![]() ![]() ![]() He was heavily influenced by films like Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thief, leading critic J. Through Renoir, Ray was able to arrange a trip to London, where he saw a huge number of films that confirmed his determination to make movies. This led him to serious independent study of film and, fortuitously, Jean Renoir showed up in 1949 in search of location advice for his film, The River (which critic Andre Bazin later said shared “the same spiritual tone” with Pather Panchali). He worked mainly as a graphic designer but co-founded the Calcutta Film Society in 1947. Satyajit Ray (1921–1992) was an aspiring Bengali filmmaker who had been born into an intellectual family in Calcutta. With regard to Pather Panchali-and ultimately making Indian films slightly more available in America-the Museum played a much greater role. Film societies and classrooms could more easily manage the transport and projection of the less cumbersome format of 16mm and, in fact, MoMA joined the trend through its film circulation program. Non-theatrical companies like Brandon Films provided a market for these films after they completed their limited theatrical runs. The acceptance of subtitles in America spread with the popularity of postwar Italian and French films, and this led to a slightly greater inclination toward risk-taking by distributors. Whatever other depictions of Asia or Africa available remained, as they had always been, the products of exploitative White imperialists, like the Hungarian-turned-British Korda brothers ( Elephant Boy, The Drum, Four Feathers) or Hollywood studio exoticism ( Trader Horn/Tarzan/”documentaries” by Martin and Osa Johnson, Clyde Beatty, or Frank Buck.) Although Japan and India both had booming film industries, the films seemed only to be for the home market. In 1951, with Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Japanese films began to appear on a very limited basis. “Third World” cinema was pretty much nonexistent for Western audiences until the 1950s. These notes accompany screenings of Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali on November 14, 15, and 16 in Theater 2. If you haven't seen it yet, what are you waiting for?.Pather Panchali. The simple story of the Bengali family will definitely stay in my heart for a long time to come. Until the closing moments, we don't get a sense of the young boy as a fully formed individual, since he's always in someone else's shadow. Harihar is absent for more than half of the movie, and, before the penultimate scene, Apu is a mere witness to events, rather than a participant. Most of what transpires is shown through the eyes of either Sarbojaya or Durga, and, as a result, we identify most closely with these two. Harihar's family often lives on the edge of poverty, coping with the unkind taunts of their neighbors, the burden of caring for an aging aunt (Chunibala Devi), and the terrible aftermath of a natural catastrophe. The mother, Sarbojaya (Karuna Bannerjee), worries that her husband's financial laxity will leave her without enough food for her two children, daughter Durga (Uma Das Gupta) and son Apu (Subir Bannerjee). The father, Harihar (Kanu Bannerjee), is a priest and poet who cares more about his writing and spiritual welfare than obtaining wages he is owed. It's a quiet, simple tale, centering on the life of a small family living in a rural village in Bengal. In contrast Satyajit Ray completed the trilogy on the behest of the Indian Prime Minister, pointing to the film's cultural impact. Apart from a seventy-year-old woman who made her name in the 1930s on the stage, none of the cast had ever acted before and many had been plucked from the Indian rurality. The film is a serene and beautiful depiction of a little boy's childhood in the Indian countryside in the 1950s.The film was made on a shoestring budget by a hitherto unknown director. Pather Panchali, released in 1955, is the first film of director Satyajit Ray's Apu trilogy. The characters are so true to the ethnic rural-sixties Indian existence that one is compelled to wonder if the film was captured through surveillance cameras. PATHER PANCHALI MOVIEThe film is overwhelmingly real and the key element in the movie is the maintenance of this realism. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |