Film Review
The film that brought Indian cinema to an international audience for
the first time was this remarkable debut work from Satyajit Ray, India's
greatest filmmaker and one of the most highly regarded cineastes of all
time.
Pather Panchali
is the first instalment in a series of three films which make up Ray's
acclaimed
Apu Trilogy.
The following two films,
Aparajito
(1956) and
Apur Sansar
(1959), continue the story of Apu's growth from childhood to
fatherhood. The literal translation of
Pather
Panchali is
Song of the
Little Road, a title which succinctly captures the simplicity
and understated poetry of Ray's film.
Prior to this, Indian
cinema was not concerned with realistic portrayals of everyday
life. In common with Hollywood, its
raison d'être was to
entertain the masses, to distract ordinary people from their
uncomfortable, unfulfilled lives, not to remind them how awful things
were. Badly made and prone to the worst excesses of melodrama,
there was no international market for such films, and the rest of the
world could have been forgiven for thinking that India had no film
industry of any kind. Satyajit Ray's debut feature
was to change this perception forever.
The story of the making of the
Pather
Panchali is worthy of a film in its own right. In the
mid-1940s, employed as a graphic designer, Satyajit Ray was working on
an illustrated version of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay's best selling
novel when he decided he would like to adapt it as a film. With
his limited resources, he set about making the film in 1950, hiring a
cast of mainly non-professional actors and still photographer Subrata
Mitra, who had no prior experience, as his cinematographer.
What little understanding of filmmaking Ray had
was obtained by watching Jean Renoir and his crew at work during the
shooting of
The River (1951). The
only professional film actor to appear in the film was Kanu Banerjee,
who plays Apu's father. Revelling in the part of the wizened crone Indir
is 80-year-old Chunibala Devi, a retired stage actress with so much
charisma (and so few teeth) that she almost steals the film.
Within a few months, Ray exhausted his own funds (which he
supplemented by selling his LP collection) and had to suspend filming
for a year whilst he raised money to complete the film. By
somehow creating the impression he was making a documentary about
road-building, Ray managed to persuade the Government of West Bengal to
grant him a loan. After a personal recommendation from John Huston
(who was reconnoitring locations for an aborted attempt to make
The Man Who Would Be King) he
secured additional funding from New York's Museum of Modern Art. From start
to finish, the film took five years to complete, but the experience was
to prove invaluable for Ray and his technical team, who would go on to
deliver a string of uncompromising realist masterpieces.
When he was preparing this film, Satyajit Ray was inspired by the
social realist movement that was beginning to impact on European and
American cinema in the early 1950s. He was particularly
influenced by the Italian neo-realists and was greatly affected when he
saw a screening of Vittorio De Sica's
Bicycle Thieves (1948) during a
brief stay in London. Ray combines the harsh realist approach of
De Sica and Roberto Rossellini with a poetry reflective of Indian
culture to create something new and beguiling.
Pather Panchali is a film that
laments the torment of poverty whilst celebrating the miracle of
existence, a work that is both intensely heart-wrenching and
spiritually uplifting. Ravi Shankar's music, played mostly on
sitar, the instrument that is most evocative of India, adds to the
sublime poetry of the stark black and white images. There is a
searing authenticity and lyrical power to this film that makes it
virtually unique in the medium of cinema.
The slow pace of the film and its rambling narrative reflect the
languorous and uncertain lives of its protagonists, reminding us
that life is a messy, chaotic affair, not the tidy painting-by-numbers
nonsense that we find all too often in conventional cinema.
Although the film is loosely structured, it has a coherence which
becomes more and more evident as it builds towards its tragic
climax. Not only are the characters convincingly drawn, we also
see the world through their eyes. We experience something of the
desperation of a mother who wonders how she will feed her family.
We share the fanciful optimism of the father who believes a better
future awaits him and his loved ones. We feel the rebellious
spirit of the daughter as she approaches womanhood with trepidation.
And we see the world from the perspective of the young Apu, not as a nightmare
filled with torment and anguish, but as a marvellous adventure
playground, a place of limitless wonder and excitement.
Reaction to
Pather Panchali
was initially lukewarm when it was first seen in India and
the Bengal government was hostile to its negative portrayal of their country,
yet the film soon became enormously popular. Its international release was no less
spectacular, even if some critics (notably François Truffaut)
were highly dismissive of it, and it won the Best Human Document prize
at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956. The film's success
established Satyajit Ray as a leading filmmaker and overnight transformed
the fortunes of Indian cinema, laying the foundation for what is now
one of the country's largest and most successful industries.
More than half a century after its first release,
Pather Panchali has lost none of
its power to enthral and move an audience. One of the most
beautifully composed and humanist works in world cinema, it has
universal appeal because it deals with themes
we can all relate to. The never-ending struggle to overcome adversity. The need to face up
to disease, decay and death with dignity. And something else:
that innate part of us that compels us, even on the darkest day, to
look upon the world with a child's wonder and delight, and smile, perhaps in
gratitude.
© James Travers 2010
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Next Satyajit Ray film:
Aparajito (1956)