Recalling a craftsman of time & attention
My teacher, the master explorer of cinematic form, Mani Kaul, left us 10 years ago on July 6, 2011. He was 66. In his body of work, from Uski Roti (1969) to Naukar ki Kameez (1999), he created an idea of temporality, profoundly marked and informed by his understanding of Indian music, aesthetics and philosophy. In doing so, he not only created a highly personalised idiom of expression, but challenged the existing notions of meaning and cinematic forms that proved challenging for many an audience, used as they are to a certain acceptable system of the socio-industrial form of filmmaking, which treats facts and meaning as pivots around which a film’s narrative is received and understood.
It was a day in 2009 when I called him up, dejected and confused as I was with my relationship with filmmaking. I wanted to pursue films but not practise making them. That was the conundrum. How to resolve such a confused state was my question to the master. He heard me calmly and attentively. Even though I could not see him over the phone, I could sense his face resting on his fist over the elbow placed on the table, a posture he would hold in the classroom listening to students. I paused and waited for him to say something. “Practice and theory are like two wings of a bird,” he said. It had to be practised. There was no other way. Perhaps the very next day, I bought a small diary and started jotting down notes for Anhey Ghorhey Da Daan, a novel by the Punjabi writer Gurdial Singh, that I was keen to adapt into a film. The year was 2009 and the film became a reality in 2011, thanks to Mani’s contribution as the film’s creative producer and the involvement of National Film Development Corporation (NFDC).
As we prepared to leave for the film’s shoot in a biting cold January the same year, Mani, who was bedridden, having been discovered with cancer, met with the team’s principal crew. His advice: look for a certain feeling in every shot. Invest in creating that sense where you can tangibly feel an emotion. And where does that feeling lie? Definitely not in a solitary thing! Once I asked Mani how he decided the composition of a shot. Pat came his reply, “For the light.”
While most cinemas look upon the actor as the prime voice of the medium, Mani (and a few others before him like the French auteur Robert Bresson), did not consider cinema to be an actor’s medium. Though he did employ both professional and non-professional actors in his films, unlike theatre where the actor is the principal carrier of narrative through the person’s voice and body, the prime expression in his films was a combination of cinematic parlance like lighting, camera movement, gestures, objects and people connected through looks and silences, but above all, temporality and attention. “Time as attention. Attention as rhythm. The invisible shape of film.”
We know for a fact that space and time are the two fulcrums of our existence. By its depiction of this outward reality, cinema creates its own universe. While most filmmakers have a strong notion of space via the visual composition, action and movement, time as the other fulcrum is by and large considered a byproduct of this spatial exploration. Not time as a conscious choice of expression and carrier of sensation. For the common viewer also, films are by and large a visual medium. That’s the notion Mani always seemed to defy. Therein his films became a challenge for an audience used to binging on cinema as an optical spectacle and over-emphasised dramatic interpretations of events and being. Even for the parallel cinema of the Indian New Wave, the social message and the actor’s craft were prime motivations.
Mani stood outside this collective and carried on with his experiments with notions of time and attention, in films like Aashadh Ka Ek Din (1971), Duvidha (1973), Satah Se Uthta Aadmi (1980), Dhrupad (1982), Siddheshwari (1989), Nazar (1991) and Idiot (1992). Even while continuing with individualised means of expressing these notions, his films retained searing indictment of society, the most formidable being his continuous depiction of strong female characters seeking to break from the traditional role defined in our culture.
Watching a film is like building upon facts and figures. They pile upon each other through a film’s unspooling, creating demands on our memory to configure and reconfigure continuously. A sudden new fact or information can change our perspective of how we have been perceiving certain things. This intellectual grasping and un-puzzling of motives and fabrications of the ‘plot’ is the stack of cards on which this building of information stands. Do away with this stack and what are we left with? How do we hold the viewer? Mani sought the viewer to respond through a series of attentive spells floating and tied in time, the way a musician holds a listener through the sensation of progression of notes. Mani would always say, “A musician plucks a few chords of an instrument, say a sitar. And we are held captive. What does it mean? What is the meaning of this plucking of sitar?” Why does it resonate with us? He sought a similar resonation in his films.
When I had finished shooting Anhey Ghorhey Da Daan and planned to start editing the film, Mani said I should spend a few days editing at his home. He offered me a room next to his where I started editing along with my editor. Worried that the sound may bother him, we kept the volume low. He called from his room, “Keep the volume high. I want to listen to what you are editing.” After three days of editing, he wanted to see what we had edited. We had finished editing the opening sequence of the film. I placed the laptop on the bed so he could see without getting up. As I was about to play the sequence, he said, “Shut off the image. I just want to hear the sound.” We were puzzled. But we complied. After listening, he said, “It sounds beautiful. Only one dialogue bothered me and disrupted the rhythm. Just remove that along with its image.”
We did a blind cut without looking at the image and played the sequence again. This time he asked for both the image and sound to be played. He said, “See, now it’s perfect.” It forever changed the way I would edit films.
