Film Alert 101: Sixty Years of Art Cinema 1960-2020 : Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - Asia - 6 (45) India

Satyajit Ray

6 (45) India

Satyajit Ray (An International Film Guide Director of the Year, 1965) b.21 Mrinal Sen (An International Film Guide Director of the Year, 1982) b.23 Tapan Sinha b.24 Guru Dutt b.25 Ritwik Ghatak b.25

Part 1 Satyajit Ray

In 1950, following the declaration of Indian sovereign independence, the Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru appointed the S.K.Patil Film Enquiry Committee to report on the direction and reshaping of the film industry post independence. The Committee’s report on content was shaped by the divide between contending ideologies with arguments around “issues of authenticity: realist rootedness versus indigenous mass culture and nationalist utopia versus the regionalist components of nationalism.” Initially much of this agenda was appropriated by the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA), a Communist Party-backed theatre and film association. At this time IPTA-influenced realist melodrama in mainstream Hindi cinema was pioneered by K.A.Abbas with Dharti Ke Lal/Children of the Earth (1949) which he followed with scripts for two immensely successful films, both in India and overseas, most notably in the Soviet Union, Awara/The Tramp (1951) and Shri 420 (1955), directed by and starring Raj Kapoor as a Chaplinesque tramp, Abbas's proletarian themes adapted to include song and dance. Abbas’s Munna/Lost Child (1954), centred on a small boy who escapes from an orphanage, was the first Hindi film without song and dance numbers. Bimal Roy 's Do Bigha Zamin/Two Acres of Land (1954), strongly influenced by neo-realism, introduced simplicity and understatement into mainstream Hindi cinema.

S K Patil

The most significant “art” films ultimately to come out of the IPTA were those of Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen, both were “fundamentally influenced by Brecht” (Rajajadhyaksha 678).

At about the same time Satyajit Ray (1921-92), also inspired by Italian neo-realism, was struggling to complete Pather Panchali (1955), an adaptation of an early 20^th century classic of Bengali fiction.

Ray was born into a gifted Calcutta family. His father Sukumar Ray was a prominent Bengali writer as well as a painter and “master of the photographic art.” His grandfather was a prolific writer of children’s books and artist, a friend of Rabindranath Tagore who influenced almost all of the modern arts in India and came frequently to the Ray family home. Satyajit graduated with a degree in economics and science at the University of Calcutta. He studied further in 1940-2 in Tagore’s “house of peace” at Santiniketan where he concentrated his studies on graphic arts. He joined an advertising agency in 1943 as an advertising artist subsequently promoted to art director. An ardent filmgoer through his years of study when he was sent to London for 8 months of training in the head office in 1950, he took the opportunity to watch more than a hundred features both old and new. Ray said it was Bicycle Thieves that finally set him on the path to becoming a filmmaker further motivated by time spent with Jean Renoir when Ray returned from London, who was filming in India. Ray set about writing a screenplay, an adaptation of an early 20th century Bengali novel first encountered in his design work, Pather Panchali / On the Road, by Bibhuti Banerji. He filmed in his own time, mainly at weekends, financed the film himself with family and friends and finally completed it with a crucial 200,000 rupee investment from the State of West Bengal.

The film was a major success, notably in the way [Ray’s] realism extended a Nehru-ite post-independence rewriting of Indian history in light of the current programmes of Industrialisation and non-alignment. Nehru’s 'Discovery of India' published in 1946 and a 'foundational text' for the whole nationalist enterprise, was part travelogue, part autobiography, and part history lesson, investigating ‘that worthwhile something’ that had allowed India to withstand foreign invasion and colonial rule.

Pather Panchali

Rajadhyaksha in his portrait of Ray (q.v. p. 682, Nowell-Smith ed.) further identifies the “uncanny fashion” in which Ray’s realism captures the tone of the book “especially in the way he symbolizes realism itself, as a vantage point from where to restage ‘the past’ to re-present memory in a land that could now, so to speak, celebrate the arrival of history.” Ray apparently followed Nehru's suggestion in making the two sequels (Aparajito, Apur Sansar/The World of Apu) to form a trilogy based on a western literary form, the bildungsroman or coming of age novel which had its origin in Germany in the 18th century and was popularised in Western culture.

