TRAC 4 (1) pp.

324 Intellect Limited 2013

Transnational Cinemas
Volume 4 Number 1
2013 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/trac.4.1.3_1

Colin Burnett
Washington University

Transnational auteurism
and the cultural dynamics of
influence: Mani Kauls Non-
Representational cinema

Abstract Keywords
This article makes two contributions to the study of transnational cinemas. First, it Mani Kaul
seeks to illuminate a common practice amongst those contemporary auteurs whose Robert Bresson
development depends on culturally eclectic sources; namely, the practice of positioning auteurism
ones style and storytelling as attempts to reconcile a range of diverse influences. The influence
non-representational cinema of the Rajasthani auteur Mani Kaul stands as just such Uski Roti
an effort, exploring the tensions between his two mentors and the aesthetic values they Duvidha
exhibit: Ritwik Ghatak (sensuousness) and Robert Bresson (restraint). Second, this
article proposes that a nuanced understanding of the relation Kaul cultivated between
these influences requires revising two of the historians basic tools: the concepts of
auteurism and influence. The concept of auteurism that best describes Kauls film
practice and approach to the domestic and international cultural marketplaces is not
one of pure, isolated independence, but rather of individuality through transnational
reference. Moreover, this article offers an approach to artistic influence, based on the
writings of the cultural historian of art Michael Baxandall, that reverses the relation,
as it were, situating the later artist, in this case Kaul, as the relevant active agent in
the influence relation, elaborating upon, redirecting and re-reading Bresson as the
innovator of a fragmentary and non-representational alternative to the illusory and
ideologically suspect closure of storytelling paradigms indebted to the Renaissance.

3
Colin Burnett

I feel I have one relation with Bresson, another with Ritwik Ghatak. But
there is a wide difference between the two. It is strange that I have a
relation with two persons so contrary in disposition. I am often trying to
figure out how one could fuse the two into some sort of harmony. I have
absorbed both of them. They are both there inside me. Only now, in
Idiot [Mani Kaul, 1991], I am beginning to feel that the two have gradu-
ally come through a door that has been shut for years. To bring restraint
and sensuousness together is an extremely difficult task.
(Kaul 1996: 50)

In the weeks and months after Mani Kaul passed away on 6 July 2011 at
the age of 66, the challenge of grasping the contributions of this multifac-
eted film-maker and intellectual and of situating his films and writings in the
history of cinematic storytelling and film theory was immediately apparent.
Kauls cinema simply did not fit neatly into a single container. Indeed, critics
and bloggers appeared uneasy in their efforts to account for the two rudders
he had long used to steer his practice and theory: Bresson (restraint) and
Ghatak (sensuousness). This uneasiness is evident in a core tension in The
Times of Indias obituary, which like others praised Kaul as a solitary genius
who invented an entire vocabulary of cinema that was astonishingly
unique, whose concept of the narrative is both radical and original, and
who ultimately forged a totally new path at the same time as it stressed
his indebtedness to Bresson and Ghatak (Ghosh 2011: n.p.). As the opening
caption of this article makes clear, Kaul himself, looking back from a vantage
point in the mid-1990s at a career that began with Uski Roti/A Days Bread
(Kaul,1969), was conscious of a similar tension; while he viewed himself as
a highly personal film-maker, his auteurism was driven not by the desire to
express a personal vision alone, but by the master problem of reconciling the
cinemas of his two greatest influences.
This was no small task, as Kaul readily admitted. The distinctiveness of his
mentors in many ways place them at oppose ends on a spectrum of film style
and storytelling. Bresson, one of the most celebrated of French masters, is
the innovator of a sparse and stringent aesthetic. Contemptuous of the influ-
ence of theaters florid artificiality on cinema, he trained his actors, which
he called models, to suppress and delay expressivity; his intimate, elliptical
storytelling withholds access to a characters past, emotional reactions and
immediate motivations and thus renders them difficult to categorize, encour-
aging speculation about their spiritual mysteries; and his pared down visuals,
often reliant on the restrictive 50mm lens, draw the viewers attention to the
relations between adjacent shots and off-screen sound cues. One the other
hand, Ghataks storytelling, as Aruna Vasudev argues, originates in his expe-
rience at the Indian Peoples Theatre Association (IPTA) and elicits pathos
through melodramatic scenarios and devices (Vasudev 1986: 23). Often rely-
ing upon deep focus compositions using a wide-angle lens, the melodramas
of the Bengali director, bearing no similarity to the Western cinema or to
the commercial Indian cinema (Vasudev 1986: 23), make allusions to Indian
mythology and archetypal characters whilst exploring Marxist themes (the
founding of the Progressive Writers Association, an anti-fascist league, led to
the formation of the IPTA in 1943). Deep focus allows Ghatak to situate char-
acters like the taxi driver Bimal (Kali Bannerjee), the protagonist of his second
film, Ajantrik/The Unmechanical (Ghatak, 1957), and his jalope, the films other
protagonist, in modern urban and primitive rural settings, and thus to

