Bernanos’ i.e. to keep only the necessary details of the text and then rarefy this concentrated selection with documentary sequences which were also as choreographed as the rest. This approach is especially relevant in a study of Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959), Au Hasard Balthazar (1965) and Mouchette (1966)
1.2 Dhrupad
The most outstanding and significant element of the film, as mentioned in the review, is the use of music. Kaul had begun learning dhrupad from Ustad Zia Mohiuddin Dagar[5], whose younger brother Zia Fariduddin Dagar rendered Raga Bilaskhani Todi for the film. This is the first of Kaul’s films structured around the alaap and jod[6] structure of a dhrupad performance, the alaap, where the scale is introduced and the jod, where improvisations are rendered to go as far from the scale while maintaining it, and results in a very formal approach to camera and soundtrack rhythms. Typically his films of this period would begin with the static camera establishing camera distances, much like scales of music, and by the hour mark Kaul would start moving his camera between these different scales. Further on Kaul would indicate this point where, as an analogy, the jod section of the film has begun by showing a set of static spaces (much like Ozu’s static spaces; what Richie calls ‘pillow shots’) and moving the camera away from the frame to pan to another set of static spaces. In Satah Se Uthata Aadmi, Kaul doubles this act (much like Pickpocket (Robert Bresson,1959) where the pickpocket’s actions are overlaid with his voiceover talking about them) by overlaying the Ustad singing the jod sections. This technique of moving the camera half way through the film to signal the beginning of the improvisatory phase of the film, became a standard practice amongst Kaul’s followers who formed the ‘Cinema of Prayoga’[7] school such as Vipin Vijay and Kabir Mohanty.
It is cliché to call dhrupad an ancient form of music which uses phrases from the shaivite[8] chant in praise of Lord Shiva, Hari Om Narayana Taan Tarana Tum to create the body of any raga through the three octaves. This shaivite chant can be approached as a text which has meaning, emphasizing the omnipotent form of Lord Shiva, and which is deconstructed to take each phrase and explore it until exhausted. Kaul works in a similar fashion by taking a text, either a short story (Uski Roti,1969) or a novel (Ahmaq(1991) adapted from Dostoevski’s Idiot) and in this case essays, poems and short stories to explore the form of cinematography (film as documentary construction through the actor as in Bresson, instead of ‘filmed theatre’) through camera, editing and soundtrack. This can be understood, with respect to dhrupad, where the bandish ‘Shankar Girijapati’, once more in praise of Lord Shankara, is exploring an abstract scale, that of Raga Malkauns, which has the structure Sa Ga Ma Dha Ni Sa (ascending) Sa Ni Dha Ma Ga Sa (descending). This scale is structured in three phases, the alaap, where the scale is first introduced and then improvised upon to capture the essence of the raga, the jod, where the pulse is introduced to exhaust the combinations of the scale and the crescendo or the jhalla. For Kaul, the text is the abstract scale with its characters (bodies), objects and dialogues being its components. With Satah Se Uthata Aadmi, Mani Kaul develops an entire cinematographic form to address this principle of the alaap jod and the jhalla.
The film begins with the titles on a saffron background with Ustad Zia Fariduddin Dagar singing alaap in the austere early morning raga Bilaskhani Todi. The raga belongs to the Todi family of ragas, which are sung to announce the arrival of dawn. The first name of the raga refers to the great singer Bilas Khan who was the son of the first recognized creator of Hindustani music, both dhrupad and khayal[9], Miyan Tansen[10]. It is said that when Tansen died, the notes, which were produced from the pit of Bilas Khan’s stomach through his throat, were so beautiful that the dead Tansen arose like a ghost and shed a tear. These notes were christened as a form of the Raga Todi named after its creator.
1.3 Approach to Matter
The opening sequences of the film introduce the viewer to a psychotic space, where the actions of the paranoid actor are superimposed with those of the carefully constructed space, which both convey an effect as well as take away its cause. Historians would certainly like to justify this state as being that of a psychotic effect of the 1947 partition between India and Pakistan. I would instead ‘read’ this as a psychotic state produced by lack of space while at the same time one where the character fulfills the highest humanist goal of cinema: perceiving humans as those whose function is to obtain space and occupy it. The sound of footsteps is overlaid with the dhrupad alaap with the actor Gopi[11] moving his eyes out of the frame in a typically Kaulian way where only the eyes express and the other facial muscles are absolutely still. The actor then moves down the steps and Mani Kaul has already produced his typical effect: that of a rarefied space suggestive of the Indian sensorial experience. This space can be achieved by taking the particular location and much like the text, keeping only the relevant materials as in Bresson’s approach i.e. where the materials occupy space and do not signify anything, and indicating the deterretorialized[12] spaces devoid of matter around them. As Kaul tracks into the staircase this effect is complete; the director has shown off his trademark and now shall move on to other film processes. As Gopi walks down the stairs in one of Kaul’s most outstanding sequences he starts rolling bringing to mind two concepts of Newtonian physics, static motion that turns into rotational motion. The actor stops motion, as Newton would say comes to rest, and Muktibodh’s text is overlaid with the slightly jarring voice of Om Puri[13].
This is also a transformation in the Deleuzean sense between sensory and motor processes of the brain. It must be noted that Kaul, much like Tarkovski and Bresson sides with the sensory film process opposing the logic of the causal Hollywood action-image produced by motor processes.
After the titles Kaul’s opening shot, which in many ways represents the entire film, is one where the medieval rock houses representing materiality are juxtaposed with the natural, much like cinema where nature is captured through man made celluloid. Kaul’s camera zooms out to a purely material space and introduces the dream like quality of the film by introducing the warli[14]-like sketches on the wall the dilapidated spaces. Gopi-Ramesh is introduced lying on the floor as the soundtrack introduces footsteps of the unknown outside the frame. Kaul immediately establishes in his actor a convergence of psychosis, fear and awareness all occurring at the same time. This is an example of a typical opening scene where the uncertainty of the actions of the character-actor is superimposed with the uncertainty of the film making style. Kaul continues this technique in Nazar[15] (The Gaze, 1989) where the similarly composed space, in this case urban, is superimposed with alaap in a raga (Bhairavi) and the camera heightens this randomness, as Piyush Shah on camera doesn’t look through the eyepiece in an attempt to capture an unappropriated space.
Thus begins his exemplary approach to Muktibodh by having Om Puri recite lines from the poet’s autobiographical writings as well as his poems to create the dialectic between language and sound. An introduction to a book of poems on Faiz Ahmed Faiz, introduces the poet as someone who like the typical Urdu poet, thinks in terms of sounds, which eventually give rise to words. In a choreographed sequence Kaul begins with Muktibodh’s poem, which best describes in words the milieu he has established through images and sound. In the case of Khayal (‘Imagination’ in Urdu) the more recent form of Hindustani music which originated in the court of Akbar, a text, either one in praise of the deity or a lyrical couplet describing the sakhi (the lover-woman) and her yearning for the beloved, is improvised on keeping in mind the scale of the raga. For example, the Jaipur Gharana (the Jaipur school of Khayal) , as represented by the great Kishori Amonkar, emphasizes the logic of Raga Madhmad Sarang with the following scale:
S R M P n S’ or (Do Re Fa So ti Do’
S’ n P M R S Do’ti So Fa Re Do)
Through the following text:
Jab Se Man Lagyo Shyam So (Since the mind has become attached to Krishna
Tab Te Sudh Budh Bisrayo From then the mind, all conscious-awareness has lost)
Chaturang Suhay Piya Man Bhaavan (The form of the Chaturang that pleases the lover)
Gopi Yana Det Rohaa (With the Gopis the Lord (Krishna) does play)
The approach to the text is defined by the pre-determined nature of the scale. One word is either stretched for a longer period of time or a number of words are compressed into a short period of time accompanied by a steady pulse or rhythm. The pace of the words is therefore either slower or faster than the rhythm, technique which Kaul incorporated in his first film Uski Roti. In his own words[16]:
I was first interested in the spatial aspect of cinema until I engaged with the temporal aspect of cinema i.e. two minutes can be stretched to five minutes, five minutes can be compressed to two…….. and I had my actors either move or speak slower or faster than the intended rhythm of the film.
In the case of the Madhmad Sarang text, the meaning of the text is superceded by its improvisation with the logic of a particular scale. The logic of the poetry is elliptical. The psycho-sensorial impact of Lord Shri Krishna on one of his playmates of the opposite sex is superimposed by the nature/classification of the poem a chaturang to end with a description of the space where Krishna is surrounded by the gopis.
Kaul transforms this approach to the notes from text through the approach to his images from (Muktibodh’s) text keeping the approach to the pure note i.e. without text as in dhrupad alaap as the key reference.
Kaul adapts a process also seen in the Ozu of Floating Weeds (1960). Made at the end of Ozu’s career as a remake of his Story of Floating Weeds (1934), Ozu removes any hint of theatrical influence by doing away with camera movement and variable editing patterns. The actor utters the words in the same way only at different paces, and most importantly with a different expression every time. This expression denotes the mood of the actor as well as the flavour of the shot which remains unchanged throughout the shot. In the repetitive editing patterns where location is established and then subverted for the sake of narrative forwarding, Ozu reduces or increases the portions before and after the actor utters his lines much like Kaul did in Uski Roti and Duvidha(In Two Minds,1973).
1.5 Recreating Muktibodh: The ‘Re-invented Neorealism’
The sequences at the beginning of the film which show Ramesh engaging with Muktibodh’s creative process and being Muktibodh are remarkable for their unique design and ability to create a stratified pure image obtained through cleansing (this ‘cleansing’[17] is the same process that causes political problems with reference to Kaul’s liberal fascism and the same approach taken in a politically opposite Right to oppress backward castes and lower classes). Om Puri’s voice over reads thoughts from Muktibodh as the poet reflects on his art. Kaul cuts to a balcony overlooking a lake. Later we shall be told that the lake is at the center of the city. The sequences create a search for inorganic matter between which nature shows up in unique ways. Kaul then cuts to images of unmediated nature as Om Puri continues reading out Muktibodh. The sound of the train begins to show the means to producing these images i.e. the train with its movement that produces dynamism in filming the passing plains and then pans to Keshav to show that he is on this train. Before this the camera awaits the arrival of the bridge at a acute angle and then pans to the right i.e. behind its acute angle to meet the bridge at straight angle and flatten the bridges passing planks to form designs of straight lines on a flat surface. In this way from nature Kaul arrives at organically formed design. Although the formation of the design is organic, the process is extremely mediated, and functions on the principle of anticipation, much like the process of listening to an alaap unfold where the next note is both known(since it belongs to a known scale) and anticipated before it is recognized. This is reminiscent of the intuitive early films of Alain Resnais.