Ray's accomplished naturalism focusing on everyday life in an Indian village, attracted critical recognition in India as an art film but limited in its appeal for general Indian audiences. A major reason given for the failure of Aparajito with a wider audience in India was its portrayal of the rift between mother and son, motherhood being sacrosanct in popular Hindi cinema exemplified by the all-time Hindi classic Mehboob’s Mother India (1957) the apex of Bollywood star Nargis’s playing of mother in many Hindi melodramas.

American director John Huston, filming in India, saw some sequences from Pather Panchali, talked with Ray and contacted the Museum of Modern Art in New York which took on its distribution. Pather Panchali ran for 8 months in a NY cinema in 1958.

The Music Room

Realism in Ray’s films become more mannered in the period films that followed. In Jalsaghar/The Music Room (1958) a feudal aristocrat is estranged from reality in his obsession with his past and his art. Devi/The Goddess (1960) was the first of four films Ray made at this time with the central focus on a woman. Teen Kanya/Three Daughters (1961), an Ibsen-like play on the power of superstition, and in Charulata (1964) masterfully crafted realism becoming “a mosaic of highly mannered gesture and painstakingly reconstructed sets, encoded and understated evocations of period (ibid 682).” Rajadhyaksha adds that a major argument arose about these films, whether they could ever be accessible to an audience unfamiliar with the highly encoded evocations of his performances and scripts.”

Adaptation ostensibly through the eyes of Ray's mentor, the Nobel prizewinning Bengali poet, writer, playwright, composer and philosopher, the extraordinary Rabindranath Tagore, Three Daughters based on three Tagore stories was made in celebration of the centenary of his birth. These films are in a Tagore - based tradition of Asiatic Orientalism to which Ray remained an adherent (ibid 682)*.

As already mentioned, Ray spent two years studying painting at Sandiniketan, Tagore's open university, the abode of peace “where the world becomes one nest”, at that time finding himself as an artist. He produced a moving documentary tribute to the great man, The Inner Eye, narrated by himself.

Mahanagar

In a shift in style and tone, Mahanagar/The Big City (1963), is set in the urban world of anglicised lower middle class Indians, ironically following the progress of a young woman from subdued housewife to achieving equality in her job only to resign in solidarity with a friend who had been unjustly dismissed. Mahanaghar has been praised for qualities comparable to that of an Ozu comedy. Ray was always concerned with the “social identity” of the characters, something Indian song-and-dance films ignored (Barnouw & Krishnaswarmy 238).

India has a history of film societies (Ray was co-founder of the Calcutta Film Society in 1947) but not of arthouse exhibition. Ray had few substantial box office successes in India, the national market being dominated by films in Hindi in the north and Tamil and Telugu films in the south. Many Bengali films were not widely distributed outside Bengal at the time. He had only one major home success, a musical fantasy based in Indian mythology and children’s books written by his grandfather that left overseas audiences puzzled, Goopy Gyne and Bagha Byne (1969).

His aspiration to make art films led to questions about Ray's loss of contact with wider Indian audiences. While recognised for the international success of the trilogy and later films such as Charulata (his personal favourite of his films), Ray's continuing preference for making films in Bengali firmly categorised him in popular discourse as the most prominent of “a generalised category of directors celebrated as being culturally rooted in their context” ( ibid 682).

Nayak/The Hero (1966) is similar in theme to Bergman's Wild Strawberries : in the course of a 24 hour journey the arrogance of a Bengali matinee idol is a facade that is stripped away in an extended interview with a journalist and interspersed with dreams and flashbacks revealing the troubled man beneath the surface. Ray said that he wrote the screenplay only for the lead actor, Uttam Kumar, and would not have made the film if he had refused the role.

A seminal film, Aranyer Din Ratri/Days and Nights in the Forest (1969), is one of his best regarded internationally for its contemplative mood in a blend of Chekov and Jean Renoir - Ray had worked as an assistant searching locations for Renoir's Indian film The River (1951). Nights has been described as almost an extended remake of Renoir's short film Une Partie de Campagne (1936) filtered through another sensibility with four young men from Calcutta on leave for a few days in the country replacing the French bourgeois family.