4
 Transnational auteurism and the cultural dynamics of influence

explore a characters emotional and political conditions relative to other char-

acters, to nature, and to other objects (like Bimals car) in the context of the
clash of the coming mechanical age with tribal cultural and tradition in post-
Independence India (Vasudev 1986: 24). He explores what might be termed
their Gattungswesen species-essence, or the socio-historical content of
their existence in modernity to employ an appropriately Marxist term given
Ghataks Communist affiliations.
The tension involved in celebrating an auteur as a singular phenomenon
while describing how the auteurs acknowledged predecessors set his cinema
in motion, a tension common in popular as well as scholarly writings on
numerous auteurs, reflects a deeper one in the critical literature on directors
like Kaul whose sources and interests are culturally eclectic. As this article
argues, his artistic and theoretical project challenges scholarship on the social
history of global film style to develop a concept of auteurism that can accom-
modate those film-makers who seek individuality by acting upon, referencing
and making ones own identified models from the past, but who also, in
pursuing individuality through reference, till the fertile and uncertain ground
between local, national and international film and literary cultures. Popular
writing on Kaul since his death commits at least two major errors that extend
from this unresolved tension and that often afflict criticism and scholarship on
transnational cinema (Higbee and Lim 2010: 18). First, this writing suggests
that a transnational cinema such as Kauls one that, under the mentorship
of Ghatak and Bresson, explores a nexus of regional and international sources
in order to subvert national and mainstream cinema (Indian and Western) is
the product of amorphous or vacuous mechanisms like the auteurs unique
vision, as if the auteur were, in the words of Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim
in the inaugural issue of this journal, a spontaneous force of nature (Higbee
and Lim 2010: 18). Indeed, critics have tended to err on the side of Romantic
auteurism when faced with the tensions cited earlier; it simplifies the task, so
the logic goes, to completely isolate an auteur like Kaul with a rhetoric that
deems his cinema to be fundamentally apart from in the sense of singu-
lar and other and thus to skirt the need to address the intriguing relation-
ship between Kauls individuality, on the one hand, and the sources (Bengali,
French) that he claims in his writings and films, on the other. Second, in
opting for empty concepts like originality to explain and categorize Kauls
cinema, and thus overlooking the social, economic and cultural factors that
shaped his overtly transnational outlook and art, this approach thereby ghet-
toizes his cinema as somehow in between or marginal relative to more famil-
iar film-making trends.
This article seeks to remedy this situation by demonstrating how aspects
of the critical transnationalism advocated by Higbee and Lim can be used to
analyse the auteurism of Mani Kaul in the context of a post-war West Bengali
taste culture, one that was transnational in the sense that it favoured adapting
alternative, mainly European storytelling paradigms within Indian cinema as
a tonic for the stultified mainstream national output. It would require much
more space than allotted here to perform an exhaustive analysis of the rela-
tionships between the entirety of Kauls films, writings and those of his two
mentors. For this reason, this article will concentrate for the most part on
Kauls interest in Bresson, although it will address Ghataks role (indirect, to
be sure) in bringing Kaul to Bresson.
More specifically, this article adopts an explanatory paradigm, informed
by the critical transnationalism of Higbee and Lim, that replaces the vacuous

5
Colin Burnett

spontaneous self-generation models of causation evident in recent writing on

Kaul by examining him as a transnational auteur who, in his art and theory,
elected Bresson as a cause. Rather than simply characterizing his authorial
choice-making as that of a singular genius and leaving it at that, Kaul will
be studied through a model of influence innovated by the social historian of
art, Michael Baxandall, one that encourages the investigation of those cultural
and economic factors that condition the choice situations in which one artist
is selected by another as an influence. Supported like many of his parallel
cinema brethren by the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC)
(then the Film Finance Corporation) in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Kaul
conceived his first few films as adaptations of local literary sources partly in
the style bressonien. He followed Uski Roti, about a waiting wife who lovingly
bakes bread for her bus driver husband with other works in the Bressonian
register, including Duvidha/The Dilemma (Kaul, 1973), another exploration of
female subjectivity as a lonesome young wife faces the dilemma of pursu-
ing her desires in a relationship with a ghost that has taken the form of her
absenthusband.
Kaul ultimately selected the Bressonian influence in his films, as well as in
his rhetorical self-presentation and theory, because he perceived it as fertile
territory to explore an entirely visionary interpretation of the cinematic princi-
ples of fragmentation and combination that Bresson advocated in print and in
his films. Bressons cinema constituted a rare European model for developing
what Kaul called a non-representational art open to local aesthetic traditions
and that ultimately escapes the dominant aesthetic regime shaped by the
values and principles of the European Renaissance a regime to which most
mainstream cinematic conceptions of time and space unconsciously adhere,
according to Kaul. Moreover, in this early period of his career, as well as in
the 1990s and 2000s, the selection of Bresson not only provided Kaul with the
means to adjust to a Bengali taste culture that had nurtured an indigenous
but fragile art cinema that looked to foreign (mainly European) film out of
principle, but also to reformulate as his own theories he had learned during
his training under Ghatak in the mid-1960s.

Michael Baxandalls Excursus Against Influence:

The perils and promise of influence studies
In a passage titled Excursus against influence in his seminal study, Patterns of
Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (1985), Baxandall elaborates
an alternative model of influence and its determinants as an aspect of the
social history of art. Social historians of film style, transnational or otherwise,
have much to gain from his thesis, reminiscent of Pierre Bourdieu (who was
inspired by Baxandall [Lizardo 2011: 1318, 20, n.4]), that art is bound to what
I call a marketplace of taste and values that promotes competencies and incli-
nations among viewers and thus demand for the kinds of experiences that art
affords. Baxandall understands this cultural marketplace as a set of circum-
stances that render artists choices from the media they adopt, to the rhetoric
they employ in describing these media, to the influences they choose as
moves in a relatively high-stakes positional game. The idea that artists and
even tastemakers react to and often seek to out do or out position others
in a marketplace is useful for historians seeking to understand the specific
cultural and institutional dynamics of global art cinema. The institutions and
technologies that bring auteurs and onlookers together in a robust cultural

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 Transnational auteurism and the cultural dynamics of influence