Keshav, one of Ramesh’s friends is introduced in sequences of nature where Muktibodh’s short story and arguments on Gandhian thinking are debated. These sections are perhaps those in Kaul’s career which most evoke his mentor Ritwik Ghatak, since nature and human beings are framed with the logic of the masculine character occupying feminine nature. The story here finds its base in Muktibodh’s short story Zindagi Ki Katran about the suicide of Tiwari’s wife and then the protagonist Tiwari himself. Suicide was a subject which fascinated Bresson as it represented Jansenist grace in all its purity not corrupted by any situation. A Deleuzean reading of the same would be one where the situation is subverted, as in Deleuze’s reading of Kurosawa, for the sake of profound metaphysical questions. In the case of Bresson, the question is one of grace where as in Kaul it is one of anticipating death and the immaterial ghost that occupies the form of film as in Duvidha. Kaul’s reading of Bresson is that in Bresson ‘one waits for suicide.’[18]
Kaul shows a number of cinematic influences other than his staple, Bresson, and the most prominent visual influence comes from Tarkovski, particularly his 1979 work Stalker, from which Mani Kaul derives his logic of framing headspace (the ratio of the head of the actor and the landscape) as well as that of nature. In the opening sequences with Keshav the framing of the eucalyptus trees, the lake as well as movement through the forest has the slow machine like movement, so characteristic of Tarkovski’s Stalker.
As soon as Keshav mentions the suicide of Tiwari’s wife, Kaul zooms out of a landscape in a quick fashion, varying the exploration of the alaap portion of the film. Kaul pans to a suggestive landscape and a truck moving towards it, the sound of a woman shrieking to suggest her rape with the camera placed firmly at a distance to maintain the suggestive nature of the rape. Bresson considered camera distances to be much like scales in music. Kaul made Uski Roti with 7 camera distances[19]. Here he continues his scaling through camera distances which at the same time link the materiality of the film with that of the building (space) in which the event occurs. This device is similar to the one used by Antonioni to highlight the architecture (matter) and the character (material becoming of the material text/script) to the materiality of the film. Here the movement of the machine (truck) relate to the other machine (camera) reminiscent of a similar process in the single shot of the Lumiere’s Brothers Arrival of Train at a Station[20]. The camera films the space and the machine is outside the space of the event. This use of cars and trucks in the film reminds one of Tarkovski’s use of such machines in Stalker as well as Muktibodh’s obsession with trucks particularly fire engines.
1.6 Channda
Mani Kaul’s engagement with cinema comes from mystical thought as seen in the Bhakti and Sufi movements of the 14th century and the formal implications of such thought when adapted to the form of haiku-like poems. He works around the four pillars of Brahminical aesthetics, first the pratyaksha or perception, followed by the shabda or text, the upamana or cognition of difference and anuplabdhi or non-cognition of meaning. In Kaul, Deleuze’s reading of Kafka, that Kafka constructs machines with different logics in different locations becomes the text, and parallels Bresson’s own observation titled Resemblance,Difference[21]:
Give more resemblance in order to obtain more difference. Uniform and unity of life bring out the nature and character of soldiers. Standing at attention, the immobility of them all shows up the individual signs of each.
Kaul is closer to Bresson than Eisenstein that he thinks of film in terms of separate chunks instead of continuous flow of images as in montage. In dhrupad these chunks of sound are known as chhanda. Though most musical theorists relate chhanda to the explicitly rhythmic aspects, it is the linking of the suggestive sound without its rhythmic counterpart or dhwani to its rhythm to create tension. This comes from the mystical processes that relate man made processes of rhythm to their corresponding inspiration in nature. The process of breaking up the rhythmic patterns of bird calls can be studied through the push-pull succession in the sound of croaking frogs next to a swamp where the frogs pre-empt and delay there croaks in a particular fashion. For example if we have a constant rhythm like 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11 the croaking of the frogs is much more like 1—3-4—7-8 —11 .The pattern is one where 2 is pushed to 3 and 5 is pushed to 4 after which 6 is pushed to 7 followed by 9 pushed to 8 and 10 pushed to 11. Alternatively one is pushed forward and the other back. The purpose of this is to make the body tight much like a stringed instrument where when the strings are pulled back and forth they become taut. This chhanda logic allows Mani Kaul the any-space-whatever cut i.e. since the film is broken into chunks a new chunk can begin and end anywhere. It also allows him to provide a new approach to Ozu’s act of increasing or decreasing the unnecessary bits around the important portion of a shot. Perhaps this is why Bresson and Kaul are most aligned to that theory representing the best chunk of modernity, Einstein’s Relativity Theory.
This idea of modern art film starts with the emergence of the train: the appropriation of nature to a succession of landscapes with denotational stop points, or stations, which lead to a destination. The succession is possible because of the mechanism of the train, controlled by an unknown unseen person, the driver. Following on from this logic, in film, the driver in film is the film director who first creates a mechanism which is a relationship between sound and image and the content of the shot, and hopes for one thing to go wrong in the mechanism that results in the accident. Kaul’s accidents lead one portion of the film to the next much like a fractal where a portion of a whole, in this case of a triangle, leads to a new triangle, which then leads to another and they form an organic design. Kaul also explores multiplicities in duration much like Eisenstein but sides with Bergson over Eisenstein who unites these multiplicities with the temporality of interiority i.e. that of the self.
This idea of pushing forward and back to create tension is there in both the alaap and bandish in dhrupad. In the alaap, taans , a fast sequence of notes which come from the word tan meaning body, come from fragments pushed forward and back known as chandda. With the coming of khayal, the word chhanda was associated only with the explicitly rhythmic elements and tantrakari meaning ‘all-assimilating approach to rhythm’ much like the tantrik approach to life, which treats everything as sacred. However chanda exists primarily in alaap, since it is in the alaap that the creation of space is implied introducing the raga phrase by phrase. The point of this pull-push force is to create a tight body (tan) through taans. Perhaps yoga is associated with Indian music since it attempts to create a taut human body whereas its respective other in music transforms this human form into an aesthetic. What is most important here is the unique element of music, its time component. In his essay Seen from Nowhere[22] Mani Kaul writes ‘From a tape of the raag Yaman Kalyan if I were to random lift a four second bit, I should easily identify that as a Yaman Kalyan bit, much as the entire two hour concert as identifiable as Yaman Kalyan.’ This ability to identify the fragment without linking it to the whole gives Kaul an opportunity to engage in a dialogue with modernity especially in its formation of fractals[23]. Thus, in the case of Duvidha (1973) Kaul films Detha’s text with a ‘lets see what happens logic’ of accidents such that each plane of the ‘dilemma’ or unsolvable riddle is taken up only to open to a new plane. This opening up of planes, instead of their closing down on a solution, is what separates Kaul’s non-centered film style from pattern making.[24]
In the same essay Kaul talks about the literal reference to the chandda through the point-void split, which much like Zeno’s paradox, splits the approaching to point and becoming of whole to nothingness:
Though playing together without a beginning or an end
Krishna and Radha haven’t an acquaintance yet.[25]
In the above couplet the intuited and delayed extremes represented by the ‘beginning’ and ‘end’ of time are approximately reduced to find a point in space which has not yet occurred since the two ‘haven’t an acquaintance yet.’
Kaul establishment of milieu based not so much on Muktibodh’s explicit left leaning as on the working class, government service spaces of Muktibodh’s short Zindagi Ki Katran. Perhaps this is why when the film was screened students and followers of Muktibodh thought the film to be alien to the author and his work.
Unlike Satyajit Ray for whom cinema was a medium of primarily of story telling through realism which treats reality as having only one perceivable dimension, for Mani Kaul and his followers, including that great film maker Kamal Swaroop, cinema’s primary function is to create space. Gilles Deleuze, the great aesthetician of the unknown, mentioned movement-image which one would define as that point where the movement in the film, in the narrative and the actor meet and become one. At the same time the process of editing differentiates these movements or separates these movements in the same image from the surroundings. In the case of the surrealists, the image represented that static space where the space of memory, much more like a déjà vu, met the dream space. Mani Kaul is closer to the surrealists than to Deleuze’s movement-image most obviously noted in his important work Duvidha where the static spaces lead to a subliminal movement-image. This leads to a meeting of landscape and character with a negation of prime event which is overwhelmed by a situation as in Antonioni. Within this aesthetic choice Kamal Swaroop Mani Kaul’s important student on the other hand rejects the surrealists opting for their precursors the Dadaists to form a dream with the logic of nonsense, to arrive at a post modern junk aesthetic.
1.7 Scholar-as-film maker
Kaul’s understanding of the dream comes from, other than his intense study under Ustad Z.M. Dagar, his study of Mughal paintings in the Akbarnama where ‘a unique synthesis of a historical space with a dream is thorough and distinct’ in order to evoke a sensuousness and ‘waking specificity,’ Kaul’s study of art and cinema also comes from the 5th century text Dhvanyaloka by Anandvardhana which talks about the Lord Vishnu or Narayan (already present in the dhrupad meta phrase Hari Om Narayana Taan Tarana Tum) and his four vyuhas or forms Vasudev, Sankarshana which is responsible for the destruction of the universe, Pradyumna which carries out the spread of religion and Anirudda which protects the world and confers the religion of truth which appear in the states of inertia (visrama), primary creative activity (udaya), pervasion (vyapti) and manifestation (abhivyakti). These 4 vyuhas are for the contemplation of aspirants in the four states, wakefulness (jagrut), dreaming (swapna), deep sleep (suspti) and ultimate salvation (moksha).
