India & Satyajit Ray
India & the film Pather Panchali
1) Western audiences discovered the cinema of India in the 1950s with Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali in
1956.
2) Pather Panchali is the first in Ray’s “Apu” (Subir Banerji) trilogy.
By the 1970s, India became the world’s leader in number of films produced, and by the 1990s, the industry was releasing an average of 2 films a day.
There are several factors to consider when thinking about the history of India’s film industry:
1) India is a nation of over a billion people and movies are the most accessible form of entertainment.
2) India is a nation without a common language – there are hundreds of languages spoken in India
including Hindi and Bengali.
3) Most films made in Bombay are shot in Hindi – Bollywood. There is also an art cinema that runs
parallel to Bollywood based in Mumbai and Calcutta known as the “Indian New Wave.”
4)The Indian cinema is subject to government intervention and censorship.
5)Under the British, films addressing independence were forbidden and
6)Under the government of free India, Western influences were forbidden or discouraged.
7)Also keep in mind that religious pressures affect censorship in India.
8)The Indian film industry has been dominated by the star system since the established studio system
declined in the 1940s.
9)As a result, projects with established stars are produced in excess.
10)Stars might work on two-dozen films at once.
11)Music is also a huge part of the Indian film industry.
12)For decades, most films included singing and dancing.
14)These factors contributed to a highly conventional national cinema.
Satyajit Ray
1)Ray studied painting and received a degree in economics.
2) He co-founded the first film society in India in 1947.
3)Mast and Kawin describe his work as uniting the traditions of Indian literature, painting, and music with Western cinema.
4)The merging of Western and Eastern values is one of Ray's recurring subjects.
Two dominant genres in Indian cinema are:
“socials” (contemporary melodramas) and “mythologicals” (traditional tales of Indian folklore).
5)Ray’s films can be classified as socials, but he avoided the majority of Indian film traditions.
6)Ray used non professional actors, did not include singing and dancing, and shot on location.
7)Neorealism clearly influenced his best-known film Pather Panchali.
8) Pather Panchali is the first part of a trilogy of films (The Apu Trilogy) about a young boy that traces
his life from his rural youth to his educated adulthood.
Film critic Girish Shambu reflects on the historical context of Pather Panchali:
"Let’s start with the bigger picture of Indian cinema. It is true that Ray was something new and original, even within Indian cinema, but his originality emerged as a response to the cinematic landscape of the time. When The Apu Trilogy appeared in the 1950s, India was the world’s largest producer of films, made almost exclusively by the mainstream commercial industry.
Cinema had come early to India, not long after the first films of the Lumières in France, and a strong studio system was in place well before Ray’s debut, Pather Panchali (1955). Commercial films were made in large numbers both in Hindi and in several regional languages, but it was Hindi-language cinema, with Mumbai as its center of production, that proved to be most influential in determining the characteristics of the “typical” Indian movie of the time....
Pather Panchali was produced outside of this industrial context, one of India’s earliest “independent” films, and indeed did something new in terms of subject matter and style as well, depicting rural life with a detailed, delicate realism. It, and the rest of The Apu Trilogy, went on to international acclaim; in this regard, the films were unprecedented in Indian cinema. But the trilogy also achieved great critical and commercial success in Bengal, resonating deeply with the public because of the subtlety and authenticity—the fresh familiarity—of its depictions. It is this particularity that we risk overlooking by thinking of the films simply as universal."
Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955):
Description of the scene we saw
Opens up with a river and lilly pods...little insects on the water. Nice ripple effect. A dog and kitten a bird in a cage. A woman being fanned in the hot weather... A boy putting dark something under his eys. A Young girl walking to a place to pray. A little boy runs around the fields It starts to rain. The girl is praying. She waters a plant. The mother gets up from the fanning. The river is now rippling hard and the lilly pods are waving... the little boy is running home with his sister. A man on the riverside sees that it is raining but has an umbrella. A little boy is running in the rain very cold. A woman is bathing in the water and enjoying it. she sticks out her tongue at the little boy and dances around enjoying the water. It is raiining very hard. The young girl wraps the goy up in a cloth and they huddle together in shelter. a woman walks along the path looking cautiously and picks something up. The girl starts to sneeze.
Cinema today: The New Cinema in India has brought opportunities for women. Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay and later Monsoon Wedding and Vanity Fair). Deepa Mehta is another prominent female Indian director who directed a trilogy known as Fire, Earth, and Water.
A comment from Janus Films about Pather Panchali
With the release in 1955 of Satyajit Ray’s debut, Pather Panchali, an eloquent and important new cinematic voice made itself heard all over the world. A depiction of rural Bengali life in a style inspired by Italian neorealism, this naturalistic but poetic evocation of a number of years in the life of a family introduces us to both little Apu and, just as essentially, the women who will help shape him: his independent older sister, Durga; his harried mother, Sarbajaya, who, with her husband away, must hold the family together; and his kindly and mischievous elderly “auntie,” Indir—vivid, multifaceted characters all. With resplendent photography informed by its young protagonist’s perpetual sense of discovery, Pather Panchali, which won an award for Best Human Document at Cannes, is an immersive cinematic experience and a film of elemental power.
Scorsese on Satyajit Ray Click Here
No comments:
Post a Comment