Mani Kaul

Aashad Ka Ek Din is an adaptation of the play that is based on Kalidasa’s life in three acts. Kalidasa is renowned as one of the greatest writers, poets and dramatists in the history of Sanskrit language.Read More »

Quote:
Film is Based on Duvidha by Vijayadan Detha, it’s about merchant’s son, whose relationship with his young bride, Lachhi is thwarted by his work and a ghost who falls in love with her, resulting in the ghost soon impersonating the husband.Read More »

Feature film version of Mani Kaul’s film on Dostoevski’s masterpiece that was shown at NYFF.

Synopsis:
Mani Kaul’s adaptation of Dostoevski’s Idiot is his most profoundly affecting film and a “tour de force” (Rajadhyaksha) that co-ordinates actors, settings and situations to a multiplicity. It his most realized attempt at making formalist film by moving the camera,without looking through the viewfinder to make Gilles Deleuze’s reading of cinema as an any-instant-whatever or equidistant instant to an any-space-whatever or any equispatial instant. This equispatial instant is created by destroying the dialectic between required and not-required, sacral and profane. Mani Kaul, analyzing his own films would state that, whereas his earlier works engaged a rarefaction of information, Idiot was the first to encounter a saturation of events.Read More »

Mani Kaul’s early short filmRead More »

Quote:
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) iis 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 interlocuters esp. in the debates about 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.Read More »

Quote:
This is the film that left the strongest impression on me. I have been lucky to engage it 3 times on 35mm.

Mani Kaul’s films create a sensory construct around their use of a selection of sounds to create a specific sensorial effect and images to create volume instead of (as in Hollywood) their denotative element of space. His films usually attempt to create an aesthetic where language is used beyond its denotative aspect, into its suggestive and rhythmic tonalities based on Anandvardhan’s 4th century text Dhwanyaloka about haiku like poetry forms and the aesthetic of suggestion they create known as ‘Dhwani’ which means ‘suggestive sound.’Read More »

Quote:
In a poetic hour and a half, director Mani Kaul looks at the ancient art of making pottery from a wide variety of perspectives. Pots are shown in many settings, including a museum where a young child is mesmerized by the ceramics that ancient ancestors created from clay. The tradition continues and so does its magic, as potters are shown deftly working a lump of wet clay and fashioning it moment by moment into a slowly emerging shape. Kaul blends in myth and fables as well as the beauty of the art itself to create an inspiring look at a humble, everyday object.Read More »