In Satah Se Uthata Aadmi, the unfolding of the film is between the jagrut and susupti state to create the unfolding of a swapna. Ramesh who plays both Muktibodh and the interlocutor of the texts plays the function of the sutradhar, the narrator who is part of the text and responsible for the unfurling of events in the text but also recites the text. This dual function, allowing both participation and distancing from idea and its realization in the image, is different from Godard’s dualities which do not double but instead form an in-between space mediating the film and its making, its reality and fiction, montage and mise-en-scene, interiority and exteriority. In Kaul, this dual function places him closer to the French noveau romanne authors such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras in their unique approach to destroying the object through dualities and probabilities. This approach to destroying the object relates to the space in ancient times within the church which opposed the institution/institutionalization of the church, which modernist thinkers like Maurice Merleu-Ponty in The Adventures of the Dialectic would equate to a left which they called Non Communist Left. With reference to dhrupad, this aesthetic of becoming church can be fulfilled by opposing its fetishized becoming in the jod sections where the jod resembles a prayer chant. This opposition of the prayer creates an aesthetic in the succession of the notes.
The film begins an approach to decenter the idea and its formative image that would be taken up later in Kaul’s subsequent masterworks such as Mati Manas, Before My Eyes, Nazar(The Gaze,1989) and eventually Naukar Ki Kameez(The Servant’s Shirt,1997). In this process of decentering Mani Kaul creates in this work, what Deleuze and Guattari would call a two layered machine, in the process of dynamic formation and disintegration. The camera is used as a device to capture things and force upon them movement and in this way no longer approach them as things, but perceived objects so that the Bergsonian image is formed in the object. This movement creates a subject through the length of the film which is opposed by the laboured movements of the characters, the slow rhythms of the soundtrack through sounds and speeches (sometimes so that the sound and voice are in equivalence) in order to create an opposing force or what Henri Bergson would call élan-vitale[26].
In his outstanding essay Towards a Cinematic Object (1983) Kaul mentions the necessity to ‘solidify’ psychological/anthrolpological ideas into spatial and temporal objects. In his essay Mani Kaul and The Cinematic Object, Ashish Rajadhayaksha paraphrases the process of ‘unblocking’ the ‘significant’ object’ by ensuring ‘ a limit be put on the field of spatial operation in a shot’ which emerges through deciding on ‘relative area’ which can either occur consciously or accidentally. This selection splits when exposed to spectatorial recruitment into a spectatorial space-time of will and a socio-historical space time and these two fluid wholes and solid sediments are antagonistic to one another. This is possible by forming a new relationship between the two antagonistic elements. Kaul believes himself to be in the tradition of Impressionist and Cubists who resolve the relationship between a single point of view and the sensuousness of the object by showing numerable points of view and destroying the relationship with the object:
It was evident that sensuousness of an object would manifest itself only from a single angle of view. But if you go around an object and incorporate aspects of different perspectives and heap them upon the object, you will destroy the sensuous relation with the object. You will in a sense destroy the very recognition of the object.[27]
Kaul wrote about explicit anthropological processes that split into their own ‘doubles’ and the resolve into one another by destroying the preceding data to restart a fresh historical process:
In feudal social formations it was adequate to respond to oppression as an internal phenomenon, since the external social structure was absolutely fixed. An internalized violence totalized the imagined and lived world of mythos. With the disappearance of the feudal order a violent reality externalized solidly, upon the social landscape. The course of the individual in society suddenly appeared hazardous. The older, subtler myths now appear meaningless with the collapse of an outmoded world . . . the solid mass is not able to will: nothing moves. A new abstraction.[28]
Opposing the perspective ridden approach of Freud with the temporal approach of W.R. Bion who broke this spatiality with a connective temporality to connect knowledge into its present, past and future axes:
In an attempt to grasp the pain of the patient he found it necessary to suspend understanding (present knowledge), memory (past knowledge) or desire (future knowledge) on the part of the analyst before he listened to the patient.[29]
Instead of bringing the mental problem to a resolution, Kaul approaches, as in Bion’s case, mental pathology through ‘ a question of relating to pain, of a toleration of pain, and through painful thought of arriving at a ‘knowing’ of nature’s evolving succession of pain and pleasure.’
Kaul mentioned in 1974 that the filmed object on spectatorial mediation becomes a ‘spectatorial’ space-time of will where the shot is split between spectator’s desire to will freely and its solidification into the solid mass of socio-historical space-time, a sediment solid present in every liquefied shot. Kaul claimed that unlike outdated feudal forms, modern forms created sediments antagonistic to its main functions and often resulted in the destruction of false sensuousness and its replacement with a new relationship between its multiplicities. I would like to treat the ‘spectatorial’ free will as relating to fluid and therefore the temporal axis of the film which relates a space only to its temporal aggregation i.e. five minutes of an object as being much more in ‘kind’ than two different objects in ‘degree’ i.e. as in spatial perception, confirming Bergson’s suspicion of perception being measured in kind as in time, and not in degree as in space, and in this way avoiding representation by uniting it with the totality of matter. At the same time this totality of matter relates to other matter in society, which forms its solid aspect which cannot be varied, often by limiting its temporal potentialities. Popular cinema makes the son-image reduce to its most convergent form by relating background score to the fluid potential of the image which is limited by introducing background such that it immediately correlates the variable potential of the image to an end i.e. the creation of a specific emotion across different spectators. Kaul stated that through the shot these effects were created initially by first calculating different elements in the film to it but later by allowing an accident to occur beneath the surface of the film.
1.8 Kaul and the location space: Uski Roti
Kaul, beginning from Uski Roti which was shot in Pratapgarh very close to the actual location of Rakesh’s story, Nakoder (which according to Ashish Rajadhyaksha at the time had changed unrecognizably) through the minimizing the fictional settings to confront the location-space of the factory in Satah Se Uthata Aadmi and Maati Maanas where Kaul films at more than a hundred locations to effectively create a ‘ single ‘location-space’ where the ‘object’ merges into that which it is solidified’ to Ahmaq where he orchestrates the location space with the narrative space, uses location to underline nomadic movement which cannot be appropriated to make them ripe for further nomad-isation through his experiments of not looking through the camera in Nazar and Naukar Ki Kameez to prevent the branching out into the spectatorial perception into ‘into a fork: of being wither sacred and/ or of being profane.’[30] These two specific techniques among several other soundtrack decentering techniques must be viewed as operations on the film so that the spectator is forced to watch the space without expecting a climax to bring their variables to a single idea.
Kaul’s debut Uski Roti mediates Bresson with Ozu, constructing every chunk to show difference between each fragment, like in Bresson, but at the same time capture an interiority like in Ozu, and the randomness which emerges from this interiority.
The most remarkable and spoofed sequence of Uski Roti is the opening sequence of the delayed falling of the guava. Although Rajadhakshya correctly argues that it ‘directly signals the film’s ‘‘how-to-read-a-text manual’-its intention to translate the story’s rigid temporality into flowing spatial definition’, he ignores as do other writers on the subject, the principle of Indian aesthetics on which the cuts are based namely the successive pre-empts and delays in timing of successive notes in the alaap in a raga known as chaand. One note is started beyond its exhaustion point (forwards) and the next much before its starting point (backwards) to create a tension between forward and backwards to create tension much like the strings in a veena or sitar which cannot be plucked unless taut. Uski Roti’s elaboration of volumes through the controlled use of the 28mm wide-angled lens and the 135mm telephoto lens is balanced by this pre-empting and delaying of shots to eventually terminate at the sequence consisting of virtual destruction of matter or sensorial collapse. In Uski Roti,the sensorial collapse is represented when Balo drops the coal and the stick after Junghi makes his move in the cave. The dropping of both the coal and the stick are delayed and their spatial dimensions are fragmented so that they are seen as independent and non-causal events, but only once their causality is established.
The astounding quality of these early Mani Kaul films ranging from Uski Roti to Dhrupad from 1969 to 1983, is his accuracy in selection of shots to create oppositions between volumes and successions in order to to bring about another layer in the proposed antagonism between the fluid (volume) and its solidification (a temporal succession in the same conditions and therefore a socio-political-cultural succession).Kaul treats these antagonistic forces as lateral oppositions in the midst of which linear tensions sparked of by the duration of the shot create a whole first without a pulse, as in the opening alaap portions of the film and later with a pulse in the jod sections. Having shot Uski Roti with seven camera distances what Rajadhyaksha calls The Grid of Seven Distances continues his exploration of tensions in the same camera distance by moving the camera along its axis to create tensions between different distances. In a remarkable sequence in Uski Roti to denote Balo’s return after her failed mission to give ‘roti’ to her husband at the bus stand, Kaul cuts to a shot of birds in the sky, the sky being an infinite space (what Udayan Vajpayee calls Abhed Aakashi i.e. ‘The Undivided Sky’ to describe Kaul’s body of work) and then rotate the camera on its own vertical axis to create the effect of different camera distances in motion. In music this technique is unique to stringed instruments, where pulling the same string at different tensions can create the effect of different notes. Kaul then moves the camera on its horizontal axis by a pan shot which connect the flattened fields to walking Balo followed by a moving shot of her producing a circular motion around a tree. Kaul uses this device in his attempt to bring about accidents now that his calculations have exhausted their potential to renew the ‘solid mass.’
Although this use of location is vaguely reminiscent of Ozu, in Naukar Ki Kameez Kaul creates an Ozu like effect by showing a banal image, that of the wife (Anu Joseph) talking and the husband Santu (Pankaj Sudhir Mishra) off-camera conversing with her now and then. It is said Kaul handled the camera himself for this sequence. Without looking through the eye piece Kaul randomly moves the camera in between static spurts to create a composite between this becoming-deterretorialized and banal image. In this way he arrives at a new method of arriving at a new composite, mediating fluid objects and their socio-historical solidification.
