Pather Panchali

Theme music from Pather Panchali.

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 22:11:55 -0400

Theme music from Pather Panchali.

BASIC STORY Harihar (Kanu Banerjee) is a priest, father, and...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 22:05:37 -0400

BASIC STORY
Harihar (Kanu Banerjee) is a priest, father, and would be writer who promises prosperity and wealth to his wife Sarbojaya (Karuna Banerjee) who live in a rural village in Begal in the 1920’s during the great depression. They try to raise their children Apu (Subir Banerjee), who is six, and Durga (Uma Das Gupta) an adolescent, as well as supporting their aunt Indir (Chunibala Devi); an aging women who hasn’t left her childhood home.

Pather Panchali is a portrait of Apu and Durga, both too caught in the curiosities of the world to care about the poverty they were born into. It is the first film in the Apu trilogy, followed by Aparajito and Apur Sansar.

BASIC RESEARCHPather Panchali was directed by Satyajit Ray, an...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 22:04:00 -0400

BASIC RESEARCH
Pather Panchali was directed by Satyajit Ray, an Indian film maker who is considered one of the great auteurs of cinema. Mostly shot on location in a village in West Bengal, it was released for the first time in New York at an exhibit at the MoMA in May of 1955 and was billed as ‘The Story of Apu and Durga’. It was later released as ‘Pather Panchali’ or ‘Song of the Little Road’ in India on August 26 the same year. The film is 115 minutes long and is a drama, as opposed to the melodramas with musical interludes (Bollywood) that Indian cinema is so well known for. That is because the style of the film is heavily influenced by the Italian Neo-realism movement that happened after WWII. Instead of showing the beautiful sleek world of movie stars, and that Hollywood look, Ray chose to show the real and not idealized details of everyday domestic village life. He also chose to deal with issues such as poverty, hunger and the caste system, which were not allowed to be filmed, before India gained its independence in 1947, because of strict censorship laws.
Pather Panchali was given a simple budget of Rs 150 000 (about $3000 US) and most of the crew was unexperienced. The cinematographer, Subrata Mitra, had never operated a camera before, and most of the actors were found in the village that they shot in. The making of the film was a struggle, both technically and financially, and Ray, in an interview with Georges Sadoul for Cahier du Cinema even said, “To be able to continue, I sold my library, my art books, my mother’s jewelry and my wife’s.” (Wright 1976: 459)
Even though the film was praised internationally, the government remained suspicious about exporting the film, which might be regarded as harmful to the image of India by showing poverty and similar social problems.

ANALYSISPather Panchali is a visual masterpiece; it is a looking...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 22:03:00 -0400

ANALYSIS
Pather Panchali is a visual masterpiece; it is a looking glass into another culture. The photogenic country of India served as the background for the film in a village not far from where Ray grew up in Calcutta. Because of the strong influence of neorealism and the shoestring budget, production was minimalistic, and things like light, sound and set were left to the location. The noonday sun in the summer and winter seasons of India would create vivid textures and bold shadows, whereas the overcast monsoon and post monsoon months would create a soft glow over the rural landscape. The lighting is key to showing the passing of time while Sarbojaya waits for her husband to return with the promise of prosperity. The change of lighting mimics seasons and moods as the characters gradually get more anxious for Harihar’s returns.
Ray uses many long and wide shots with deep focus lenses to show the characters in their entire surroundings. The environment is just as important in Pather Panchali as the script or the characters, such as the foot worn paths throughout the jungle, or the giant tree Apu and Durga sit under to protect themselves from the early monsoon rain. The extreme long shot of Durga and Apu in the kaash fields by the train tracks is one of the most memorable scenes because of the way it is shown on film; it is the same way the children would have experienced it in the field. First, the faint click of wheels on tracks, and then as the children turn to look, the camera reveals a train with a trailing stream of black smoke. As this is set in the 1920’s, industrialization was a new curiosity in this part of the country.
Filming was done mostly in the village, but many of the minor characters in the movie were played by villagers from the shooting location. Many main characters were played by inexperienced and armature actors. The role of Apu was played by a young boy named Subir Banerjee, who Ray’s wife found on the street, after endless casting sessions. Although he and Kanu Banerjee and Karuna Banerjee have the same last name, they are not related.