marketplace for art cinema the magazines, broadcasts, specialized websites,

blogs and now Twitter feeds that act as platforms for authorial reputation
formation within a community of in-the-know intellectuals, tastemakers
and cinephiles, the awards, prizes and sinecures (like jury appointments)
that secure a film-makers continued visibility and influence, the distribution
systems and state and festival-related funding apparatuses that directly enable
the expression of authorial visions, and so forth and so on create condi-
tions for competitive self-differentiation among auteurs. And implicated in
this self-differentiation process is an auteurs ability to affix a set of meanings
and values to his or her films and thus to stimulate a viewership and continue
performing in relative independence. Since at least the late 1950s, a director
wishing to perform as an auteur, to participate in risky fiction film produc-
tion, would find it beneficial to situate himself or herself within these local,
national and international institutions.
The complex connection between the values and meanings we associate
with art cinema and the challenges of continued performance is worth stress-
ing. Art films may not guarantee a large return on investment for producers,
so why sponsor them? To understand this, it is salutary to view art cinema
auteurs as participants in a marketplace devoted to the exchange of cultural
goods intangibles like the value of individualism, as well as challenging ideas
and experiences viewers cherish in art film contexts. While at times rather
loose and informal, the affiliations, opportunities and forms of exchange that
festivals, funding bodies and cinephiles create grant auteurs the occasion to
present their experiments and visions as something like commodities, whose
yield can, in the minds of some intrepid producers and funders, offset the at
times slight box office revenue they promise. Of course, not all artists and
film-makers are equally successful in the strategic game of self-presentation.
Like economic marketplaces, cultural ones can be quite competitive, for they
can only offer a certain number of opportunities to those who risk making
films that challenge the status quo. But those who excel in the French
context, Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, and Agns Varda create conditions for
their continued performance as individualist film-makers.
Influence as the election of prior auteurs as causes at times plays, as we
will see, a significant role in the cultural project of creating and disseminat-
ing values and meanings around art films. Unfortunately, scholars have yet to
fully appreciate the importance of influence studies, as one might call it, to
understanding global art and transnational cinemas. Yet, the value of influ-
ence studies for a sub-field like transnational film studies can hardly be taken
for granted given the limited ways influence tends to be conceived in the
critical and scholarly literature. Baxandall reminds us that the problem with
casual or conventional claims about the influence of one artist on another
is that, while innocuous on their face, they rely on a language that implies
or fails to protect against the idea that the artist who has been influenced
is a passive agent. And in the context of transnational film studies, render-
ing the intentions and innovations of a Robert Bresson as an unfiltered cause
behind the films of a Mani Kaul is problematic on a number of grounds, not
the least of which is that it suggests a Eurocentric causal picture whereby the
French film-maker rests at the centre of a cluster of orbiting spheres, with
the Indian auteur as one among many passive bodies motivated to rotate
about this Western cultural influence. Moinak Biswas recognizes similar prob-
lems with influence in the encounter between Italian neo-realism and 1950s
Indian cinema. Rather than posit 1950s Indian cinema as an inert, shapeless

7
Colin Burnett

mass invigorated and given form and direction only with the importation
of Italian neo-realist cinema, Biswas stresses the manifold ways Indian and
other national industries anticipated and assimilated neo-realist strategies:
This anticipation and the afterlife that neorealism enjoyed in various national
cinemas through the rest of the century show that its global reach is not to
be understood solely through the model of influence (Biswas 2007: 81).
Because a casual notion of influence leaves unsettled the question of whose
intentions and practices are active, claims about artistic influence must be
reconceived or avoided altogether.
Baxandall opts for the former, encouraging historians to reclaim influ-
ence through a more dynamic metaphor than that of orbiting spheres, one
that recognizes that artists like Kaul actively re-read in terms like that of
cultural, stylistic and thematic anticipation and assimilation other auteurs
and traditions in a marketplace context. As an admirer of Italian billiard rooms
(Baxandall 2010: 76), he fashions the cultural marketplace and the agency of
artists within it as the field represented by an Italian-style pool table without
pockets. Of two artists implicated in an influence relation, with Y being the
one influenced,

[] the cue-ball, that which hits another, is not X, but Y. What happens
in the field, each time Y refers to an X, is a rearrangement. Y has moved
purposefully, impelled by the cue of intention, and X has been repositioned,
too: each ends up in a new relation to the array of all the other balls.
(Baxandall 1985: 60, original emphasis)

In this rather playful model of influence, the volitions of Kaul (Y) and not
Bresson (X) are the relevant causal consideration; hence, one should not be
misled by the order in which these film-makers appear the historical chronol-
ogy. The cue of Kauls volition moves his art, his rhetoric, or his presence in
the marketplace in Bressons direction. And since there are no pockets, this is
a game of self-positioning (by Kaul), which affects the positioning of others in
the field (Bresson) a crucial point to which we shall return.
Baxandalls alternative version of influence, so simple in its origi-
nal formulation, stands to benefit a film historiography informed by critical
transnationalism. Methodologically, it re-frames auteurs as active decoders as
viewers shaping the meaning and value of the cinemas of other auteurs and
thus grants them the ability to craft their own styles and, just as crucially, their
own histories. As such, it encourages a productive collaboration of methods
between authorship studies and the reception studies suggested by Higbee
and Lim for transnational film studies, in which scholars investigate

the capacity of local, global and diasporic audiences to decode films

as they circulate transnationally (not only in cinema theatres but also
on DVD and online), constructing a variety of meanings ranging from
adaptation and assimilation to more challenging or subversive readings
of these transnational films.
(Higbee and Lim 2010: 18)

A central aspect of Kauls identity as an auteur, as we will see below, is as a

transnational reader of Bressons cinema.
By restoring agency to the one ostensibly influenced as a reader acting
upon a prior artistic source, this elected causes model, as we might dub it,

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 Transnational auteurism and the cultural dynamics of influence

proposes new research questions about how film-makers decode and re-direct
the cinemas of their predecessors:

What factors led Y (Kaul) to elect X (Bresson)?

How did Y read X? A crucial consideration here is that whether Y provoca-
tively read against the grain or by our standards misinterpreted or wildly
reimagined X is not a concern. Imaginative reinterpretations of other
auteurs potentially possess causal weight as well.
What effects did Ys reading of X have on Ys films? In other words, how
did Kauls interpretation of Bresson factor as a cause in the making of
Kauls films?
What effects did Ys acting upon X have on Xs reputation in the art cinema
marketplace?

Although the question of who influenced or moved whom and why may seem
rather academic, the impetus to develop an elected causes model of authorial
influence within transnational film scholarship is motivated by the need to
clarify a basic dynamic operating among auteurs as well as the contributions
(or lack thereof) that influence studies can make to theories and histories of
global film history. Film-makers who operate within transnational concepts
and contexts regularly claim influences. Either these claims are useless for the
historiography of transnational film style or they are not. As we have seen,
influence will remain a crude and even problematic explanatory term (not
unlike explaining auteur cinema through largely vacuous laudatory terms
like originality or personal vision) unless we clarify whose intentions act
as the rudder that ultimately steers the practices of the second auteur in the
chronology. Reversing the relation puts the power to navigate the complex
tides, eddies and squalls of artistic invention, funding pressures, marketplace
competition and the like back in Kauls hands. The elected causes model also
emphases the importance of linking questions of influence to questions of how
auteurs interpret their peers (assimilating them, as it were) and questions
about the contexts (social, economic, cultural) in which authorial selections of
influence are performed. As we will now see, the bearings Kaul took on his
mentors (especially Bresson) suggests that transnational authorship studies
must accommodate those auteurs who conceive their agency as individuality
through reference.