In the 'Calcutta trilogy' - Pratidiwandi/The Adversary (1970), Seemabadha/Company Limited (1974) and Jana-Aranya/The Middleman (1975) - there is a darkening of mood and stylistic departures in Ray's films in the post-Nehru era ushered in by the Naxalite peasant insurrection and student revolts in Calcutta. In The Adversary centred on the anger and violence associated with the disillusionment that comes with youth unemployment, Ray uses disjunctive distancing devices – negative imagery and a flash forward – for the first time. Corruption is central in both the succeeding films, ironically in The Middleman which Ray described as “a kind of black comedy.” Mrinal Sen, in his own Calcutta trilogy made at the same time, sought to directly participate in current politics.

The Chess Players

Following the Calcutta trilogy the growing complexity, even ambivalence, of Ray's later work, in mode more akin to modern European art cinema, appeared to alienate at least a part of the relatively elite Indian audience for his earlier films. Shatranj ke Kilari/The Chess Players (1978) is made up of two stories reflecting on each other. What many viewers expected, Satti Khanna suggests, was “a reconstruction of the splendours of Moghul India” (as in Jalsaghar) and “the decency of upper class Bengal” (as in Charulata). “What they found was a stern examination of the sources of Indian decadence. According to Ray, the British seem less to blame for their role than the Indians who demeaned themselves by colluding with the British or by ignoring the public good and plunging into private pleasures.”

This point of view was not popular with the monopolistic distribution set-up of Hindi cinema. Instead of a simultaneous release, Ray's first film in Hindi was delayed for seven months and then denied fair exhibition in a number of Indian cities. Generally well-received internationally, The Chess Players took some years to recover losses from the Indian release.

His second film in Hindi, Sadgati/Deliverance (1981), made for TV, is “his sharpest indictment of caste and religious orthodoxy,” it was attacked by some critics for its 'lack of anger' and commitment to which Ray replied that “it was not the anger of an exploding bomb, but of a bow stretched taut and quivering.” (Garga 224)

Ray was the complete ‘auteur’; as well as directing he wrote the original story and screenplay, designed the sets and composed the music for many of his films.

Satyajit Ray and his Honorary Oscar

In the year before his death in 1992 Ray was awarded an honorary Oscar for “rare mastery of the art of motion pictures and for his profound humanitarian outlook.” David Thomson in an overview in his “Biographical Dictionary” concludes that “the rhetoric had been earned, but Ray seemed more than ever the projection of “our” India – not quite India's India.” The former was close to being projected internationally as the 'real' India by Ray through a realist and Tagorean lens close to fully realised in his films from Pather Panchali to Mahanagar. To aid the achievement of that sense of reality Ray had immersed himself in European, Soviet, American and other cinemas at film society screenings in Calcutta and during the 8 months of intensive film viewing in London in 1950. The projection of “India's India,” always elusive, in cinema has come to embrace a spectrum of narratives from masala to art cinema, the latter also taken up radically by Bengalis Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen, and younger filmmakers who were inspired by Ray's example as he had been by Tagore.

* For those interested in exploring this subject further, search online under “Tagore's Asiatic Orientalism” for an article in 'Punch Magazine' Do Indians have Tagore's idea of being an Asian? by Devdan Chaudhuri, and an essay, Tagore's Orientalism by Yu-ting Lee in 'Taiwan East Asian Studies'.

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Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Tables and Directors Lists to Accompany Bruce Hodsdon's Series

Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more

Part One - Introduction

Part Two - Defining Art Cinema

Part Three - From Classicism to Modernism

Part Four - Authorship and Narrative

Part Five - International Film Guide Directors of the Year, The Sight and Sound World Poll, Art-Horror

Part Six (1) - The Sixties, the United States and Orson Welles

Part Six (2) - Hitchcock, Romero and Art Horror

Part Six (3) - New York Film-makers - Elia Kazan & Shirley Clarke