Regents' Lecturer and film director Mani Kaul has been called “the stern poet of the Indian cinema, who goes his own way regardless...” (Derek Malcolm, The Guardian). His films have been compared to those of Ozu and Bresson in their precise language and their contemplative restraint. They include A Day's Bread, in 1969 a landmark film for India's “New Generation” of directors (PFA, 1980); A Monsoon Day (1971), In Two Minds (1973), Rising from the Surface (1980, PFA, 1982), and several documentary studies on traditional Indian art and music, including Dhrupad (PFA, 1983) and his newest film, The Mind of Clay.
“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