Kauls Bresson: A visionary reading and its contexts

The elected causes model encourages historians to seek answers about the
whys and wherefores of influence relations, and thus to attend in a more
discriminating fashion to the agency of the film-maker under the influence.
A question that needs to be answered now relates to those conditions that
initially shaped Mani Kauls interest in the cinema of Robert Bresson. Kaul
emerged in a taste culture that favoured a certain degree of transnational
cultural exchange, and this would create a set of choices he would have to
make as his career began.
The development of Indian film societies in the late 1940s, espe-
cially those of West Bengal where Uski Roti eventually found its audience
(Nag2011:n.p.), stimulated a taste for foreign films. The Calcutta Film Society
launched by the legendary Bengali auteur Satyajit Ray and others in 1947
founded a library of film books and magazines, invited admired foreigners like

9
Colin Burnett

Jean Renoir, V.I.Pudovkin and Roberto Rossellini to speak to its members,

and, in the words of another founder, the Bengali film-maker and critic
ChidanandaDasGupta, established the idea that seeing good foreign films
was essential for spreading disaffection with the low, imitative standard of
Indian films. The important thing was to develop a genuine national cinema
(cited in Vasudev 1986:36). Kaul remembers seeing a short documentary on
Calcutta financed by the society, Portrait of a City (Das Gupta, 1961): [] I
decided immediately that the thing to do was to direct a film. And I went off
to the University library to read books on film (cited in Vasudev 1986: 37). He
ultimately learned how to think about and make movies from another legen-
dary Bengali, Ritwik Ghatak, author of Cinema and I (1987), later revised and
expanded as Rows and Rows of Fences: Ritwik Ghatak on Cinema (2000).
Ghatak consistently engaged Western thought, adapting its ideas to his own
theories of cinema. His essay, Cinema and the subjective factor, channels Carl
Jung, Joseph Campbell and Federico Fellini to explore the ultimate sources of
artistic creativity, and this conception of cinema, long held by Ghatak, appears
to have been perceived as a clarion call by Mani Kaul and other aspiring film-
makers to champion a highly personal form of film-making in India. In fact,
Ghatak famously rejected Siegfried Kracauers thesis that cinema is a technol-
ogy for objectively recording reality (Ghatak1987:63), instead innovating his
own version of the politique des auteurs, or even Alexandre Astrucs camra-
stylo, as a fundamental aspect of film as an art: The subjective in [cinema] is
born of the makers vision. He impregnates this objective piece of recording
with tensions and connotations born out of his consciousness and the uncon-
scious (Ghatak 1987: 63). A film-makers vision drives his inventive process:

In all art, on another level, arises the necessity of compression. An

artist sees before him a kaleidoscope of reality. He wants to compre-
hend it. Encompass it. His reaction, based upon his impression, tends
to compress reality into an artistic whole with limits imposed by time
and space.
(Ghatak 1987: 63)

Cinemas ability to capture the film-makers vision draws the medium closer
to the most foundational of the arts, poetry: All art, in the last analysis, is
poetry. Poetry is the archetype of all creativity. Cinema at its best turns into
poetry (Ghatak 1987: 6364).
At the same time as he defended these classic tenets of art cinema
auteurism, Ghatak claimed a complex personal relation towards his films
political or sociological aspects: Cinema is for me nothing but expression. It is
a means of expressing my anger at the sorrows and sufferings of my people
(Ghatak 1987: 77). This view of cinema, antagonistic towards certain forms
of realism, shuns the reproductive in favour of the transformative powers of
film techniques, like those of Soviet montage aesthetics. A number of Western
sources shaped his personal taste in this regard:

Well, there were films like Eisensteins Battleship Potemkin, Pudovkins

Mother, Krakatit the Czechoslovakian film, Nem Barikda by Otakar
Vvra and books like Eisensteins Film Form and The Film Sense,
Pudovkins Film Technique and Film Acting. Ivor Montagus collection of
film articles in the Penguin series, and Bla Balzss Theory of the Film,
all of which threw up a completely new world before my eyes.

10
 Transnational auteurism and the cultural dynamics of influence

Most of the films which I have mentioned were banned in India at the
time. We could only see them clandestinely. That also gave a romantic
aura to the whole experience. And then came the first Film Festival in
India [in 1952] which introduced us to the Italian neo-realists [sic]. This
was yet another completely new and fascinating world.
(Ghatak 1987: 69)

While Ghataks aesthetic and political commitments can scarcely be reduced

to these influences alone, as meaning- and value-making gestures in a
marketplace these statement reveal a critical aspect of his self-presentation to
cultured cinephiles: on some level, he fashioned himself as a visionary intel-
lectual with a cosmopolitan outlook who opened a dialogue with foundational
and cutting edge texts of the Western canon. Along these lines, in this exciting
moment of transnational distribution and cross-pollination, he was also taken
with the use of non-fiction elements in fictional contexts. In his enthusiastic
Documentary: The most exciting form of cinema, he praises Soviet film-
makers for rejecting the star system:

Nowadays, almost all the documentaries employ actors, not always

people impersonating themselves or their like.
Conversely, from Pudovkin and Eisenstein onwards, use of nonactors
as a conscious theory has played a very big part in the development of
cinema as a whole.
(Ghatak 1987: 57)

These Western influences left an impression on his students, Mani Kaul

among them, during Ghataks 19661997 tenure as vice principal and instruc-
tor at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune. Under Ghatak,
the FTII offered students a theoretically rich environment in which to learn
film-making. In a 1991 autobiographical account, A personal testament, Kaul
remembers:

Being close to [Ghatak] you automatically lived in three more worlds

those of Fellini, Buuel and above all the primordial Sergei Eisenstein.
Siegfried Kracauer with his concepts of cinema penetrating ephemeral
physical reality, as presented in his book Theory of Film became a target
of [Ghataks] scathing attack on his flimsy thesis of the redemption of
physical reality [].
(Kaul 1991b: 5253)

A few obituaries have suggested that late in this period Kaul more or less split
from Ghatak; but the role Ghatak played as his mentor is more nuanced. The
following paen to Kaul stresses the importance of his teacher, but clarifies that
it was a Bresson and not a Ghatak film that inspired his cinema. Kaul studied

under the tutelage of the illustrious Ritwik Kumar Ghatak. However

after a screening of Pickpocket (1959), directed by the high priest of
cinema, Robert Bresson, at FTII, Kaul was convinced that out of all the
films he had witnessed, only Bressons spoke the truth and that he
must study the French masters approach to film form while develop-
ing his own. Kaul would compare his study of Bresson to his study of

11
Colin Burnett

dhrupad, the austere form of northern Indian music, with the legen-
dary Ustad Zia Mohluddin Dagar. He would state that it was precisely
through his imitation of both masters that he was attempting to discover
his own approach in all its uniqueness. From Bresson, Kaul would
borrow the logic of filming to capture the unplanned or chaotic through
the accident. The film-maker would arrive at the accident through the
mechanism of the retake, where redoing the same action can create
unplanned responses from the actor or equipment.
(Trivedi 2011: n.p.)

