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| Ritwik Ghatak |
Ritwik Ghatak (1925-76) completed 8 features 1953-74, plus 4 that remained unfinished while completing more than a dozen documentaries and short films and writing 20 scripts for other films and films that remained unmade, acting in several of his own. Prior to devoting himself to filmmaking he tried writing poetry and short stories although he felt that “literature lies deep in the soul of man, but works slowly. It takes a long time to grow roots inside. With typical adolescent impatience I wanted immediate impact because I felt that people should be roused instantly.” Then he discovered the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA) which showed him that theatre was much more spontaneous and effective than literature. He gave up literary writing and took up writing, directing and acting in plays. But he still found the outreach limited in relation to the energy expended, so he decided to make films. “I just want to convey whatever I feel about the reality around me and I want to shout. That's why I produce films – not for their own sake but for the sake of my people...Cinema for me is not an art form [it is] nothing but a form of expression.” In his approach to the art and craft he was a complete original.
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| Titash Ekti Nadir Nama / A River Called Titas |
When Ghatak was asked which four of his 8 features, and more than 10 short films, were most satisfying for him, he named Ajanik/Pathetic Fallacy (1957) - about a taxi-driver's relationship with his battered Chevrolet- “because of its brevity of expression and for certain technical achievements.” Subarnarekha (I963) - the final film of his trilogy set against the partition of Bengal - he felt was his “most philosophical film.” The fourth was Titash Ekti Nadir Nama / A River Called Titas (1973) because filmed on locations around his childhood home - “an essay on the lyricism of the Bengali countryside, especially its monsoons,” and because he felt he was able to portray certain working class characters who are 'intensely Bengali'.” Bari Theke Pale / The Runaway (1959) had many autobiographical elements. Like the boy in the film who runs away to escape the tyranny of his father and in search of the kind of adventures he had read and dreamt about, Ghatak too ran away from home a number of times while at school. Komol Gandhar / E Flat (1961), his most complex film is difficult for other than those well versed in Bengali literature. It was made, he said, with “an overwhelming sense of nostalgia for the comradeship and ephemeral hopes, faith and trust of the IPTA days,” in which he tried “to discard the normal story line and propound his proposition on four levels at the same time.” It seems characteristic that he excluded from nominating his one commercially successful film and most widely acclaimed as his masterpiece, Meghe Dhaka Tara / The Cloud Capped Star(1960).
Ghatak’s work compels attention for its originality and lack of inhibition. Unlike Ray, unlike most Indian filmmakers in fact, Ghatak developed an idiom and style astonishingly free of western cinematic influences… [His] films are quintessentially Bengali; unashamedly melodramatic, they plumb the depths of character to arrive at underlying archetypes - Garga 228.
Ghatak's great sorrow was the partition of Bengal in 1947 and the mass migration that followed only four years after the Bengal famine of 1943 in which 5 million died, the setting for Ray's Distant Thunder (1973). In 1971 East Bengal/Bangladesh was liberated from Pakistan after a war that cost a million lives. Ray said of Ghatak that “he had in him this influence of Soviet cinema, and of the theatre in the dialogue, content and conclusions of his films […] something that was rooted in the soil of Bengal. Ritwik was a Bengali director in heart and soul, a Bengali artist, much more of a Bengali than anyone.”
Ghatak taught at the newly established Film and Theatre training Institute (FTII) at Pune in the mid-60s sharing insights he had developed from a rigorous interest in film language. As a creator of powerful images in an epic style he was virtually unsurpassed not just to serve or express a story but “to give us a world, his ambivalent attitude toward that world as it is and […] energies and forces to transform the world” (Adrian Martin 216). He was strikingly original in his approach to editing – for instance he loved sudden ellipses working the frame together with “sonic intervention” (208). He ignored Hollywood conventions; the only sign of connection to other schools of filmmaking is to classical Soviet cinema, notably to Eisenstein whom he acknowledged as “the father […] the primeval Adam of the cinema.”
Ghatak shared with the Russians and some experimental filmmakers, recognition of the holistic bridging of image and sound. Dating from 1966 he anticipated the now popular concept of sound design identifying five elements: “the weaving of words or dialogue, music, incidental noise or sounds complementing the events appearing as visual in the film, effect noise or suggestive sound supporting a scene, and silence.” The design begins, Ghatak emphasied, not with the literary concept of the screenplay but right at the film's conception, “the filmic treatment” as Martin terms it, the recognition of “sonic space […] belonging fully to the realm neither of image nor of sound, but to both in concert.” (ibid 110-11).
