Parables of Perception: Three Films by Mani Kaul

Features

Dec 14, 2021

Parables of Perception: Three Films by Mani Kaul
Duvidha

Parables of Perception: Three Films by Mani Kaul

Features

Dec 14, 2021

In 1968, soon after he graduated from the Film and Television Institute of India, Mani Kaul made an arresting short titled Forms and Designs. It observes artisans at work across the country, some swimming alone against the tide of mass production, others pitched up at government centers for handicraft revival. Several times the camera tilts from hands chiseling (or painting or weaving) up to faces gathered in concentration. There is an admiring sequence on village cooperatives. These are set beside dour images of industrial machines and advertisements for home appliances, as a starchy voice warns that the “wheels of mechanization” are accelerating. “He is the last in his family,” it’s said of eighty-five-year-old Imtiaz Ali Khan. “With his passing, the art of brass engraving will wither away.”

Kaul took a keen interest in India’s shastriya kala, or traditional arts. A formally restless director, he found much inspiration outside cinema. In a four-decade career he released twenty-odd films; on the side, he studied Sanskrit aesthetics, wrote about medieval miniature painting, and trained in dhrupad, a form of Hindustani classical music. When he died of cancer in 2011, the obituaries mentioned friendships with dancers, singers, writers, and painters. “His creative intellect was so prodigious that all these art forms were refracted through his own practice,” novelist Sharmistha Mohanty wrote. “He was my guru in the traditional sense of the word,” poet Udayan Vajpeyi recalled. “He will go on living in his students of cinema, in his students of literature, in his students of music.”

Uski roti
One Day in the Rainy Season
Duvidha

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