Aashad Ka Ek Din is an adaptation of the play that is based on Kalidasa’s life in three acts. Kalidasa is renowned as one of the greatest writers, poets and dramatists in the history of Sanskrit language.

Ashad.Ka.Ek.Din.AKA.One.Day.Before.the.Rainy.Season.1971.576p.MUBI.WEB-DL.AAC.2.0.x264-SHR.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 54 min
Size: 	2.00 GiB
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Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x576 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 372 kb/s
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#1:  	Hindi 2.0ch AAC LC @ 128 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/AF46155CC1D98E9/One.Day.Before.the.Rainy.Season.1971.576p.WEB-DL.MUBI.AAC.2.0.x264-SHR.mkv

Language(s):Hindi
Subtitles:English

The post Mani Kaul – Ashad Ka Ek Din AKA One Day Before the Rainy Season (1971) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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Film is Based on Duvidha by Vijayadan Detha, it’s about merchant’s son, whose relationship with his young bride, Lachhi is thwarted by his work and a ghost who falls in love with her, resulting in the ghost soon impersonating the husband.

Mani Kaul - (1973) In Two Minds.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 21mn
Size: 	1.34 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	768x576 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 119 Kbps
BPP: 	0.200
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#1:  	Hindi 2.0ch AC-3 @ 224 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/99A0E123F68C4AC/Mani_Kaul_-_(1973)_In_Two_Minds.mkv

Language(s):Hindi
Subtitles:English here

The post Mani Kaul – Duvidha AKA In Two Minds (1973) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Feature film version of Mani Kaul’s film on Dostoevski’s masterpiece that was shown at NYFF.

Synopsis:
Mani Kaul’s adaptation of Dostoevski’s Idiot is his most profoundly affecting film and a “tour de force” (Rajadhyaksha) that co-ordinates actors, settings and situations to a multiplicity. It his most realized attempt at making formalist film by moving the camera,without looking through the viewfinder to make Gilles Deleuze’s reading of cinema as an any-instant-whatever or equidistant instant to an any-space-whatever or any equispatial instant. This equispatial instant is created by destroying the dialectic between required and not-required, sacral and profane. Mani Kaul, analyzing his own films would state that, whereas his earlier works engaged a rarefaction of information, Idiot was the first to encounter a saturation of events.

The film has important actors in the lead role. Theatre director Ayub Khan-Din plays Prince Myshkin, Mita Vashisth plays Nastasya Mukhopadhyay (Nastasya Fillipova in the original), and Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan shows of his trademark acting style in this early role as Pawan Raghujan (Rozoghin).

4.07GB | 3h 10m | 1280×960 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/4DB77A0AC90C330/IDIOT_01.mkv https://nitro.download/view/DF28E588753FC48/IDIOT_01.SRT https://nitro.download/view/6806C07BA62E590/IDIOT_02.mkv https://nitro.download/view/AF6CA2350AB0433/IDIOT_02.srt

Language(s):Hindi
Subtitles:English

The post Mani Kaul – Idiot AKA Ahmaq (Feature Film Version) (1991) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

STUDENT DOCUMENTARY – IT CONCERNS TWO YOUNG COUPLES ON A VISIT TO THE AJANTA CAVES. THE FILM OBSERVES THEIR INTERACTION THEREBY WEAVING SUBTLE CHARACTER STUDIES ON A PERSONAL KEY.

YATRIK.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	19mn 37s
Size: 	150 MiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	640x480 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	
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Audio
#1:  	2.0ch AAC LC (Stereo)

https://nitro.download/view/1151F4F024966C3/YATRIK.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/6A1D746E5B70148/Yatrik.srt

Language:Hindi
Subtitles:English

The post Mani Kaul – Yatrik AKA Passenger (1966) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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Kaul’s film addresses the writings of Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh (1917-79), one of the main representatives of the Nai Kavita (New Poetry) movement in Hindi. Muktibodh also wrote several short stories, one of which provides the film with its title, and critical essays. The film integrates episodes from Muktibodh’s writings with material from other source, including a reinvented neo-realism derived from Muktibodh’s literary settings. The narrative is constructed around 3 characters. Ramesh (Gopi) iis one who speaks and enacts Muktibodh’s writings, functioning as the first-person voice of the text; his two friends, , Madhav (Jha) and Keshav (Raina), are Ramesh’s antagonists and interlocuters esp. in the debates about modernity. Kaul gradually minimizes the fictional settings until, in the remarkably shot sequences of the factory, the audience is directly confronted with the written text itself. Kaul had begun his studies of Dhrupad music, the classical North Indian music known mainly for its extreme austerity, and derived a number of cinematic styles from this musical idiom which have continuously influenced his films since, e.g. the continuously mobile camera, the use of changing light patterns and the importance of improvisation.

1.37GB | 1h 46mn | 720×544 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/E16424D98149B49/Satah_Se_Uthata_Aadmi_1.avi https://nitro.download/view/CBD38BCEE750383/Satah_Se_Uthata_Aadmi_1.srt https://nitro.download/view/B638426D5549118/Satah_Se_Uthata_Aadmi_2.avi https://nitro.download/view/5CE9DFD32F6DBF7/Satah_Se_Uthata_Aadmi_2.srt

Language:Hindi
Subtitles:English

The post Mani Kaul – Satah Se Uthata Aadmi aka Arising From The Surface (1980) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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In a poetic hour and a half, director Mani Kaul looks at the ancient art of making pottery from a wide variety of perspectives. Pots are shown in many settings, including a museum where a young child is mesmerized by the ceramics that ancient ancestors created from clay. The tradition continues and so does its magic, as potters are shown deftly working a lump of wet clay and fashioning it moment by moment into a slowly emerging shape. Kaul blends in myth and fables as well as the beauty of the art itself to create an inspiring look at a humble, everyday object.