While Kaul never disputed his early interest in Bresson, he did attempt to
clarify the record. Ghataks teaching of Theory of Film (S. Kracauer, 1960) in
the FTII curriculum created a choice situation for Kaul. The books explora-
tion of experimental cinema (Kracauer 1960: 17592) set him upon a search,
whereupon he discovered another Bresson classic apparently before he saw
Pickpocket (Bresson, 1959):

Whereas I wasnt swept off by the book, it certainly made my mind

search for non-theatrical cinema. Paradoxical it is that when I saw
Mouchette [Bresson, 1967] in that frame of mind, it unfurled a sleeping
snail within my heart. I at once made a secret alliance with its director,
Robert Bresson.
(Kaul 1991b: 53)

And, as he publicly reports, these experiences directly shaped the film-maker

he became:

Hung between Ghatak and Bresson, my diploma film pursuing a blend

of fiction and document, was a disaster; though, it most definitely set
my mind upon a path. Then onwards, even if I made mistakes, nothing
detracted my attention from the contemplation of a form I realized in
Uski Roti [].
(Kaul 1991b: 53)

Ghataks instruction fostered a cinephilic outlook among his students, which

subsequently encouraged them to view their film-making as a conversation
with the major trends in global film history. Like Kaul, Kumar Shahani idol-
ized Bresson, perhaps even more so than Kaul (at least initially). While Kaul
only briefly met Bresson in Paris in 1972, Shahani went there in 1968 on
a French government scholarship to train at the Institut des hautes tudes
cinmatographiques (IDHEC), Frances national film school, and subse-
quently interned on the production of Une femme douce/A Gentle Creature
(Bresson, 1969) (Garga 1996: 243). The experience marked the sparse
storytelling of his debut feature, Maya Darpan (Shahani, 1972). Among
their FTII cohort, the Malayaki film-maker John Abraham, who worked
as an assistant on Uski Roti, launched the Eisenstein-inspired Odessa
Collective in 1984. This peoples cinema initiative financed one of its first
productions with screenings of The Kid (Chaplin, 1921) (The Hindu 2009:
n.p.). Adoor Gopalakrishnan, also from Malayalam, chose a different
route: he would adopt from Ray and Italian cinema a passion for neo-
realist stylistics and thematics in such films as Elippathayam/The Rat Trap
(Gopalakrishnan, 1981).

12
 Transnational auteurism and the cultural dynamics of influence

During the traumas of the Emergency (19751977), the NFDC retracted its
financial support for art cinema, a development that encouraged Kaul to take
a position as instructor at the FTII in 1975 and to later form the politically radi-
cal YUKT Film Cooperative (Union of Kinematograph Technicians) with other
film-makers, like Shahani, and fifteen of his own students (Krishen 1991: 35;
Hariharan 2011: n.p.). Like Godard in his Dziga-Vertov Group period, the
members of the Cooperative became motivated by the notion of a cinema of
protest and revolt, temporarily renouncing what they now viewed as the ideo-
logically suspect, bourgeois idea of the Romantic auteur in favor of collabora-
tion and collective authorship. One of the films they made, Ghashiram Kotwal
(Hariharan, Kaul, Mirza and Swaroop, 1976), comments on Prime Minister
Indira Gandhis rule by decree through an adaptation of Vijay Tendulkars
famous Marathi play (1972) of the same name, which satirizes the abuse of
political power for personal gain in eighteenth century India.
But prior to this, during the burgeoning parallel cinema marketplace of
19681975, Kaul and his FTII cohort launched a narrative avant-garde that,
in some measure, experimented with storytelling principles and solutions
innovated in the West. And each of these film-makers could be studied
for how they read their sources, Ghatak among them. Kaul expressed an
interest in minimal art cinema, and Bresson in particular, as a conceptual
and artistic challenge to take up in developing alternatives to mainstream
Western storytelling. Some critics, as we have seen, believe that Kaul drew
from Bresson a method for soliciting spontaneous responses from actors.
One could add that, perhaps sharing Ghataks enthusiasm for the use of
non-actors in Soviet cinema, Kaul saw the virtue of Bressons famous rejec-
tion of professionally trained performers and thus cast non-professionals
for Uski Roti and Duvidha as well. The version of Bresson that he elected,
however, factored much more systematically in his film style, storytelling
and presence in the marketplace.
The potential that Kaul saw in Bresson takes at least three forms (and
here we will note examples from Kauls entire career): rhetorical, conceptual
and stylistic. Particularly after the 1980s when he regularly looked to the West
(America, the Netherlands) for institutional support (university appointments
and funding), Kaul explicitly presented himself as a student of Bresson, even
at one point accepting the challenge of writing in the rhetorical form adopted
to great effect in the book of aphorisms, Notes sur le cinmatographe/Notes
on the Cinematographer (Bresson, 1975). In the 1991 article The director
reflects , Kaul expresses his film-making philosophy in short Bressonian
maxims, two of which refer to the French auteur directly. In their respective
writings, Bresson and Kaul employ the aphorism a fragmentary and even
tentative form that eschews the totalizing and the systematic to explore
the practical and theoretical implications of film lighting, editing, acting and
narrative. Bresson writes the following about his models, about silence on
the soundtrack and the theatrical limitations of conventional storytelling
(the cinema):

Your models, pitched into the action of your film, will get used to
gestures they have repeated twenty times. The words they have learned
with their lips will find, without their minds taking part in this, the inflec-
tions and the lilt proper to their true natures. A way of recovering the
automatism of real life [].
(Bresson [1975] 1997: 69, original emphasis)

13
Colin Burnett

THE SOUNDTRACK INVENTED SILENCE.

