I saw this almost unheard of film at the National Film Archive of India in Pune. Although IMDb lists the year as 1986, the film was completed in 1981 in between Kaul's masterwork Satah Se Uthata Aadmi and his remarkable documentary on the austere form of music, Dhrupad. The film is produced by ZDF and the text written by Vijaydan Detha (author of the text which became Kaul's best known film in the West, Duvidha (1973) and Kamal Kothari and is set in the arid desert of Rajasthan, a setting similar to Duvidha, where two rival clans face off one another in the desert.
The absence of representational detailing and storyline through event logic, makes this Kaul's singularly most difficult film matched only by his later work Maati Maanas (Mind of Clay,1984). Striking is the early sequence where Mani Kaul on the voice-over repeats the words or the utterances (much like 'Rosebud' in Citizen Kane) of 'camel' and 'desert', 'the camel in the desert' etc. The sensorial effect develops until in certain remarkable sequences separated by intertitles Kaul collapses the sensory effect he has carefully developed.
Kaul's studies in Dhrupad, the scale-based improvised form of music that destroys the object of music the raga unlike khayal which builds it or even fetishizes it, create an affected camera aesthetic. Whereas in Uski Roti and Duvidha Kaul moves the camera only 50 minutes or an hour into the film, here we see random wipes creating the impression of on-the spot improvisation, very similar to, but much before what Doyle and Wong attempted in Happy Together(1997).
The film is in between Kaul's remarkable Satah Se Uthata Aadmi and Maati Maanas in terms of film form, the proportion of interiority of the former giving way to the 'road-film' like nature of the latter as the film plays out. The most memorable shot: a pan down from the exterior to constructed interiority of the bed and mat.
It also seems to be an ode to the film technique of Sergei Parajanov
The absence of representational detailing and storyline through event logic, makes this Kaul's singularly most difficult film matched only by his later work Maati Maanas (Mind of Clay,1984). Striking is the early sequence where Mani Kaul on the voice-over repeats the words or the utterances (much like 'Rosebud' in Citizen Kane) of 'camel' and 'desert', 'the camel in the desert' etc. The sensorial effect develops until in certain remarkable sequences separated by intertitles Kaul collapses the sensory effect he has carefully developed.
Kaul's studies in Dhrupad, the scale-based improvised form of music that destroys the object of music the raga unlike khayal which builds it or even fetishizes it, create an affected camera aesthetic. Whereas in Uski Roti and Duvidha Kaul moves the camera only 50 minutes or an hour into the film, here we see random wipes creating the impression of on-the spot improvisation, very similar to, but much before what Doyle and Wong attempted in Happy Together(1997).
The film is in between Kaul's remarkable Satah Se Uthata Aadmi and Maati Maanas in terms of film form, the proportion of interiority of the former giving way to the 'road-film' like nature of the latter as the film plays out. The most memorable shot: a pan down from the exterior to constructed interiority of the bed and mat.
It also seems to be an ode to the film technique of Sergei Parajanov
