Pottery has always been a witness to human life. It is among the earliest forms of craft and among the most enduring traces we leave behind. Across centuries, shards and vessels have carried stories of who we were, how we lived, and what we believed. Archaeologists reconstruct lost cultures and hence values of past civilisations from clay objects and dissect how storytellers used them as vessels of myth.
Clay carries the imprint of memory and mortality, binding human beings to the soil from which they come and to which they return. It is this elemental relationship between the two that Mani Kaul explores in 'Mati Manas' (The Mind of Clay), a film made in 1985 for the Festival of India that remains one of the most remarkable subversions of the documentary form.
The film is a reflection on the human journey through clay, unfolding as a meditation on the gestures of potters and the myths carried in their work. We travel through villages and communities where pottery is not just a livelihood but a spirit passed from generation to generation. The wheel turning, the hand shaping, the kiln firing — each image speaks to a ritual as much as labour; to continuity as much as craft. In this sense, clay is treated as both matter and metaphor, embodying the fragile and cyclical nature of life itself.
A central presence in the film is mythology. Through a script written together by Mani Kaul and Kamal Swaroop, the narrators lead us through tales embedded in clay idols and terracotta figures, traversing stories of creation and destruction; of conflict and transformation. The film does not simply recount the characters and plots; it probes the essence of these myths, suggesting that they speak to universal themes of birth, death, and purpose. The figures on screen turn into vessels through which ancient voices pass. By dwelling on these images, the film shows how myth and craft are inseparable and how storytelling itself has always been bound to material form.
Running alongside this mythological register is the film’s archaeological and anthropological gaze. Mati Manas juxtaposes contemporary potters with fragments from past civilisations, linking the Indus Valley terracottas to present-day workshops, while museum cases are studied as continuations of a living tradition. In these passages the film insists that clay is humanity’s oldest archive, preserving gestures, beliefs, and memories across millennia. What emerges is less a history of pottery than a history of humanity told through pottery.
Visually, Mati Manas is composed with extraordinary care. Mani Kaul crafts images that have their own rhythm and each frame composed with the patience of a potter’s hand. A potter’s wheel turning, a riverbank, a kiln, an ancient figurine — these images flow into one another like verses in a long poem. The editing is elliptical and dreamlike, making the film operate less on the conscious mind than on a subliminal level. It is precisely this refusal of straightforward exposition that allows the film to move beyond documentation and become a poetic experience in itself.
The qualities of Mati Manas are inseparable from the filmmaker's own sensibility. A student of Ritwik Ghatak at the Film and Television Institute of India, he absorbed both Ghatak’s disregard for conventional storytelling and his attention to tradition. From 'Uski Roti' (1969) and 'Duvidha' (1973) to 'Siddheshwari' (1989), Kaul consistently sought new cinematic forms, privileging rhythm over plot, which is also true for Mati Manas. He once said that he wanted to know “...the anguish of the potter through my anguish as a filmmaker,” and that empathy shapes the film’s entire approach.
Beneath its images lies a powerful subtext: the act of making is inseparable from the act of being human. Here, the act of shaping clay reflects our own tendency to invent meaning. And each vessel and idol in the film is a totem to our attempts to narrativise our lives, understand the human condition, and leave behind traces that outlast us in the story of time.
Watch the film below:
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