Mani Kaul’s films didn’t appeal to masses: Om Puri

The first time I saw a Mani Kaul film was around 1973 when I was in drama school. The film was Uski Roti. Immediately after, I saw Ashad Ka Ek Din and then, many of his documentary films.
While the visual text of his films appealed to me, I didn’t quite enjoy the narrative which was very dull. He was like an abstract painter — some of the elite may have been impressed with his work, but his films held no appeal for the common man. They were — how do I say this — too bookish.

Even though there were other filmmakers during that time whose films held limited appeal for masses, but focused on different styles of storytelling, like Shyam Benegal, Kaul couldn’t be counted among them. Benegal’s films, for example, adopted a much simpler language, and didn’t get into film jargon. In my opinion, Kaul would have been a much greater teacher of film than a filmmaker — film theory was more his thing.

I interacted with Kaul closely during the making of Ghashiram Kotwal, his adaptation of Vijay Tendulkar’s famous play. I had enacted Nana Phadnavis’s role in the Hindi stage version, but was playing Ghashiram’s character in Kaul’s film.

Even as an actor working with him, I found many things about the man hard to grasp. When he spoke, he came across as very intelligent, but someone very difficult to have a conversation with. I remember shooting a scene involving a pole with the Union Jack. Kaul wanted to shoot the scene in a certain way where the camera tilts up on the Union Jack. It made no sense to me, but he would have cared less with his ‘I-don’t-give-a-damn’ attitude. The film never saw a commercial release.

Interestingly, for someone whose films were hard to grasp, his documentaries were very communicative, and simple to understand. I remember watching one about the return of immigrants — it was emotive, communicated the story well, and struck a chord with me. Mani Kaul was, in essence, a documentary filmmaker. 

— As told to Aniruddha Guha

Filmmaker Mani Kaul, who was suffering from cancer, died after a
prolonged illness on Wednesday in his Gurgaon home. He was 66.