CULTURAL CONTEXT WWII hit India’s film and movie making industry...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 22:03:00 -0400

CULTURAL CONTEXT
WWII hit India’s film and movie making industry hard. Not only was film stock rationed, but the strict censorship laws became even more outlandish, for the Raj was able to control the subject matter and treatment of the film. Even film stock on the black market was expensive and production costs could span from Rs. 400 000 to Rs. 500 000 after the war struck, whereas the average cost of a movie in 1939 was Rs. 90 000 (Wright 1976: 458).
Finally in 1947 India gained its independence and the same year Ray co-founded the Calcutta Film Society, where he proceeded to study film making. India’s own movie industry flourished and became similar to that of Canada’s, Australia’s and England’s, with movie stars parallel to Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell, and stories filled with suspense, comedy and popular musical numbers.
With the new freedom to create films that went outside the pre-existing lines of the Rajas laws, people started filming themselves: everyday ordinary people. A series of short productions called Actual Experience, similar to news reels, were where men and women talked directly to the camera about contraception and sterilization they had gone through. Similarly, there were also short videos about improving agriculture, which were carried around in mobile cinemas to rural areas.
In 1949 Jean Renoir came to Calcutta in search for a place to shoot his film The River, about a teenager’s first love. There, Ray assisted Renoir with the production of his film, and they became close acquainted. For many years Ray had been thinking of making Pather Panchali, and with encouragement from Renoir, he started saving the funds he would need to make his adaptation of the book by Bandopadhaya.
During a business trip to London in 1950, Ray watched many foreign movies, including Bicycle Thieves by Vittorio De Sica which became one of the biggest influences upon Ray and his style throughout the entire Apu trilogy. Along with the spirit of De Sica and the new independent style of documentary India was creating, Ray was also influenced by the traditional poems of Rabindranath Tagore, which can be seen in the whimsical and symbolic images he creates, such as the still of Apu and Durga with the cow above.

INTERPRETATION “… [Pather Panchali] made a great book: its...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 22:02:00 -0400

INTERPRETATION
“… [Pather Panchali] made a great book: its humanism, its lyricism, and its ring of truth.” –Satyajit Ray (Ray 1994: 33)

While working for Signet Press, Ray was asked to illustrate the covers of multiple books that would be published, and that is when he came across a child’s version of Pather Panchali. He was inspired to turn it into a film, but it wasn’t until he met Renoir, that the idea became tangible. Pather Panchali means Song of the Little Road, pather meaning ‘of the path’ and panchali, a type of folk song, popular in Bengal. The film is very much about Indian culture but wasn’t received very well in its home country, and was especially unpopular with the government of Bengal who thought that it would give them a bad reputation. However, it became very sensational throughout the rest of the world and even ran for six months in New York. It appealed to many other western countries and broke the ice for other third world independent films.
Because of the strong Neo-realistic elements carried over from Italy, the main themes displayed throughout the film revolve around authenticity and social issues, around life as it really is, boring bits and all. The story rests upon a normal family struggling during the great depression, and the tolls and tribulations village life (such as a smaller access to doctors and medicine) but also the simple joys it brings, such as the portable projectionist or the candy man. Industrialization is also a theme that presents itself, more throughout the rest of the trilogy and as Apu moves out of the small village, than in this film, but is represented by the train. The train that Durga would never get on, but Apu one day would.
Ray saw the world from a middle class point of view, and had never struggled like some of the characters in his film. But he had been stuck under the strict laws of the Raj and was under the dark cloud of colonialism until it was lifted in 1947 at the end of the war.

MY JUDGEMENTPather Panchali is a film filled with simple...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 22:01:00 -0400

MY JUDGEMENT
Pather Panchali is a film filled with simple pleasures. I really did enjoy this film, so much so, that I watched the rest of the trilogy which follows the story of Apu as he moves to town and grows up. Before I watched the movie though, I did most of my research and I found I understood more things, especially culture based things, like marriage, and the caste system, and what was going on in the 1920’s in India. I also noticed specific shots that books had said were absolutely wonderful for certain reasons and I feel that I was able to notice those things, which I probably would have disregarded if I had not read about it first. It had the effect of watching a movie twice, only I just watched it once.

PRODUCTIONProduction Company, government of West BengalDirector,...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 22:00:47 -0400

PRODUCTION
Production Company, government of West Bengal
Director, Satyajit Ray
Script, Satyajit Ray, from the novel by Bibhut Bhusan Banopadhaya
Photography, Subrata Mitra
Editor, Dulal Dutta
Art Director, Banshi Chandragupta
Music, Ravi Shankar

SOURCES Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 21:56:13 -0400

SOURCES

Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. 4th ed. McGraw-Hill, 1993. Print.

Cook, Pam. The Cinema Book. London: British Film Institute, 1985. Print.

Hayward, Susan. “The Key Concepts.” Cinema Studies. New York: 2000.

Ray, Satyajit. Our Films, Their Films. New York: Hyperion Books, 1994. Print.

Seton, Marie. “Satyajit Ray: Portrait of a Director.” Indiana University Press. (1971).

Silver, Charles. “Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali.” Inside/Out. MoMA, 13 Nov 2012. Web. 18 Apr 2013.
.

Wright, Basil. The Long View; An International History of Cinema. Great Britain: Martin Secker & Warburg Limited, 1974. Print.