(Bresson [1975] 1997: 48, original emphasis)

CINEMA seeks immediate and definitive expression through mimicry,

gestures, intonations of voice. This system inevitably excludes expres-
sion through contacts and exchanges of images and sound and the
transformation that result from them.
(Bresson [1975] 1997: 46; original emphasis)

Kaul responds to these questions with three aphorisms of his own, only now
he extends Bressons comment on the cinemas reliance on definitive, coher-
ent expression to all industrial practice:

Error as effort of the invisible.

Among those pursuing earlier schools, the goal is to achieve the error or
the involuntary in spatial terms. By design or accident, Bresson reaches
its limit through endless retakes. That is until the moment manifests
itself despite all design (including the design the actor may harbour).
(Kaul 1991a: 48, original emphasis)

Silence: intuitive and sudden as the unexpected intervention of a drum

in a Noh play.
(Kaul 1991a: 49)

Incompleteness, a modern idiom against the arts today: striving against

the industrial and electronic habit of a given whole.
(Kaul 1991a: 48, original emphasis)

Each of these aphorisms could be analysed for how it relates to others around
it and to Kauls film-making. Perhaps the most salient way that Kaul acts
upon Bresson in these and other aphorisms is in moving his mentors inter-
ests in the direction of contemporary philosophy. He discovers in Bressonian
principles a potential that the French auteur did not recognize or explore. In
The director reflects questions of acting, editing and directing are exam-
ined through a Deleuzian lexicon of attention, time and movement. Indeed,
Kaul shows his many commitments to film pedagogy, Bressonian aphorisms
and Deleuzian image-philosophy in the following bite-size denunciation of
film school training that indoctrinates students in the conventions of main-
stream storytelling:

The traditional training of widely changing angles between shots is not

meant to create newer movement-images. It is only meant to establish
the geography of the location, a remnant of realism.
(Kaul 1991a: 49)

Kaul presents himself in The director reflects as an auteur discover-

ing Deleuzian echoes in the aphoristic Notes sur le cinmatographe. This fact
underscores the two remaining ways he appropriated Bresson: conceptu-
ally and stylistically. Bressons minimal or restrained style, as Kaul conceived
it, offered a means to theorize the distinctions between Western and non-
Western approaches to storytelling. Especially late in his career, Kaul made an

14
 Transnational auteurism and the cultural dynamics of influence

effort, again through Deleuzian concepts, to reposition his mentors cinema as

a unique alternative to storytelling paradigms shaped by the ideology of the
European Renaissance. In his early films, Kaul read Bresson as a model for
a certain kind of artistic brief a term also borrowed from Baxandall, which
simply refers to the specific terms of the problems and challenges an artist
addresses in creating a work (1985: 35). In Bresson, Kaul saw a series of chal-
lenges related to scene construction through what one might call combined
fragments. Notes sur le cinmatographe returns repeatedly to the theme of
fragmentary imagery:

ON FRAGMENTATION.
This is indispensable if one does not want to fall into REPRESENTATION.
See beings and things in their separate parts. Render them independent
in order to give them a new dependence.
(Bresson [1975] 1997: 93, original emphasis )

Published six years after the release of Uski Roti, this specific statement could
not have been known to Kaul; but he certainly observed that in Bressons
cinema plot events and performances are constructed from a set of isolated
gestures and glances in combination, with each image presenting a frag-
mented view of a larger whole, and these aspects of his film-making would
later help Kaul decode the significance of the concept of representation in
Bressons 1975 text one that remains ambiguous in the French auteurs writ-
ing and interviews.
While shooting and editing Uski Roti Kaul did not simply mimic Bressons
style; he amplified its potential. Pickpocket (Figures 15) shows its protagonist,
Michel (Martin Lasalle), tilting his head down and then, truncated by a series
of high-angle close shots, marching into a Parisian intersection towards
screen right. In the same shot, we tilt up and his right hand clasps the left
wrist of a nameless victim (he will pull the man off-screen left). We cut to a
car screeching to a halt at the intersection, and in the last shot, Michel, still
clasping the wrist, steals the mans watch. The sequence withholds quite a
bit of story information what Michels motives are as the scene unfolds,
whether the leap onto the sidewalk actually saves the man, and because our
view is restricted to the figures lower torsos and arms, whether the man is
grateful, irked or perplexed by Michels intervention, and so on. Pickpocket
uses this combined fragments approach to show a thiefs intuitive skills in
close quarters.
The opening of Uski Roti (Figures 612) follows similar principles of
fragmentation and combination to ultimately build a scene where an unap-
preciated young wife, to whom we are introduced through this emblematic
exchange, provides her ungrateful sister with a gift of nourishment. Much
like the Pickpocket encounter, the scene transpires with unclear motivations.
The film begins with a tree in the (presumably) Punjabi countryside being
rustled from a stone thrown from off-screen, and we cut to a figure who
will prove to be the films protagonist, Balo (Garima), entering an extreme
long shot from the top right, pausing and throwing another stone into the
trees (she is framed by an aperture created by two trees on the far right
of the frame). The leaves are rustled again, followed by a medium shot of
Balos truncated right arm reaching in from off-screen left to catch a guava
tumbling from the tree. The fruit falls between her fingers, whereupon

15
Colin Burnett

Figures 15: Pickpocket, courtesy of Criterion.

we cut to a close shot of her right hand entering the frame to pick it up.
Why Balo is performing this act explained in a shot that shows her offering
the fruit to her sister, Jinda (Vyas Rihca), who stands on frame left. But a
close-up shows Jinda taking a bite, spitting out the guava in disgust as she
pivots and marches off-screen left. The scene proves to be emblematic in a
story where a family ignores or disparages this young wifes generosity and
selflessness.

16
 Transnational auteurism and the cultural dynamics of influence

Figures 612: Uski Roti/A Days Bread, courtesy of National Film Development Corporation.