In Henri Bergson’s landmark text Time and Free Will, Bergson differentiates between qualitative and quantitative differences in sensations, taking the example of the pin being poked which leads to different sensations, first a tickle, followed by a touch and then a sensation of pain instead of an increase in quantity of the poke and the consequent pain. In the case of cinema, the quantitative element is time and the qualitative space. At the same time stretching the shot beyond its denotative limits so as to engage with time can negate the perception of space. In Kaul’s own words ‘it is only when the object and the camera are immobile (without motion) that we make entire contact with duration.’ The unique quality this engagement can produce is the unique quality of attention that the film creates. This quality of attention, which occurs through stillness, realizes its potential only when there is a denial of movement. However the spaces even though ‘violated’ by the film artist still exists and forms a collage with a destroyed object much like a Cubist painting. However the characters in the image relate to this violation of representational form by creating a unique quality of medical pathology, which is perceived by the viewer through their incomplete characterization. If as Antonioni says ‘characters are part of the landscape’ then they no longer remain characters but actors, models in the Bressonian sense, the film maker is documenting the affective state of their emotions and not creating characters for spectatorial-study.
In music, especially in Hindustani raga music, the quality of the sound produced is the quality of the raga. Only certain musicians allow the entire quality of the sound of say Malkauns, to be revealed through the duration of their performance. Similar only certain film makers allow the sensory and the non-sensory aspects of the film to create a quality of attention through the unique perception-image they create.
In Welles’ masterwork Citizen Kane, lensing, set design and editing to represent several stages of the past in contraction and expansion match the juxtaposition of past and present and real and virtual. Deleuze’s reading of Welles, stated that Welles simulation of a metaphysical ‘great wave’ puts time out of joint and engages the viewer through apparent nervousness after the coming of the wave. Both the wave and its effects are studied in an apparently causal way. At the same time this ‘great wave’ is related to unit sensation which is the close-up of the face which has no potential other than the sensory-motor relations with the face.
1.9 Duvidha
With Kaul’s 1973 work Duvidha, the relationship between this ‘great wave’ and its effects are removed from their continual succession in the absence of causality and intentionality. The folk tale about the effects, of a ghost disguised as a husband, on his wife, abstracts the wave into either rarefaction or concentration and in this way explicitly deals with Deleuze’s dictum of information-cinema. Hence Kaul’s understanding of Bergson is much more explicitly
Kaul is more psychology oriented than Shahani who uses élan vitale much more as an idea which concentrates a developing whole in order to represent a space. Kaul avoids representation by using élan vitale to allow the space to split. American avante-garde film maker Ernie Gehr in an interview talked about this difference between idea and image in avoiding representation :
In representational films sometimes the image affirms its own presence as image, graphic entity, but most often it serves as vehicle to a photo-recorded event. Traditional and established avant garde film teaches film to be an image, a representing. But film is a real thing and as a real thing it is not imitation. It does not reflect on life, it embodies the life of the mind. It is not a vehicle for ideas or portrayals of emotion outside of its own existence as emoted idea. Film is a variable intensity of light, an internal balance of time, a movement within a given space.
1.10 Kaul and Bergson
Kaul’s interest in Bergson is evident since Uski Roti, where pure perception of undivided space is created implicitly through fracture of memory. This is achieved by slightly anticipating and delaying the logic of the shots so that they play closest to the dream.[31] Uski Roti can be thought of as a mediation of Bresson’s approach to rhythms made by model actors with Ozu’s creation of a purely suggestive stasis where the absence of signifiers in the image points to the resonance beneath the image. This is juxtaposed with the creation of rasa or suggestive mood. Although rasa has been described as suggestive mood, I shall call it unit-sensation. This unit-sensation creates a sensorial whole. By whole one means a field that is suggested in and around the mere film or the composite. This composite can be thought of as evidence that the whole exists, what Boolean algebra would claim to be a 1.
This understanding of Bergson is best seen in the sequences, which are adapted form Muktibodh’s short story with the same name as that of the film. The sequence begins with Keshav and Krishnaswarup recognizing one another through a play on what Bergson would call attentive memory. Kaul would conversely reverse this as inattentive memory i.e. attentive memory made inattentive through the accident. Kaul creates milieu in a very different way from what would be described as typically Deleuzian milleau cf. Citizen Kane, the Rosebud crystal and its dense dry ice/snow components leading to childhood represented by snowfall on the Kane household when Charles was a young boy. Kaul uses milieu as either density of materiality within the space or character. With reference to a space this would imply the ‘totality of matter’ (Bergson), the whole of matter in the composite space. The materiality of the character is his/her physical appearance, which generally bears resemblance to Russian characters in Kaul’s work, which can be traced back to the Russian-aesthetic like forms of Kaul’s Kashmir, as it does in this sequence. The arrival of Ramnarayan into the film marks the change of the roop (nature) of the film from shanta roop (peaceful nature) to vir-raudra roop (brave-angry nature). In Kaul’s film, Ramnarayan shouts loudly and almost barks (for the lack of a better word) an otherwise insignificant line in Muktibodh’s text to surprise the viewer with both his voice and diction. The viewer of the film perceives this unique combination of diction and voice after which Kaul allows the perception of the previous shot to continue as he shows a still Keshav. After 5 seconds Keshav stands up and limits the continuing perception of the previous shot. Bergson would have called this ‘real’, indeterminate[32] action, which according to him limits perception, or virtual action.
At several points in the film Kaul cuts to documentary sequences either with or without a voice over. In most cases the use of documentary passages is to set up middle-class milieu including the remarkable sequence where Krishnaswaroop drops of some important items at his mother’s house and ensures his fridge is in order. The use of materiality of character and materiality of the location create a sensorial base, which is automatically that of its cultural space. This ‘cultural space’ can be described as the space where action and reaction meet to describe the personality of the space in its details. Kaul removes the details so that the whole has a personality devoid of details and therefore devoid of any cultural subjectivity. Kaul would exhaust this exploration of the split between location-space and narrative-space in his adaptation of that very Russian story, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, in his adaptation Ahmaq (1991).
1.11 Kaul’s Approach to Satah Se Uthata Aadmi
In this way Kaul creates an Indian sensorial experience without necessarily representing its cultural basis or cultural function. Kaul sets up new densities of sensory balloons across the film which then collapse at variable points in the film. This exercise is made most explicit in Before My Eyes where he creates sensory collapse by using the remarkable shot of the collapsing balloon with Kashmir’s landscape as its backdrop. This sensorial collapse is the explicit result of the Wellesian ‘great wave’ where action and reaction are out of touch to prevent them forming a Deleuzean circuit as is completed in the early silent works of Fritz Lang and Abel Gance.
According to an esteemed actor who worked with Kaul at the time, Kaul while explaining the respective film said that he thought of his characters at three levels, at the level of society, at the level of history and at the level of myth. Kaul combines myth with the construction of the irrational through the dream. Myth is suggested through presence and the dream through absence or death of an unknown being. Freud states that the dream suggests the death of someone, which is replaced by the word to become known. In Satah Se Uthata Aadmi in shots where Ramesh/Muktibodh were not required, Kaul would instruct Gopi to stand next to the camera so that his not being there would be a mere presence until he would randomly enter the image. Two instances of this are at the end of Ramesh’s dream where he appears alongside Keshav and Madhav and in the library sequences at the end of the filming of the short story Satah Se Uthata Aadmi. The sudden presence (spirit) in a suggestive absence (death) materializes as irrelevant and therefore myth. The readings of text replace the unknown arrival/presence of death, with words empty of meaning much like in a dream. Hitchcock’s films Birds(1961) can be seen as this random and irrelevant arrival of these monstrous creatures that only facilitate a rhythm, what Bresson would call a knot along which the rest of the film clings, and Kaul would call a raga: ‘ a knot in the air.’ In recent experimental cinema the works of Gerard Holthuis play with this idea of anticipation especially in his masterwork Hongkong HKG (1999) where the proportions of Kowloon and the low flying aircrafts are played with visual while at the same time the audience anticipates the arrival of the next airplane or the same airplane through the sound of the airplane at variable intervals throughout the film. Although Hitchcock had already completed this by filming the accident on the surface in the sequence in North By Northwest where the crop dusting plane chases down Cary Grant at variable intervals of time in an unknown, randomly introduced location, HKG manages to do the same in a very known location: in and around Kowloon airport.
Kaul shows his command on cinematography, which Robert Bresson defined as ‘a writing in movements through images and sound’, in a sequence where he uses a middle-class milleau to establish a Bergsonian whole through sound and image. The sequence begins by Keshav entering the apartment where Tiwari, whose wife has just commited suicide, lives. Although in recent times Wong Kar Wai’s work has drawn huge attention from critics for his unique fragmentation of space and time akin to a post-modern Bresson, Kaul’s work outshines Wong’s in its ability to take different milieu and creating sensory wholes unlike Wong who chooses just one milieu and explores its different fragments. The sequence begins with Keshav entering the apartment foyer and then exiting from the left of the frame and climbing a dingy staircase whilst taking directions to Tiwari’s kamra or room. Kaul establishes a micro-situationalist progression by showing direction and position of Keshav to refer to Zeno’s paradox where movement and position along a trajectory are equated. In the case of Kaul position can be thought of as collapse of movement. Once Keshav enters Tiwari’s room the sensory whole is created from the noises from the street outside. In a masterful sequence Keshav is shown looking through the window in front of Tiwari in the kitchen, who is seen through a rectangular opening in the wall. Tiwari and Keshav begin their conversation of existentialism and middle class society as the sound of the stove occupies the soundtrack. The audience cannot see the stove as the opening in the wall allows only Tiwari’s face to be seen. At this point the audience is imagining a stove. Kaul cuts to the other end of the space i.e. taken from the kitchen where Keshav is shown through the opening; Keshav’s expression continues Kaul’s relationship with affect which he has begun in the very first sequence of the film. Raina’s face captures the static affect and its linkage to a psychological pathology that Kaul has been exploring since his landmark first work Uski Roti. Kaul finishes the sequence by showing the stove and kettle and Tiwari pouring out the tea into cups. Bergson would have agreed that the stove existed in its pure object form, one with the totality of matter in the universe. Kaul ends the sequence by isolating this stove from the totality of matter and rendering it into a representation of a stove and in this way taking away energy from its pure potential.