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Episodic film about the ancient Indian tradition of terracotta sculpture and pottery and the several legends associated with this tradition. The artifacts involved include some of the oldest items of Indian civilization (from the Indus Valley, 2500BC) and have been, together with the legends associated with terracotta techniques, central to historical research into e.g. the origins of patriarchy, the shift from pastoral to agrarian systems, etc.

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“Mani Kaul was commissioned by the Festival of India 1985 to make a film about the art of clay pottery in India. His response was to wander in a tourist bus (with his film crew of twenty persons) up and down North India looking at the lives and longings of ancient communities of potters. Museum curators complained that Mani Kaul had not stopped in to film their exquisite pieces of one sort or another but Mani Kaul was not interested in a catalogue of fine things. He wanted rather to discover the myths and states of mind out of which pots were made and to render these states of mind through his own shaping of the medium of cinema. ‘I wanted,’ Mani Kaul says, ‘to know the anguish of the potter through my own anguish as a filmmaker.'” Satti Khanna

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Like his earlier film, Satah Se Uthatha Aadmi [L’uomo che si erge dalla superficie], on the Hindi writer Muktibodh, Mati Manas is multilinear and defies conventional distinction between a documentary and fiction film, thus creating, what Mani calls, “a non-fictional reality”. The film traces our entire cultural superstructure, myths, rituals etc. in the act of pottery making, one of man’s earliest occupations. Mani’s film starts with a museum exhibiting terracotta of the past and moves out to the vast central Indian plains which saw the rise of one of the most ancient civilisations of the world, and the extreme south with its ritualistic pottery, linking the pot – a symbol of creation – with the rhythm of life. ~ B.D. Garga

1.42GB | 1:30:55 | 640×480 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/0AD8E8A13BD609A/Mati_Manas_AKA_The_Mind_of_Clay_(1985).avi

Language(s):Hindi
Subtitles:English hardsubbed

The post Mani Kaul – Mati Manas AKA The Mind of Clay (1985) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Summary from The Hindu:
On paper, Siddheshwari, like so many films commissioned by the Films Division, is a cine-profile, of the Hindustani singer Siddheshwari Devi. However, Kaul turns the genre inside out, and amalgamates literary, theatrical, musical and cinematic forms together to construct an experience of music, instead of simply presenting biographical details or passively documenting the singer’s artistry. The sprawling film blends multiple timelines, realities and geographies to sketch a unique portrait of the artist.

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This hauntingly beautiful visual poem is ostensibly about Siddheshwari Devi (1908-77), the sublime vocalist of the vaunted Banaras gharana. But from the onset, it is obvious Kaul dispenses with any notion of the conventional bio-pic. Among this singular auteur’s works, this is a unique beauty.

Kaul is not interested in presenting the elusive life of a person, rather he is concerned with illuminating the experience of Siddheshwari’s music itself: particularly its transmission from guru to shishya, from filmmaker to viewer, and back again. The ecstasies and tragedies of a life within the sensuousness of the thumri milieu, where the theme of absence (of the object/beloved) dominates.

Kaul blurs any boundaries between documentary and fiction in recognizing and exploring the possibilities of form (cf. Dhrupad (1982)). Literature, painting, architecture, music, theater and poetry are layered within this filmic experience. For Kaul, a film is not a visual document, rather it’s a temporal process. His is a cinema of fragments beyond conventional logic, meaning or chronology which unfolds like an open-ended tapestry, not necessarily needing solutions/endings.

As temporal alienation is key in Kaul’s self-reflexive process, the film is bound to confound. The juxtapositions of conflicts can be overwhelming in their fragmentary non-resolution. The soundtrack consists of overflowing waves of sounds: birds, bells, everyday found sounds and multiplicities of voices, from whispered to crying to spoken to sung. The tension between innocence/experience. The slow moving camera vs. the relentless fragments, where one shot takes meaning in the context of the other. Each lovingly-crafted sequence so beautiful but then the constant, necessary movement to the next. The contrast and diffusion of colors and monochromes. The recognition of the ethereality of the experience capped off by the coup de grâce final sequence, with Mita Vashisht alone, in her alienation (from herself? from her role?) watching footage of the titular “subject”, in the archives.

These waves after waves of fragments do unveil some recurring motifs: the empty, spinning, resounding loṭā … the cat meows (a nod to Chris Marker?) … the Bressonian dwelling on hands/feet … the recursive mirror images … the drifting boat … the pervading hues of blue … most poignantly, the sensoriality of the thumri/tawaif context of Banaras/Kashi, eternal river city of death/light.

Quote:
The kernel of the film is revealed within the sequences encapsulating the opening credits. The sarangi’s (with cat meowing) plaint to the hennaed, bejewelled hand of the tawaif. Then the counting fingers of the luminously tranced shishya. Then to another hand fragment with the color blue making 1st appearance (in a sari) in yet another transformation of Siddhi, which leads into further credits. At 3:20, a table of contents(!) of the “chapters”. Then at 3:30, Siddhi’s key voiceover: “Kaumudī, ham ye nahīṃ jānte ke kaun gā rahā hai” (“Kaumudī, I do not know who is singing”), which then reappears at 4:20! And then prime Siddheshwari, soaring in baithak at 4:35…

True instant light!

Further notable sublime moments abound: the drifting lovers on the blue boat 10:07; the majestic music/film-improvisation sequences 4:35, 15:15, 36:11 & 42:33; the supine Guru ji playing sarangi 66:00.

1.16GB | 1h 32mn | 762×572 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/D41CC48E999C815/Mani_Kaul_-_Siddeshwari_(1989).mkv

Language(s):Hindi
Subtitles:English

The post Mani Kaul – Siddeshwari (1990) first appeared on Cinema of the World.