17
Colin Burnett

Bresson and Kaul shared a commitment to fragmented compositions like

displaced two-shots showing lower torsos and shots of isolated hand gestures.
But Kaul revised the problem of Bressonian scene construction by adding at
least one further challenge, one additional constraint that is rather unchar-
acteristic of Bresson. As was suggested earlier, beginning with Journal dun
cur de campagne/Diary of a Country Priest (Bresson, 1950), Bresson committed
almost exclusively to the 50mm lens. The scene from Pickpocket shows its
capacity to limit depth, avoid unwanted visual distortions and concentrate
the viewers attention on centred action in tight framings. Kaul, for his part,
conceived his film as a thematic play of two lenses that generate opposing
visual effects the extreme long shot uses a wide-angle lens that promotes
depth, while all the other shots are captured in flattened telephoto composi-
tions. He explains:

In taking up certain limited aspects of cinema and bringing them in rela-

tion to the theme, all other factors (like acting, dcor, mise-en-scne)
were neutralized to realize the possibilities of the limited experiment. []
To demonstrate: confining the film to two lenses (28mm and 135mm)
and making them represent the actual and mental life of the waiting
wife in the beginning of the film I mean, the wide angle provided the
universal focus and the extra actuality of the cinematographic image, and
the long [focal length] a critical range of sharpness or a certain dream
quality. Having faithfully established this as the norm, the lenses were
gradually freed of the strict representation they were crossing each
other in the middle of the film where the distinctions were blurred
until in the end the representation was reversed, with the result that the
actual return of the husband almost appears as a hallucination [].
(cited in Rajadhyaksha 2009: 333, n. 13; original emphasis)

This innovative restriction to two contrasting lenses to express the outer

(wide-angle) and inner, intimate or private (telephoto) realities of the
characters carries many associations in this context. Not only is it an effort
at Bressonian restraint (with a major twist), but it assimilates Ghatak as well
in the form of the wide-angle, deep focus compositions for which, as we
noted earlier, his films were renowned. Moreover, Kauls striking synthesis
of Bresson and Ghatak a sparse system of oscillating visual extremes also
functions as a nod to the films literary source. The modernist short story on
which the film is based, written in the Nai Kahani (New Story) tradition by the
Hindi writer Mohan Rakesh (who also wrote the films screenplay), depended
on the creative interplay of objective and subjective storytelling (Rakesh and
Rashid 1973).
Although he dismissed Uski Roti as a failed freshman effort, like his later
films it establishes Kauls auteurism as one of individuality through transna-
tional reference. Notwithstanding Kauls comments on the film, what is truly
innovative about his debut feature from the perspective of transnationalism is
that it initiates his experimentation with the potential of combined fragments
to adapt local stories in cinematic terms that eschew European Renaissance
notions of illusionism, convergence and closure. His third film, Duvidha, is
based on a Rajasthani folk story modernized by the feminist author Vijaydan
Detha (2010). More than this, the films assimilation of Bressonian principles
renders the source story as a radical (and quite challenging for the viewer)
experiment with the temporality of female subjectivity. David Bordwell has

18
 Transnational auteurism and the cultural dynamics of influence

shown that Pickpockets narration turns on a repetition structure, consist-

ently returning to almost identical shots of spaces like Michels apartment for
the purposes of a parametric formal engagement of the viewers attention
(Bordwell 1985: 289310). One of the films pleasures rests in the percep-
tion of order, of stylistic patterning for its own sake. Duvidha assimilates this
strategy by thematizing it. Throughout the film, Kaul rhythmically repeats an
overt pan-and-tilt figure, in which the camera will pan left or right for a few
seconds of screen time, pause and then, still in the same shot, tilt straight up
or down for a similar duration. The films fragmented storytelling also restricts
the viewers understanding of deadlines and time lapses; although the young
husband reveals that business in a distant land requires him to leave his wife
for five years, once he has departed our sense of duration, of when he left and
how many years remain until his return, collapses. The recurring pan-and-tilt
device executed with only the slightest of variations, sometimes momen-
tarily motivated by characters who have no apparent goal or aim as they
perform ritualized actions like climbing and descending staircases creates
the impression that time has slowed, that moments and actions repeat in a
cyclical manner, and that characters like the wife, who is now suffering her
desires for her husbands dopplegnger, live in a dreamy, but emotionally
ambivalent perpetual present.
Perhaps Kauls re-reading of Bressonian rhythmic play with cues is best
expressed in aphoristic form. Bresson viewed the rhythmic repetition of stylis-
tic elements as an aspect of a films sensual and musical experience:

Rhythmic value of noise.

Noise of a door opening and shutting, noise of footsteps, etc., for the
sake of rhythm.
(Bresson [1975] 1997: 52, original emphasis)

Kaul perceived maxims like this as an opportunity to investigate the quasi-

Deleuzian implications of cinematic rhythm. The repetition of cues like the
pan-and-tilt figure imbued cinema with a temporal dimension, one devoted
not to the perception of the past (memory) but, perhaps paradoxically, to
attention to the rhythms of an enduring present:

Time as attention.
Attention as rhythm.
The invisible shape of the film.
Keeping attention as against building memory.
(Kaul 1991a: 48)

Questions of time and space increasingly shaped his theorizing about

cinema. At the 2007 Cinefan Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema held in
Osian, Rajasthan, Kauls home province, he positioned Bresson historically
as a crucial example of a fragmentary non-representational art in the global
history of film and culture (Kaul [2007] 2011: n.p.). By presenting Bressons
cinema as a model alternative to Renaissance notions of representation that
involve images conceived as unified wholes, spatially and symbolically, Kaul
was elaborating theories he had been developing since 1991, when he contrib-
uted a rather difficult chapter, Seen from nowhere, to a volume on concepts

19
Colin Burnett

of space. While he makes no reference to Bresson or indeed to cinema in the

chapter, he lays out in full his ideas about Renaissance perspective, as well as
the history of more fragmentary Indian alternatives, like miniature painting
or even dhrupad, the classical Indian music in which Kaul himself specialized.
The Renaissance representational system of Giotto, Ucello and Leonardo aims
for mathematically precise and complete perspectives on objects depicted,
launching a historical process that that led to the belief in a subjectless
universe:

The vivid presence of an intentionality toward space was soon camou-

flaged by the seemingly natural enjoyment of the isolated object: the
apparent distances and sizes into which space broke down concealed
the fact that an optical world had been deduced from a conceptual one.
(Kaul 1991c: 415)