The function of the shot as independent unit once established, the logic of each section unfurls in different way to ‘place very fragment in a definite position in a given sequence of fragments.’ This ‘difference’ consists of two sides: one that has to do with the appropriation of events and the other, which has to do with rhythm. Initially the film represents important events, people in conversation, a subjective critique on Muktibodh specifically his creative process. As the film progress Kaul lets the Ivens-like documentary images take the place of narrative to oppose the appropriation of only relevant information within the whole. This logic finds its climax in the factory sequences, which aren’t yet the climax of the film, and in this way de-centers the film. Beginning from Satah Se Uthata Aadmi upto Nazar Kaul makes this process of decentering, in his own words between the sacral and the profane, more and more explicit until he begins to shoot the film without looking through the eyepiece in both Nazar and Ahmaq.
Satah Se Uthata Aadmi completed in 1980 has certain stylistic similarities with Tarkovsky particularly Stalker which the Russian master had made the previous year. Kaul has studied the film and is fascinated by Tarkovski’s use of moving object i.e. machines. Although a staple of the films of Eisenstein and Vertov, Tarkovski’s use of machines is very different from those of the early Russian formalists. Whereas the former attempt at using machines for the sake of joining film through montage, Tarkovski’s use of time pressure to study the time component in film allows for rariefied spaces which are different from those of Bresson and Mani Kaul because they focus on the mechanical aspects of objects/ isolated spaces in addition to the purely sensorial portions.
1.12 Kaul and Deleuze
In his iconic study of Cinema 1: The movement-image and Cinema 2: The Time Image, Deleuze breaks cinema into a nervous system like whole, which he calls sensory-motor system. I would like to break these into explicit compartments first,the purely sensory and second, the reactive motor. Certainly Ozu would fall into sensory-motor or motor-sensory cinema where one set of reactive responses transformed into sensory responses and vice-versa. The same logic holds for Tarkovski. However being a visual artist, the Russian master splits the visual into sensory and motor and thus creating a sensory-motor dichotomy within the frame. The question therefore arises (much like in an Ozu film) that at what point does the motor give rise to the sensory thereby creating resonance much like the jod-jhalla section in a dhrupad performance where resonance is produced through the body of the raga (tan or body) with taans.
Deleuze talks about replacing the relationship between the two clichés form and content, with content and expression; where both content and expression implicitly refer to a virtual organic form constantly in the process of developing. In their tour de force, A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari talk about the split appropriation of multiplicities in the whole caused by a suggestion of capital. In the case of the brain this explicitly results in split-personality or schizophrenia. The charge of a neutral sphere is split into positive and negative. A politicized positive and negative with respect to colonization processes are termed as territorialized spaces and deterritorialized spaces. Deleuze and Guattari argue that pure deterretorialized spaces create nomadic processes, which oppose cultural capital and create ‘unappropriated’, nomadic thought.
In what is the most apt criticism of Beethoven, Deleuze refers to Beethoven as having through motif and counterpoint realized the fascist potential of music. Godard mastered the use of Beethoven’s Quartets to underline this fascistic potential as motif and then counterpoint it with a mélange of sounds which oppose the dominance of the image and the dominance of the Hollywood film which even today uses more number of images than number of sounds. In his 1962 masterwork Vivre Sa Vie, Godard opens up his double dialect split between territorial motifs and counterpoints and its other functions leading to trade (and in the case of Godard leading to trade of film production) and groups leading to religion (and in the case of the Godard leading to Bressonian religiosity and in the case of Vivre Sa Vie leading to facialization through the sequence of Nana watching the close ups of Marie Falconetti’s face in Carl Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc.)
Deleuze’s three processes of territorialization are most apt to these Bressonian processes of films making: the first (where the camera is made part of the whole) to establish a critical distance between the multiplicities, the second where the differences in each fragment emerges and the third where the space of the passage marks the advent of the territory. Kaul uses fixed camera distances, 7 in the case of his debut Uski Roti, to elaborate these as scales much like in music. A shift from one camera distance to the other through camera movement is the cinematic equivalent of a taan. The difference according to Bresson can only emerge once the multiplicities are thought out, so as to give more resemblance to obtain difference as in the note from Notes on the Cinematographer mentioned earlier.[33]
The process of colonization can be thought of as a becoming. The first requirement in the case of both producing image and colonizing is direction. Same applies to religious practices. In certain religious practices the direction is implicit with its image, whereas in others the direction forms its image with the intervention of explicit materiality. This becoming can be thought of as passage between territorialized to deterretorialized space. Ozu represents spatial passages in the Japanese houses that he shoots to underline a becoming of thought or a becoming of time. Ozu territorializes pure thought. With Kaul, pure thought is territorialized through the text, often the voice over of the text. In this sense the point before the origin for most of Kaul’s work is the Hindi Nai Kahani movement or Dostoevsky. In this way he either begins by creating spatial images on location which match the milieu of the book or the image provided through Russian text often a preoccupation with Dovzhenko and Tarkovski. This is precisely why Tarkovski’s Stalker (1979) had the potential for becoming a text for a Kaul film, which Kaul aptly utilized in Satah Se Uthata Aadmi.
With reference to religious practices and the Bergsonian totality of matter, the crucial factor is the implicit or explicit relation that direction has with matter. In the case of Hindu forms of worship the direction becomes explicit and materializes in the idol. Conversely the idol determines the direction of worship i.e. the image determines the single direction after a succession of worship in that same direction (usually due to the religious institution and the placement of the idol so that it faces a northern direction) over a number of years materialized in the form of an idol. However in Islamic practices, the image is formed depending on the constant change of direction, the change of direction (mathematically (d (direction)/dx) determines a whole/fragmented changing image. This direction potentially territorialized a space. Cinema makes this practice of Deleuzean terretorialization most explicit as the process of finding a direction, its recording or construction as well as its projection as completely territorialized space can be split, and often in the case of capitalistic regimes split according to labour processes. Kaul creates a nomadic roop of Muktibodh and not an appropriated, cultured version as this appropriation shall create an infinity, what Kaul refers to in Renaissance paintings as lines of light receding to infinity, that shall have no limit, mediation in their object(ive) or causal/instigated violence[34] through either a religiosity or grace or psychological pathology.
Kaul is consciously working with the idea of a filmscape (his 1989 work Before My Eyes has the subtitle ‘a filmscape on Kashmir’) where the pure surface of the screen merges with the space as represented in the image and the two dissolve one another to only point to the common temporalities connected the disjointed spaces. Deleuze and Guattari construct such surfaces existing in the mechanosphere, a sphere consisting of machines at the same energy level, in their masterpiece A Thousand Plateus(1980). The creation of pure deterretorialized spaces where the absence of presence is underlined to create what in chemistry and particulate physics may be called a negative charge and in this way suggest the constant movement of particles away and not towards the appropriated space. This assemblage transforms its own phylum from a dense to rarified space and creates transformations not just between states of intensities but states of mind. Although a raga has a particular scale which creates a representative sound underneath it, a combination of notes beneath this specific scale, the same raga could have different moods based on the mental state it occupies. Based on Anandvardhan’s ninth century text Dhwanyaloka these states could either be in the deep sleep state, the awakening state, the dreaming state and the _ state,these states take away the appropriations of the particularity of the mood. The great singer Kumar Gandharva would sing an uncharacteristic bandish in the somber raga Darbari (meaning palace-like) to demonstrate the joyful mood the same scale could create.
1.13 The Territorialized Split
The territorialized space is split according to Kaul into its ‘sacral and profane’ forms. In chemistry this can be done by taking a metal compound, dissolving in water and then having a liquid form of the compound (whole) which is split into its 2 components- the metal with a positive charge and the non-metal with negative charge. Deleuze and Guattari generalize this split so that every multiplicity in the whole finds its own double. The process of territorialization is split into territorial motifs and territorial counterpoints. Territorial motifs point to a repetition of an idea and counterpoints, which take the flow of information among the multiplicities as far away as possible from the repeated information. A classic example of this is Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie (1962) where Godard splits his whole into two: one which consists of the repeating score by Michel Legrand and the other the self conscious act of forwarding the story (i.e. the text) of Nana. Godard highlights this self-consciousness by interspersing the repeating motifs with chapter titles to add another layer of temporal repetition. This temporal repetition serve as motifs to represent different fragments of Nana’s life until ultimately Nana and her lover are confronted in one of the room’s in the brothel, with the latter reading out a text by Edgar Allan Poe juxtaposed by Godard with Legrand’s score on the soundtrack. Godard creates two layers to the motifs (the soundtrack and the chapter titles) and two layers of counterpoints (different spaces in the brothel and on the street and with different speeds of words, camera movements and temporalities i.e. different rates of flow within the multiplicities) and then juxtaposes them through an accident at a location keeping the milieu ‘as documentary as possible.’[35]
The assemblage is split vertically into two as well: one that deals with the micro or infra assemblage and the other the correlation of these macro elements with the motifs and counterpoints. In Vivre Sa Vie Godard relates the actor to the space in infra-assemblage ways, each space is related to the other as the actor looks outside the space. The space within the frame leads to the space outside it. This is why an actor looking at the camera fits into a Godardian assemblage as the camera leads to the space surrounding the viewer, which is outside the space of the frame.
The opposite is true in the case of Bresson: cf. the opening racecourse scene from Pickpocket. Bresson frames the hats and outer portions of hands, clothing and body parts at the corner of the frame keeping his actor at the center. Although all of them are looking outside the frame their fragmented images create a centering on the actor within the frame. Therefore in the case of Bresson the world outside leads to the inner state of man as in the case of St. Augustine[36] , a late 4th and early 5th Century philosopher who talked of the inner life of man and opposed the appropriated linearity of the Romans to engage with circular forms of life much like the seasons which repeated every year. Godard is essentially a phenomenologist, the purely intellectual value of the object for him leads to a world outside full of subjectivities. Both Godard and Bresson are believers following the tradition of St. Augustine as occupying a space within the church that opposes it and in this way progresses in time by opposing. This can be linked to the idea of Non-Communist left which against the church but is against the communist party as well since the latter is as exploitative as the former.
