Mani Kaul’s Extraordinary Philosophy of Life
Those who view Indian cinema as a clash of two diametrically opposed streams—on the one hand, the frivolous gimmickry of Bollywood, and on the other, the classical narrative gravitas of Satyajit Ray in his Hollywood-inspired idiom—forget that there was also a third, vitally important current. That was India’s avant-garde, the New Cinema. The evolution of the avant-garde in cinema was itself part of a global pattern, a celebrated aesthetic mode that defined experimental twentieth-century filmmaking. It was, in essence, an assault upon tradition—an artistic rebellion that broke apart the ancient conventions of cinema. The term “avant-garde” was first employed in the 1920 s by a small band of theorists. French visionaries such as Louis Delluc, Germaine Dulac, and Jean Epstein attempted to fashion an avant-garde cinema. This was a cinema that was not merely about stories but about the form of stories—a polyphonic structure that invoked theoretical methods to interrogate realis...