Cubist paintings and Mughul miniatures interrogate or reject the notion of a

single, invisible and ahistorical perspective, offering a more intricate encoun-
ter between the viewer and the object(s) represented:

Totally different from the cubists whose multiple perspectives brought

them on the verge of destroying the object itself, the perspectiveless
view of space in the Moghul [sic] miniatures recovered a unity amidst
the apparent planar distortions. For long we were made to believe that
the imbalanced optical proportions between corresponding dimensions
in the miniatures were defects in the presentation of an objective reality
instead of being, as we know today methods of generating an experi-
ence of individual spaces.
(Kaul 1991c: 416)

Representations showing spaces and objects seen from a series of historically

situated somewheres specific experiences of individual spaces present
a vital alternative to those seen from nowhere, as mathematical perspective
implies, because Kaul wants to show that a single work can reveal to the viewer
something like a synoptic view of a space even as the viewer is challenged to
synthesize the concatenation of separate perspectives that comprise that view.
Mughul paintings require a more active and conscious viewership. In the
article that inspired his CineFan Festival speech, titled Beneath the surface:
Cinematography and time, Kaul associates this more sophisticated spectator-
ship with the temporality and fragmentation on offer in Bresson. Crediting
the two volumes of Cinema (Deleuze 1983, 1985) for discovering Bresson and
Ozu as the two modern film-makers who explored the unknown realm of
the time-image (Kaul 2008: 12), Kaul highlights the musical dimension of
Bresson, whose fragmentation, unlike that of Mughul miniatures, engages the
spectator in a synthesizing activity in time via theellipsis:

Opposed to the technique of mise-en-scene [sic] where scene, scenery,

set, setting and actors movement relate to a whole intentional environ-
ment (as in Eisenstein), Bressons single shot presents itself as a fragment
(often only hands, feet, doors, faces, bodies, etc.) of an intangible whole
not displaying an particular intention. [] It is the ellipsis between
fragments, the difference between fragments, which finally conveys a
sense of tangible intentions. That difference becomes a specific relation

20
 Transnational auteurism and the cultural dynamics of influence

between the two fragments when bridged in the head of the spectator.
Not on the screen but in the head of a spectator making him or her
a subjectively active participant. Cinema itself then appears a hub of
multiple intentions in conflict with each other like music.
(Kaul 2008: 10)

Because Bresson evolved the technique of fragmentation in order to discard

the traditional method of representation (Kaul 2008: 10), his cinema shows
the promise of the alternative aesthetic tradition Kaul wished to promote.
Although Kaul does not address him directly in these late writings,
Ghatak is never entirely absent. In significant ways, Kauls late theoreti-
cal project might be understood as an effort to rethink Ghataks critique of
Kracauers theory that cinema is a representational technology that redeems
reality as it is, only now he does so in neo-Bressonian terms that Ghatak
himself apparently did not entertain. Cinema, as a means to explore the intel-
lectually, emotionally and visually richer experiences long created by dhrupad
and Mughul miniatures, should not employ individual shots as if they are able
to restore spaces as perceptual wholes, for this approach merely provides an
illusory and ideologically suspect closure. Rather, it must build on Bressons
initial insight that cinematic space, when fragmented, can elicit in spectators
a difficult experience in time whereby they creatively infer a larger space from
a sequence of relatively neutralized views that retain their status as limited
perspectives on the world.

Conclusions
The versions of Bresson (and Ghatak) that Kaul created played a significant
role in the history of his film practice, as well as in his engagement with the
marketplace and theorizing about cinemas potential as an art that chal-
lenges the premises of illusionist perspective. What this makes clear is that the
study of transnational flows and exchanges requires a historiographic para-
digm that accounts for the role influence in fact plays in the causal history of
auteurs whose stylistic, thematic and storytelling interests, while difficult to
categorize, ultimately explore the fertile ground between local traditions and
international sources. This involves conceiving of influence as an auteurs elec-
tion of his or her own causes an inventive process of assimilating, re-reading
or acting upon sources and acknowledging that influence of this kind is
nurtured within communities of film-makers and taste cultures that strate-
gically promote what we might call an impure form of auteurism, that of
individuality through reference, in order to rejuvenate national and regional
film industries and cultures. The tensions one observes in obituaries on Kaul
reveal both the complex conditions (cultural, institutional) that a transna-
tional auteur often navigates and the multifaceted authorial identities he or
she often cultivates.
Indeed, the story may prove to be more complicated still. As social histo-
rians of transnational film style uncover other forms of auteurism, we might
discover that Kauls visionary realignment of Bresson rhetorically, stylisti-
cally, theoretically reassessing the potentialities in his minimal storytelling
paradigm is perhaps just one strategy for electing ones causes. Transnational
auteurism might here adapt the range of reading strategies Higbee and Lim
sketch for audiences; while some auteurs adapt and assimilate their pred-
ecessors, others perhaps cultivate a negative influence relation, offering

21
Colin Burnett

challenging or subversive readings of their peers, also for strategic purposes

(Higbee and Lim 2010: 18).

Acknowledgements
I owe many thanks to Tom Gunning, Meraj Dhir and Sreya Mitra for their
generosity, counsel and encouragement at various stages of this research.
Many of these findings also benefited from the industrious students of Global
Art Cinema, Washington University in St. Louis, Spring 2012.

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Suggested citation
Burnett, C. (2013), Transnational auteurism and the cultural dynamics of influence:
Mani Kauls Non-Representational cinema, Transnational Cinemas 4: 1,
pp. 324, doi: 10.1386/trac.4.1.3_1

23
Colin Burnett

Contributor details
Colin Burnett is Assistant Professor in the programme in Film and Media
Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He has articles on the concept
of film style inNew Review of Film and Television Studies and Arnheim for Film
and Media Studies, on Robert Bressons professional activities in the 1930s in
Robert Bresson Revised, and has a forthcoming piece on authorial intentionality
in The Blackwell Companion to Media Authorship. He is currently working on a
book manuscript on Robert Bresson and postwar cinephilia.
Contact: Washington University in St. Louis, One Brookings Drive, 415 Seigle
Hall, Campus Box 1174, St. Louis, MO 63130, USA.
E-mail: cburnett@wustl.edu

Colin Burnett has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was
submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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