Transnational auteurism and the cultural dynamics of influence: Mani kaul’s ‘nnon-rrepresentational’ cinema

This article makes two contributions to the study of transnational cinemas. First, it seeks to illuminate a common practice amongst those contemporary auteurs whose development depends on culturally eclectic sources; namely, the practice of positioning one’s style and storytelling as attempts to reconcile a range of diverse influences. The ‘non-representational’ cinema of the Rajasthani auteur Mani Kaul stands as just such an effort, exploring the tensions between his two mentors and the aesthetic values they 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 historian’s basic tools: The concepts of auteurism and influence. The concept of auteurism that best describes Kaul’s 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. 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 gradually come through a door that has been shut for years. To bring restraint and sensuousness together is an extremely difficult task.