This review mainly focuses on Kaul's use of close-ups. Contains some spoilers.
An Intimate Apparition
The close-up is one of cinema’s most distinctive tools. Ever since it was popularized by Griffith, filmmakers have used the close-up to help distinguish the medium, particularly from theater. Most often a close-up helps facilitate a parasocial interaction between the characters on screen and the viewer by recording the actors’ performances in greater detail. Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, a late silent film starring Renée Jeanne Falconetti, is a common example of the technique's power: shot almost entirely close-up, we are made to have sympathy as we watch Falconetti experience the arduous, cruel treatment of the French court. Every subtle glance, every tremble develops a commiseration and a relationship between the audience and Joan. It wasn’t until many years later when filmmakers began to expand their conception of the close-up. One of the most accomplished films created during that period was 1973’s Duvidha, an Indian film directed by Mani Kaul, based on a Rajasthani short story.
Much of Duvidha plays out in close-up, but instead of creating any sort of relationship between the characters and the viewer, it disorients. The film opens with two newlyweds, Lachhi (the wife) and Krishnalal (the husband), traveling to their home. The sequence primarily serves to deliver important bits of exposition and indicate some characteristics of the couple—Krishnalal, being work and status-obsessed, is planning on immediately leaving town for a number of years for his work; Lachhi is not happy about this, but she does not put up a fight. Typically a film would express these things via shot/reverse shot, flashback, or other methods that bring the viewer closer to the material. Instead, Kaul uses close-ups to do the opposite. Almost all of the dialogue is delivered in voiceover while what is shown on screen are details: hands plucking fruit off a tree, wheels going across a dirt road, eyes closing under a ghoonghat, taking off a shoe, flipping pages, fabrics, fruit, jewelry… Kaul works in textures and impressionistic images, and even though the physical distance between camera and performer is quite small, he maintains an emotional distance throughout.
Very little is provided in the way of emotional resonance. Apart from the words spoken in the voiceover, we do not get a glimpse at how Krishnalal or Lachhi feel about their relationship or the situation they are in. Beyond just the opening sequence, there are moments of psychological lucidity with Krishnalal (such as later in the film when he discovers that the ghost has taken his place with his wife), but Kaul never gives us anything similar for Lachhi. Richard Suchenski in Mythic and Modern: The Aesthetics of Space in the Films of Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani makes a connection between Kaul and Bresson for this reason, “In Bresson’s films, there is a flattening out of the surface effects of cinema—dramatic performance, ostentatiously beautiful imagery, and so forth—in an attempt to emphasize the concreteness of image/sound relations as well as the spatial presence of bodies and objects” (33). He notes that Kaul does not go as far as Bresson in rejecting all of these cinematic norms—his films are certainly “beautiful,” ostentatiously or otherwise—but he does share with Bresson an attempt at removing imposed sentiment. As a viewer, one that is used to the conventional objectives and contrivances of cinema, this can be disconcerting because these filmmakers use techniques that bear the veneer of familiarity and yet the results of those techniques are unfamiliar. The close-up, a device that has been used time and time again to visually display a character’s internal monologue, is employed instead for the sake of abstraction.
Kaul used the close-up in this way to play with perspective. He “was acutely conscious of the way in which the camera’s basic recording mechanism fundamentally orients the spectator around a particular idea of the image,” writes Suchenski, “but he tried to push it in a different direction” (34). People, unavoidably, make assumptions—often shaped by life experiences, often by their culture, often by what art they have seen previously—so Kaul attempts to decouple those expectations from the images themselves. For instance, during a pivotal scene in the film, Lachhi gives birth to the child that she and the ghost conceived. Conceptually, it is quite provocative. A strained childbirth in nearly any other film would be exploited for emotionality, but Kaul never plays into it. Initially Lachhi gives birth in medium shots. It might seem for a moment like Kaul is going a different direction when the uptempo Rajasthan folk music kicks in, but then Kaul cuts to a close-up still of Lachhi with her hand on her face. The music switches to the drone that accompanies most of the film, and it becomes apparent once again that Kaul is dissociating the technique from our expected result.
With Duvidha, it could seem like Kaul is embarking on a fool’s errand. One’s deep-rooted assumptions are not easily surmounted, but the endeavor is justified in its motivation. Suchenski connects Kaul’s work with Stan Brakhage’s 1963 essay “Metaphors on Vision,” quoting, “Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception” (14). Kaul attempts to elevate a viewer’s cinematic palate by diversifying the effects of a tried-and-true film technique. That is not to say that he wants to dismantle how the close-up is traditionally used, but instead, by expanding its capabilities of abstraction, he takes away the prejudice of the “eye.”
The context of the film’s narrative elucidates Kaul’s methods even further. When the ghost tells Lachhi of the fact that he is not her real husband, she chooses to accept him anyways. This begs the question, who is the “real” Krishnalal? Of course, the original Krishnalal believes it to be himself, linking reality with the physicality of his conception, asking his mother, “Will you too deny the son to whom you gave birth?” Maybe the better question is whether or not Lachhi’s real husband is the original Krishnalal or the ghost. Kaul gives us no answers—rather, his technique enhances the dilemma. His dissociative close-ups lend an intimacy to the film that is simultaneously destabilized by the ambiguity of their expression. In a sense, it correlates with the conundrum at hand: while Krishnalal is her husband on paper, the ghost is the man who stayed. He is the one in her bed, the one that eats at her table, and yet he isn’t “real.” Once again, Kaul challenges our preconceptions.
Kaul, with Duvidha and his films thereafter, wants to confront cinematic standards. To quote the introduction of The Cinema Situation, a symposium written in part by Kaul, “There has been a gentle struggle, a push here, an upsurge there, a raising of more authentic voices, the slow birth of an indigenous cinema. But, it is beset with problems … The audience has come to regard film as synonymous with a particular breed of song, dance, vulgarity, burlesque, violence, crudity, escape, often under the mush of misleading progressive situations—rich man poor girl, rigid father growing son, erring husband devoted wife, etc. Is it ready, even in small measure, to receive a new experience from a familiar medium?” (10). To this day, Duvidha is demanding of its audience, but what it teaches is important. One’s perception of reality is a fickle creature, and whether with the close-up or otherwise, Kaul knew how to defy it. Our conception of “what film is” has certainly expanded since 1973 in no small part due to Kaul’s work.