Nazar

Programmed by Nick Newman

Two decades after Robert Bresson made Une femme douce, Mani Kaul approached Dostoevsky's “A Gentle Creature” with such staggering effect as to suggest nobody better understood its possibilities—to such ends that he engaged his own daughter, Shambhavi Kaul, to embody the story’s theme of corrupted innocence. Nazar implodes basic concepts of film language in nearly every shot, and sound has seldom been applied to narrative cinema with such impact. Though lesser-known than Bresson in western cinephilia, Kaul was as galvanizing, radical, and revolutionary, a distinction borne out by this double-feature.