Whereas the dhrupad form of music used by Kaul is circular, both the motifs as well as the counterpoints in film form as taking Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie as example, so that they a build up around each sequence leads to a succession of images with built climax points, and a finale, like in a symphony, which takes these sequences to their highest dramatic point. Kaul opposes the climaxing of events by breaking up his film into purely temporal multiplicities without arriving at the finale-climax, but at the same time, in a state of becoming. As Bergson noted duration is opposed to becoming. Kaul elongates the duration through the pace of the words such that the pace of words is, like in Kaul’s reading of Bresson, much more important than their meaning and at the same time has several multiplicities in progression in the state of becoming. Kaul does not side with the duration so that as he noted ‘two minutes become five minutes’ or conversely with the becoming of the film in terms of the characters or the narrative but instead play off the opposition to create a constant tension while the climaxing of events is reversed for a rarefaction of information instead of a concentration. Both the rarefaction and the opposing of the climax serve one another in de-centering the film.
Kaul thinks of film editing much like Bresson as opposed to Eisenstein to break film into discontinuous chunks; fragments in which the ‘differences are more important than the similarities.’ Each chunk of film leads to its own end point much like a chain until a new chain is created (cf. the shot of pick pocketing the lady at the station in Pickpocket leading to the lady’s bag being dumped.) In the case of Kaul the termination of the chain especially in Uski Roti is a sequence that creates Kaul’s typical sensorial collapse where the matter in the image collapses but the image still maintains its static nature to create a remarkable contrast. A prime example is Jinda’s first encounter where she drops the stick and the coal she is holding. The sequence is delayed so as to just point out the action in time i.e. the dropping of the stick from one hand and coal from the other so as to break its connect with the situation or cause of this affective motion. As Kaul progresses through his body of work this sequence is more and more implicit like in the close camera distance shot of Keshav sitting on the chair in Satah Se Uthata Aadmi or the remarkable closing shot in Maati Maanas of the camera descending on a landscape, taken through a crane, played backwards.
1.14 Violence and Politics
Octavio Paz in his masterpiece The Labyrinth of Solitude refers to Mexico as a society where space and time are unrelated i.e. a primitive society, which is not in a state of constant flow of its multiplicities. As the assemblage is essentially about dealing with violence as the making of a film, its processing through light and showing to audiences is a violent act. The methods of film production are opposing nature, film i.e. celluloid cannot be decomposed by the soil and therefore is a factor in land pollution. The scale of the film, the sophisticated matter required to make it, occupy a purely man made space that is contrary to a natural space and therefore is only possible through violating the default natural state. The film therefore, as a whole as well as in its parts becomes a carrier of violence. Whereas the events in the film, according to this approach can be concentrated or rarified, the approach to violence can either be mediated or unmediated. Kaul’s films are about the rigorous and particular form taken by random imagination and are investigation of the why, where and when of violence that transpires in the process of transforming the abstract forms into their concrete form.
At the same time, this violence at an individual scale in Kaul’s work i.e. between individuated artist (Kaul himself) and the individuated viewer part of the whole watching the film in a group can be viewed as a machine and therefore a violent machine. On a mass level this may result in what Deuleuze and Guattari refer to as the war machine which fetishizes its assemblage to produce a face or fetishistic version of itself and thus climax through actual violence in the public domain. The war machine does not have war as its objective but at the same time it has the potential of creating mass violence or war. Recent reviews of Kaul’s work particularly Satah Se Uthata Aadmi, made in 1980, label it as a right wing work in its extreme political indifference, and progression parallel to the creation of the right-wing Bhartiya Janata Party[37] (BJP), formed in the same year as Kaul’s film. Similar accusations can be made against both Kaul’s métiers Ozu and Bresson in their restriction to interiority in an art form that is exhibited in the exterior space. Critics ask: since the logics of the interior world and the exterior world are so different how can one use such an exterior form to suggest interior content. Kaul’s use of Sanskritik Hindi (Hindi derived from Sanskrit as opposed to Hindustani, Hindi with a mix of Persian, as in Bombay cinema) and dhrupad alaaps(which are often incorrectly viewed as Hindu music) become excuses for aligning his work to the domain of the Right. Detractors claim that this confusion between private and public is in line with the BJP (which uses acts in the private domain: primarily prayer and worship and projects them in the public domain to create violence).However such claims are unfounded primarily since Kaul opposes this effect to create a pathological character unable to engage with his surroundings. In such a situation the function and sole aim of the character becomes space occupation instead of dialogue and engagement. A dialogue in the film often comprises of two words which have the same meaning, one in Hindi and the other in Urdu. Kaul objectifies space occupation in the sequence where Krishnaswaroop is away and Keshav occupies the space of his living room. Although an ignorance of the everyday-banal occurring in the Indian landscape which carefully ignored in Kaul’s work (and concentrated in the output of Bombay’s film industry), causes a selective purification of India, in terms of the subjects, objects and most importantly, language it chooses, a purified version of Hindi not used in the everyday colloquial, it cannot discount the historical accuracy of either Kaul or Muktibodh or their relevance to post-independent India.
1.15 Kaul and Ozu
Although Bresson has often been cited, along with Ghatak, Mani Kaul’s master at the Film and Television Institute of India, the influence of Yasujiro Ozu on his work is almost ignored. Ozu, the iconic Shochiku studio film maker, who made 40 odd films marking the golden age of the Japanese studio system, often remade his own narratives to focus on the different static forms that the same content could create. For Ozu much like Bresson much of the creative process of film making occurred during the process of shooting, unlike in the case of the Hollywood studio system where the writing of the screenplay is central to the film and assembled footage is compiled during the process of editing, and editing for Ozu was just a matter of putting shot material end to end. In the process of shooting, according to Donald Richie in his book Ozu[38], the master would often measure not just the distance between the camera and the actor but the scalar relationship between the objects, the actor and the camera. In this way he would capture something purely random and unscripted through this process of filming constructed narratives. Although most commentaries on Ozu, including Richie’s, talk about the thematic structure of his films, no commentary on the explicit relationship between the spatiotemporal whole and the son-image combination has been compiled as yet. Taking a sequence from Ozu’s Tokyo Chorus (1931) this relationship between the two can be studied:
- The sequence begins with a tracking shot across a set of soldiers to film exactly what Bresson makes subjective to describe the film-making process as a whole.
- The camera stops at the character to underline his behaviour as being different from the rest.
- He is fired.
- He moves away from the ground and sits on a rock in an open space much like the park and lights a cigarette
- Ozu cuts to a shot of wind blowing across a tree.
Whereas shots 1-4 are increasingly constructed editing sequences to create different spaces, shot 5 makes these spaces implicit in their rhythm, in this case the rhythm of movement between the smoking of the cigarette and the shaking of the tree. The space dissolves to show what Warhol would later call ‘father time.’ Recently the solution of a mathematical equation has been successfully completed which proves variables in space can be solved only if taken in their temporal axis
Kaul’s act of ‘gradually minimizes the fictional settings’ is also with reference to their random appropriation with respect to the characters functioning within the fictional
settings. The earlier portions of the film condense the text to only important events e.g. people talking about relevant things in cafés, roadside inns with voice-over to maintain the link between events assumed to be significant but eventually confronting the viewer with their documentary base. This is most evident in the sequence at Tiwari’s house which culminates with the irrelevant shots of tea being poured into a tea cups. As the film progresses Kaul begins to take the camera further back (instead of bringing it closer to suggest a climaxing of events) in this progressing through opposition. This opposition begins after the sections where Kaul begins to move the camera to connect to diverse spaces like connecting two notes on a musical scale. This section is known as the jod section. Rarely do instrumentalists play an Ulta jod or an upside down jod to reach a micro climax tilted upside down. One such instrumentalist is Ustad Rais Khan and he is heard announcing his elaboration as ‘Ulta Jod’ in Navras’ recording of Raga Ek Prakar Ki Kauns (which roughly translates to One Type of Kauns) at the ICA Auditorium in 1985. In the sequences from Muktibodh’s short story Satah Se Uthata Aadmi, only the most irrelevant details are included one after another. This is heightened in the 2 minute sequence of Krishnaswaroop parking his cycle, giving something to his mother (not seen in the frame) and opening the fridge to check whether anything has been stolen.
Kaul proceeds filming the story which bears the title of the film and therefore should be the most appropriated, as if it is just one of the multiplicities in the fluid-solid whole. After this he ends his documentary-fictional process by taking characters from al of his different vignettes and putting them in the factory and filming their interiorities (their recitation-utterances of poems by Muktibodh) with the different external states in the factory suggested through the different rhythms of the machines. The documentary shots (objects) are superimposed with text (subject of the film) to record changes in light that are recorded through the machine-camera. Kaul then confronts the viewers with text from Muktibodh in amber background with the sound of the printing press. Kaul uses this sound twice in the Satah Se Uthata Aadmi short story. The first instance of this is in the sequence where Ramnarayan and Krishnaswaroop are walking to the former’s room. Kaul juxtaposes two elements on the soundtrack; the dhrupad jod by Ustad Zia Fariduddin Dagar in the austere morning raga Bilaskhani Todi and the sound of the printing press. Both these elements of the soundtrack are irrelevant to the story. They only indicate that the story, a multiplicity in the film, is ‘becoming’ which Kaul indicates on the image with his first crane pan.
In a sequence where Keshav scans Krishnaswaroop’s living room, Kaul culminates the sequence with a shot of Keshav sitting on a sofa. Each of the actions from Keshav’s rise from his sofa set to his survey of his room to reclining on the sofa are slightly delayed so that they are completely free of each other’s causality. The culminating shot of Keshav sitting therefore is completely independent of the succession before it. Bergson would have agreed that if the shot makes the succession before it incomplete, it does the same for the succession of spaces before it. Sensorial collapse allows Kaul to create his own version of what Rajadhyaksha calls ‘Cinema Effect’, in Kaul’s case where a virtual negation of space creates the equivalent of an explosion except that unlike a Hollywood film the destruction of matter is not actually represented through an explosion.
