An immediate, austere India

Mani KAUL, a pioneer of the New Hindi Cinema of the ‘60s and ‘70s, will discuss his landmark 1970 film “Uski Roti” (“Daily Bread”), presented by CalArts on Monday at REDCAT. One hopes that CalArts will succeed in lining up a simultaneous translator, for as visual as the film is, it has sufficient dialogue that considerable nuances may be lost without translation.

Nonetheless, its larger meaning could scarcely be clearer. Its heroine, Balo (Garima), is a traditional wife living in a rural area in the north of India. Hers is a typical peasant existence of housekeeping, tending the animals and presumably the tilled fields that surround her small mud house while her husband, Sucha (Gurdeep Singh), drives a large bus. The entire focus of her day -- indeed, her life -- is to meet him at a bus stop some two miles from her home to present him with a meal as he passes by during the day and then as he passes by in the evening on the way back to the small town where he lives all but one day of the week -- with a sexy mistress (Savita Bajaj).

Sucha is a peacock-proud male chauvinist who one day is so irate when his wife arrives late that he not only refuses his early meal but also his evening meal. Balo, who spends the bulk of her life waiting for her husband’s bus due to his uncertain schedule, has been delayed because her 14-year-old sister Jinda (Richa Vyas), who lives with her, has been either raped or roughly deflowered.

So elliptical and ambiguous is Kaul’s style, which involves moving back and forth in time, that it is even possible that Sucha is the seducer -- not a local farmer who has repeatedly come on to Jinda.

Much of the film’s dialogue clearly deals with Jinda’s dismay at Balo’s oppressed status and grim plight, and her own longing to escape a similar fate. Even without subtitles, “Uski Roti,” which Kaul adapted from a Mohan Rakesh short story, emerges as unmistakably a masterwork. It is suffused with a deeply evocative use of natural sound and the austere, rigorously understated immediacy of the films of Robert Bresson, whom Kaul has cited as an important influence.

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Three by Tarkovsky

The American Cinematheque will present three films by another challenging master filmmaker, Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-86). Each film will be shown at the Egyptian and the Aero theaters.

“Andrei Rublev,” Tarkovsky’s dazzling 1966 epic about the life of Russia’s greatest icon painter, is a beautiful, harrowing and mesmerizing spiritual odyssey. In it, Tarkovsky suggests that man ever wants to soar, yet everything conspires to bring him down.

Nevertheless, by its end, this three-hour masterpiece has become a profound affirmation of spirit in the face of truly awesome adversity.

Significantly, Tarkovsky once said, “I do not understand historical films that have no relevance to the present.” Tarkovsky thrusts us into early 15th century Russia in all its harshness, cruelty and raw beauty as the artist-monk Rublev (Anatoli Solonitsyn) expresses his tortured search for God in man in his paintings.

Another dazzler, the 1972 “Solaris,” is at once an outer-space adventure and a meditation on the meaning of life. It becomes the odyssey of a Soviet psychologist (Donatas Banionis) who travels to a space station hovering over a remote planet named Solaris. It seems that the Soviet government would actually like to abandon the station, regarding reports of some of its findings as too incredible to believe.

What ensues allows Tarkovsky to contemplate life’s basic questions through the interplay of science, philosophy and emotion in a quest to determine the relative importance of each.

“Solaris” is also an unabashedly romantic work in which the primacy of love is asserted -- but as one of the film’s characters observes, “To preserve the truths, we need mysteries.”

The title of the shimmering, enigmatic 1978 “The Mirror” could easily refer to art itself in its eternal function of holding up a reflection so that we may see ourselves in it. With Tarkovsky, however, there’s always a desire to see beyond this world into others -- in this instance, the past, evoked through memory, imagination and dreams.

Tarkovsky shifts between black-and-white and color, between past and present, in so intensely a personal way that it becomes beside the point to try to make distinctions. It’s best to go with the film’s gorgeous flow, connecting with it emotionally rather than rationally.

“The Mirror” is above all an expression of longing for the past, specifically for a mother’s love (and trying to find it in a wife), and a return to a Garden of Eden-like existence. But this is also a film with a double vision: While expressing that childhood desire for security that seems to remain in us always, it perceives its people from an adult perspective, and for all its luminosity, some of its memories are fear-laden and tragic.

Tarkovsky’s films invite us to experience what we’re seeing, to perceive a universe in which the line blurs between the natural and the supernatural. This radiant, sublime dream of a film begins with a televised scene of a therapist in the process of curing a stuttering young boy. If we are to take this scene as a metaphor, then “The Mirror” can be regarded as the work of a man who has found his voice and learned to express himself in his own powerful way.

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Screenings

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An Evening With Mani Kaul

“Uski Roti”: 8 p.m. Monday

Where: REDCAT at Disney Hall, 2nd and Hope streets, L.A.

Info: (213) 237-2800; www.redcat.org

American Cinematheque: Andrei Tarkovsky

* “Andrei Rublev”: 7:30 p.m. today and Saturday at the Egyptian; 5 p.m. Feb. 13 at the Aero

* “Solaris”: 7:30 p.m. Friday at the Egyptian; 7:30 p.m. Feb. 11 at the Aero

* “The Mirror”: 5 p.m. Saturday at the Egyptian; 7:30 p.m. Feb. 10 at the Aero

Where: Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood; Aero Theatre, 1328 Montana Ave., Santa Monica

Info: (323) 466-FILM; www.americancinematheque.com