Both Kaul and his student Kamal Swaroop, and off late Kamal Swaroop’s leading disciple Amit Dutta, have a relationship with the 11th century omnibus text by Somadeva Katha Sarit Sagar. Comparable to The Decameron, The Arabian Nights but most similar to the Dictionary of Khazars, the texts consist of a story-within-a-story format which once again make language move beyond its linear and denotative function and move through a circular form. Often the stories consist of animals, upper class Kings and Queens, poor Brahmin boys and animals, often consisting of a transformation between them, what Deleuze would call becoming-animal. The middle portions of Satah Se Uthata Aadmi relate to the becoming-animals as well as the process of narrating a story through a narrator-sutradhar between a bird and white ant and their transformation from one animal to the other. Kaul would take this exploration of Somadeva’s text in Katha Sarit Sagar. Kaul takes a majority of shots from this episode in the Town Hall Library in Bhopal to relate the matter in the library to the matter in the film both of which underline the functioning of the brain in its ability to create sensations. This episode features two remarkable sequences; the first of the two characters Madhav and Neelima walking towards the Communist rally through an open garden taking through a gorgeous wide shot followed by terretorialization under a bridge and an aeroplane passing overhead and the second, a shot consisting of a reflection of Madhav on a black Mercedes Benz, talking about a bureaucratic episode whilst purchasing microscopes. Madhav eventually leans towards the surface and the camera tracks back to represent the surface as being part of the car. Madhav then turns towards the camera. Kaul completes the narrative with overhead shots of the Mercedes Benz and a mélange of interesting sounds of a hollow object being knocked against. This is followed by a remarkable shot of a tree cut before it has been exhausted by the spectator’s temporal free will to a shot extended beyond its exhaustion point of a man in the Mercedes Benz asking the whereabouts of the microscopes. The car stands for its own value beyond its monetary ends much like the film, but its immediate usage points to its functionality. More importantly Kaul is using the car as repetition to create a perception image and affirm to Bunuel’s dictum of an image being that space where a dream seen for the first time is juxtaposed with a feeling of deja-vu.
Starting from Ramnarayan’s monologue upto the factory sequences, the spectator is confronted with a static speaker communicating through language without moving (specifically his lips). Kaul differentiates processes from events by making events as implicit phenomena in the process. Characters stop moving to allow their dissemination into the totality of the film. The factory sequences relate this totality of the film to the totality of matter in the frame to ultimately relate the content-matter and form-matter of the film to the material of film: celluloid. In this way, Kaul is trying to suggest that to allow for a complete unfurling of the process, it is important to think of it as being opposite of events. Therefore in the flashback sequences in the beginning to depict the rape of Tiwari’s wife, Kaul submerges the events with the landscape in order to relate these events to the matter in which they occur. The camera maintains a large distance as the brutes rape the wife. More than the act of violence that constitutes the event Kaul maintains distance to create a whole related to the matter in the whole (Bergson). Later Kaul cuts to a remarkable sequence which the critic Amrit Gangar thinks to be most representative of early Kaul’s sensuality: a slow pan up through grass, in a swamp, to reveal the sari and eventually the dead body of the wife. Kaul has constructed these sequences in tandem with his reading of Bresson: one where the spectator is ‘waiting for suicide.’ This is also in tune with Bresson’s aesthetic in Pickpocket, which Godard read as is Godard’s reading of Bresson, ‘one where each action is brought to its logical end.’ Thus Nirmala’s rape sequence finds its non-causal end in her suicide.
Throughout the short story Kaul ‘minimizes the fictional settings’ by showing insignificant acts: Krishnaswaroop parking his cycle, people beating each other up around Ramnarayan’s soliloquy about his father and a remarkable sequence of Ramnarayan leading Krishnaswarup into his private chambers with Ustad Z.F. Dagar inaugurating the jod in Bilaskhani Todi on the soundtrack. When Krishnaswarup shows his surprise at a lean photo of the stout Ramnarayan, Kaul abruptly cuts to a shot of the two with Ramnarayan’s mother. When Krishnaswarup is disappointed at Ramnarayan’s ‘perverted genius’ he is forced to visit Keshav at his house. Keshav is in the waking state throughout this episode and emerges out of bed, Kaul shoots Krishnaswarup soliloquy on his disappointment at Ramnarayan through a static shot followed by a wipe to Keshav. The monotony of Krishnaswarup’s voice is in tandem with Kaul’s objective of creating a Bressonian cinema, where the sound of words produced by the model and their rhythms and tonalities are much more important than their meanings. Kaul abruptly cuts to the Ozu like landscape formations through the house and notably the arrangement of shape through Saini’s undersaturated but exaggerated colours. The sequence culminates with Keshav explaining his disillusionment at the both of them, Ramnarayan and Krishnaswarup, which ends with an unexplained abrupt cut. At the time of the making of the film, Kaul claimed his objective to be the complete disjunction of successive shots. This objective becomes more and more apparent through the passage of the film and also becomes a comment on the appropriation of important/ background events in the film.
In these sequences Kaul creates his most complex space. The sequence begins after a shot of Keshav getting up and seeing a cup of tea, which is taken away by an unknown girl. These sequences denote the waking-dreaming state denoted in Anandvardhan’s Dhwanyaloka. The juxtapositioning of space in between dream and childhood is enhanced by an emergence of psychological pathology or in its extreme form madness. In this sequence the lives of those who ‘distinguished themselves by their inability to work and to follow the rhythms of daily life.’ In his remarkable text Madness & Civilization Foucalt describes madness as ‘an animal with strange mechanisms’, which Deleuze and Guattari would have termed a becoming-animal. Kaul denotes pathology as an implicitly becoming-animal in the space between childhood and dream. With reference to film this pathology emerges from the fact that film being an economic-social and political art and using economic and social means through the funding and audience respectively, is a misplaced art since it tries to create pure images which not just transcend but in the process conflict with and often contradict their means. The space occupied by men drinking in both Uski Roti and Satah Se Uthata Aadmi is related to this same space. This act of drinking is related to ‘tree-becoming’ and thus one sees Kaul create both animal and tree ‘becomings’ in these sections that explicitly relate material civilization with nature. This is particularly true in the Indian landscape where inspite of developed man-made matter, nature finds its way of co-existing. This is denoted in the panning shot in Ramnarayan’s yard, which consists of interior space juxtaposed with wild nature representing exteriority. Kaul often denotes a painting in the background generally from Hindu mythology to overlay this tree-animal becoming in dream, madness and childhood to overlay the historicity of the acts with nomadology or an unknown history of nomads wgi created the ‘war-machine’ but not with the objective of war. Only on state appropriation could the war machine have war as its objective. Kaul’s experiments in Nazar and Naukar Ki Kameez of attempting not to look through the eye-piece can be seen as an attempt to not appropriate space create an unfurling of nomadic knowledge that has the potential of violence but does not have violence as its objective.
When Kaul cuts away to the jod sequence Ramnarayan’s parents are walking and they stop to stare at Krishnaswaroop. All the characters are still and the camera pans to Krishnaswaroop who is initially still to then suggest some movement. This act of being still to lead to movement is particularly noticeable in Bresson’s Pickpocket and Resnais’ Last Year At Marienbad, and according to Kaul the only way to be in ‘entire contact with duration’ as it is possible only when both the object (character) and camera are immobile.
This approach to waiting for events begins with Hitchcock’s placement of the MacGuffin, the unknown undefined object that forms the crux of the plot. In his recent essay, Beneath the Surface:Cinematography and Time for the Osian’s Cinefan Festival (2006), Kaul uses documents of the interactions Hitchcock had with his scriptwriter during the making of The Birds (1961) to explain why it was unnecessary to explain the why the birds attacked Bodega Bay in the first place. Kaul suggests that the only reading possible of the film is one where the birds are integrated with a ‘wave’ of time, which repeats at variable intervals. This is much like the gat or fixed composition portions in dhrupad where the singing/ instrument playing is accompanied by a repetitive beat of a given interval. The difference between Kaul’s proposal and the dhrupad gat is the variable cycles that cinema allows unlike music, and that too without making it, especially in the case of The Birds, explicitly ‘avante-garde.’ In Uski Roti, Mani Kaul repeated the same camera distances to give the spectator a sense of deja-vu(‘a sense of repetition’) in his dream-like, non-causal narrative style. In Satah Se Uthata Aadmi, Kaul repeats the dhrupad alaap to denote becoming through repetition whereas the passage of cars throughout the film becomes more and more distant in its occurrence starting from the rape-sequence through the dream sequence and the clock tower to the confrontation in the bungalow at the end. This is also similar to the sequence from North by Northwest indicated earlier.
The documentary spaces, which conclude the works can be thought of as pure ‘deterretorialized’ spaces which can only be occupied by nomads which shall vacate the space and therefore creating the purely nomadic space. Antonioni’s work with Nicholson should be replaced The Nomad instead of The Passenger with the last track through the window staging the confusion between Locke’s mental and physical states and the interior-exterior location of the hotel being pure any-space-whatever.
Antonioni had already begun this logic of combining unknown wholes and not multiplicities as in his black and white trilogy with Blow Up (1966) which consisted of disconnected variable rhythms that flowed into one another through their own durations. Antonioni combines possibly ever kind of film in his barebone narrative implicitly without being self referential and declares his objective through one of the lines stated by David Hemming’s character to the lady in his studio: to smoke against the beat developed by the diagetic Jazz score. Antonioni ends his film with the sequence of Hemmings character picking up the ball and participating in the act of the performers. This participation and its political importance have been ignored as they define a carefully constructed causality that leads to an accident. All acts of violence can be made implicit if all those within them are studied as part of the act and not subjects or objects. The characters at the end of Satah Se Uthata Aadmi participate in the filming of the factory and its becoming-deterretorialized space.
This explicit relationship between documentary and constructed forms was also taken up by Nina Shivdasani Rovshen’s Chattrabhang (1976) a “fictional reconstruction of a real-life episode in which Harijans confront Brahminites and eventually the police when their wells dry up.” Rovshen concludes the film with still images (withdrawal of movement as in Kaul) while the soundtrack consists of interviews with people involved in the real struggle. Although such techniques were earlier taken up by Rossellini, Godard and most recently by Abbas Kiarostami (in the closing sequences in arguably his best work Nema Ye-Nadik (Close Up,1990) where Kiarostami accidently finds something wrong with the sound when the Makhmalbaf fake, Sabzian confronts Mohsen Makhmalbaf) Rovshen and Kaul relate this ‘documentation’ to the matter on the location. Both minimalize the settings to destroy the Deleuzean organs constituting the body and yet refer to the totality of the body as the film is integrated in these sequences. In this way they create a machine, which could become a war machine when part of the system, but which does not have war or anything else as its objective. Techniques used by the two directors include withdrawal of movement, monochrome or desaturated use of colour to create film screen as uniform surface with even charge so that the dynamics of the surface are destroyed to proceed to conflict beneath the surface of the film.
Both these directors could be guilty of the same potential that Ozu’s and Bresson’s work can be charged with: the potential of being Right-Wing even Fascist works. Ozu (through his focus on interior space) and Bresson (through his concerns with St. Augustine’s Inner Life of Man) confuse a form i.e. cinema dealing with exteriority with an extremely interior space. If the ‘laws’ of the internal and external world are different a juxtapositioning of two different sets of logic could create confusion, a split between the two orders and an ‘Anti-Oedipal’ schizophrenia (cf .A Thousand Platueus, Deleuze and Guattari ) through a point before the source producing the idea for the image (cf. Bergsonism, Gilles Deleuze) Since both construct machines without any objective both have potential for being fascist. Their sympathy for pathology can be viewed at the same time as an extreme reaction against society that has potential for violence.
Kaul’s film represent in the most effective way the intense Indian heat of the Indian summer conjures up in the afternoon raga Brindabani Sarang. The notes in the circular abstraction of the alaap format of the raga that best conjure up this specific feeling of heat are a combination of a less emphasized second or Re and an emphasized Ma or in the Westerns scale Fa. When the appropriation of the intensity applied to each of the two notes is reversed, the effect of the following season i.e. the Indian monsoon is created through the raga Megh. Whereas Mani Kaul’s film often use austere ragas such as Bilaskhani Todi in Satah Se Uthata Aadmi and Bhairavi in Nazar, the typically Indian sensorial experience in all his films is represented through the afternoon in sequences of Uski Roti and most importantly in the banal sequences of Ramesh-Muktibodh performing routine tasks. In a sequence that is Kaul’s signature he creates the sensorial collapse that he is known for in the most minimalist unnoticed way through a 6 second shot of Ramesh-Muktibodh wearing a kurta. The passage of air beneath the kurta to make it fluffy with air constitute the sensory bags that Kaul creates and then most explicitly in his remarkable documentary Before My Eyes with the image of the balloon deflating, collapses through its relationship through density and buoyancy.
In this way Kaul belongs to a tradition of artists like his mentor Ghatak and his contemporaries John Abraham and Kumar Shahani who engage with the individual as a historically formed figure and unlike G. Aravindan who juxtaposed together religious iconography, pop music, tourism and garish calendar art colour and artistic creativity in his masterwork Esthappan (1979) or Kamal Swaroop whose Om Dar B Dar (1988) mediates the historically formed temporal being with public space violence materializing in kitsch and popular forms of literature, cinema and advertising.
Kaul’s cinema allows for the creation of fractals by balancing his ‘patient observation’ with ‘let’s see what happens.’ A fractal is a process of isolating one side of a triangle and mounting a triangle on this side and then following this procedure for the newly formed triangle infinitely. After repeating this procedure several times, a complex opening out occurs which represents formations in nature as seen in ice cubes and tundra leaves. In this way Kaul’s films do reach an ‘organic’ end, even though the beginning points of this process are perhaps decidedly planned and constructed through detailing.
[1] Encyclopedia Of Indian Cinema by Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Paul willemen , British Film Institute , Jun 1999
[2] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1:The Movement Image
[3] Cinematography as defined by Robert Bresson is ‘a writing with images in movement and sounds.’
[4] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). French edition: 1968
[5] Zia Mohiuddin Dagar was one of the 19th generation of Dagar family dhrupad musicians. He was largely responsible for the revival of the rudra vina as a solo concert instrument.
[6] Alaap and Jod: Beginning portions of any Hindustani classical music recital. The alaap is the introductory phase to introduce the scale of the raga and its nature and jod is the portion where the portions are further established with a pulse or a beat.
[7] Cinema of Prayoga comes from prayōga‘, a Sanskrit word, which loosely translates as ‘experiment’ but can also mean ‘representation’ and ‘practice’.Cinema of Prayoga is a unique touring exhibition of artists’ film and video work from India and presents the rich and unseen artists’ film from India which trace a history of personal film and video free from the constraints of the film industry and drawing on a broader array of the arts from folk tales to poetry and music to dance, as well as myths and fantasy.
[8] Sect of Hinduism that worships Lord Shiva. Also can be related to studying dhrupad through Lord Shiva’s instrument the rudra veena.
[9] Khayal, meaning imagination in Urdu was a later form of music where the raga would be solely developed. It is much more ornamented than Dhrupad.
[10] Miyan Tansen or Ramtanu Pandey (1493 or 1506 – 1586 or 1589) is considered among the greatest composer-musicians in Hindustani classical music. He was among the Navaratnas (nine jewels) at the court of the Mughal Emperor Akbar. Akbar gave him the title Miyan (an honorific, meaning learned man).
[11] Gopinathan Nair (1937 – 2008), more popularly known as Bharath Gopi, was one of the first actors to be associated with the New Wave Cinema movement in Kerala. He is considered one of the greatest film actors in India and has won many awards, including the National Film Award for Best Actor for his role as Sankarankutty in Kodiyettam (1977), and hence he got the name Bharath.
[12] Detteretorialization is a term used by Deleze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus to oppose colonial processes with nomadic processes
[13] Known primarily for his work in the Indian parallel cinema of the ‘80s, Om Puri does not cite Satah Se Uthata Aadmi as being part of his body of work. The film does not appear in the recently completed biography by Nandita Puri.
[14] The Warlis or Varlis are an Indian indigenous peoples, who live mostly in Dahanu and Talasari talukas of the northern Thane district mural paintings are similar to those done between 500 and 10,000 BCE in the Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka, in Madhya Pradesh. Their extremely rudimentary wall paintings use a very basic graphic vocabulary: a circle, a triangle and a square.
[15] With Nazar, Kaul de-centers the frame by having cinematographer Piyush Shah not look through the eyepiece while filming.
[16] Interview with Mani Kaul for Film and Television Institute of India promo, directed by Gurvinder Singh
[17] The specific word in Hindi for this cleansing act is shudh meaning pure.
[18] Abhed Aakash, Mani Kaul Ke Saat Baat Chit by Udayan Vajpayee
[19] According to Rajadhyaksha, in his essay Mani Kaul and The Cinematic Object (Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid, Tulika Books,2009) the grid of seven distances moved from one to the other ‘growing into another, making an interval in between e.g 1.4. feet to 2.8 feet to 4 feet to 7 feet to 10 feet to 15 feet According to Kaul all the characters ‘stood at one or another of these distances, moved from one distance to another, and so with the camera.’ Pg. 340
[20] Mani Kaul’s teacher Ritwik Ghatak and Ghatak’s favourite pupil Kumar Shahani would rewatch Lumiere’s film laughing at it each time for its absurd thinking of denoting one machine looking at another
[21] Notes on the Cinematographer, Robert Bresson
[22] Seen From Nowhere, Concepts of Space:Ancient and Modern, Edited by Kapila Vatsyayan, Indira Gandhi National University Press, New Delhi, 1991
[23] A fractal is “a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole,” a property called self-similarity.
[24] When asked about Palekar’s remake of Duvidha, Paheli, Kaul mentioned that he thought the former was solvable (Paheli means a riddle) whereas his film made solutions or the idea of a solution redundant.
[25] Original in Brij bhasha:
Anadi anant vihar kare
Lal Priya so bhai n chinhari
[26] Defined by Bergson as the ‘life force’ in several texts
[27] Untitled Note on music by Mani Kaul
[28] Towards A Cinematic Object, Indian Cinema Superbazaar edited by Aruna Vasudev, 1983
[29] Untitled essay by Mani Kaul
[30] Approach to Naukar Ki Kameez, Mani Kaul, Mani Kaul Dossier, Cinemaya Publications Delhi,1997
[31] When Kaul says that he edited the film after having a dream in which the shots fell into place, he means that the film has been edited with the logic of a dream relating to a dream
[32] ‘So we must start from the idea that perception means eventual action-indeterminate action’, pg22, Matter and Memory, Henri Bergon,1896. Bergson continues to say ‘perception is the matter of space in the exact measure in which action is master of time’ (author’s italics). If perception results in eventual action then the denotational aspects are transformed into their value in time.
[33] Uniform and unity of life bring out the nature and character of their bodies. Standing at attention, the immobility of them all shows up the individual signs of each.
Notes on The Cinematographer, Robert Bresson, Urizen Books, New York
[34] In France the camera itself is known as objectif
[35] Quote from Notes on the Cinematographer, Robert Bresson, Urizen Books New York: ‘Your imagination will aim less at events than at feelings while wanting these latter to be as documentary as possible’
[36] Augustine of Hippo or St. Augustine was a Romanized Berber philosopher and theologian. Catholic theologians generally subscribe to Augustine’s belief that God exists outside of time in the “eternal present”; that time only exists within the created universe because only in space is time discernible through motion and change. His meditations on the nature of time are closely linked to his consideration of the human ability of memory.
[37] The Bhartiya Janata Party is a right-wing party that is associated with Hindu nationalism and advocates conservative social policies, self-reliance, free market economics, foreign policy driven by a nationalist agenda, and strong national defense. It has been responsible for creating communal violence throughout the country in 1992 and in Gujarat in 2002.
[38] Ozu, Donald Richie, University of California Press,1974
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