Unable to adjust himself to the official protocols and rigid routines, Ritwik left FTII early but not before making an impression on a number of students who became prominent in the ‘New Wave’ of the 70s and 80s including Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani, Sayeed Mirza, John Abraham and Adoor Gopalakrishnan. There are no precedents in Indian cinema for Ghatak as a filmmaker “investigating cinema's image-sound dialectic in epic constructs.” (Encyc. Indian Cinema 85)
See also Megan Carrigy's take on Ghatak's career in 'Senses of Cinema' (q.v.).
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| Tapan Sinha |
Ray and Ghatak both shared strong connection with the work of revered Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. Prolific Bengali director Tapan Sinha (1924-2009) - 35 films standing out for their variety and richness over four decades - made three films based on Tagore stories: Kabuliwalla (1956), Kashudita Pashan (1961) and Atithi (1966), the last an early Tagore work about a village boy's wanderlust in the course of which he encounters a broad range of people but is always compelled to move on, a story of relationships established and then broken. Drawing on Tagore's uncanny powers of observation, Sinha achieved success on the international festival circuit including an award at Venice (Garga 239).
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| Mrinal Sen |
Mrinal Sen (1923-2018), like Ghatak, migrated to Calcutta/Kolkutta as a teenager from East Bengal/Bangladesh, the city remaining the bedrock of his art as did the partition of Bengal remain Ghatak's. Like Ghatak, Sen came to filmmaking through his involvement with the IPTA (see above) as a Marxist, politically active through his art. His first significant film was his third feature Baishey Shravana/ The Wedding Day (1960) a portrait of a failed marriage that ends in tragedy during the cruel time of the 1943 Bengal famine.
Sen completed 24 features, 1956-2002, the majority in Bengali, others in Hindi, Oriya and Telugu, always working with low to ultra-low budgets. Sen's breakthrough film, Bhuvan Shome (1969), funded by the government Film Finance Corporation established in 1960 encouraged by the continuing phenomenon of Satyajit Ray but initially cautious in its choice of new talent. Bhuvan Shome with its happy conjunction of spirited talents filmed in Hindi on location with a small cast in a total departure from Hindi film formula, wore its sharply observed and acted social commentary lightly. Success with national audiences gave Mrinal Sen’s ninth feature pivotal landmark status in Indian film history encouraging further official sponsorship of “art” cinema. It also ended the first phase of Sen's filmmaking - 9 films from Raal Bore/The Dawn(1956) to Bhuvan Shome - as he experimented with film form in assimilating Russian (Eisenstein and Pudovkin) and French new wave (Godard and Truffaut) influences.
Although all his films were underpinned by what he called his “private Marxism,” Sen's second phase of 7 films, 1971-7, from Interview (1970) to Oka Oorie Katha / The Outsiders (1977), the latter a more overtly politically engaged continuing protest against exploitation in perhaps Sen’s most achieved merging of form and content transmuted into an allegory on poverty. The second phase includes his agit prop 'Calcutta trilogy' : Interview, Calcutta 71 (1972), and Padatik/The Guerilla Fighter (1973).
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| Ek Din Pratidin/And Quiet Rolls the Day |
With his third, most creative, phase, 8 films from Ek Din Pratidin / And Quiet Rolls the Day (1979) to Aamaar Bhuvan/This My Land (2002), in which Sen transitioned to strengthen the narrative framework in his films of social analysis and psychological introspection, having noted that “introspection is a ruthless business.” He said in 1991 that “my interest these days is much less what happens to the individual but how the individual reacts in a particular situation.” His final film, This My Land, made after a break of ten years as he struggled with ill health, was clearly intended as his valedictory. Sen departs from his own norms to portray a triangular love story and affection for village life, Tagore songs bringing ”hope, dance, death, birth.”
Writing in 1981, Derek Malcolm commented that Sen's contribution in the then 18 features already to his credit, was not as the author of 'monumentally great films' for international art house release, “but that often against considerable odds, he has traced the social and political ferment of India with greater resilience and audacity than any other contemporary Indian director.”
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| Guru Dutt |
The legend of Guru Dutt (1925-64) as the great tragic artist of Hindi cinema, rests on three masterworks and his early death at 39, a probable suicide. His short career coincided with a peak decade of Bombay cinema in the fifties. “Dutt was a genuine artist and undoubtedly suffered, but his image as a friendless martyr to art was largely self-constructed.” (Levich) All his films were commercially successful except for his most personal work, Kaagaz ke Pool, and he benefited from the support of family and industry colleagues.
His breakthrough film as director, Baazi/The Gamble (1951), Levich suggests, was probably India's first film noir, inspired by Hollywood's Gilda (1946), and the beginning of a friendship and working relationship with actor Dev Anand. His next film Jaal/The Net (52) began his career-long collaboration with the brilliant cinematographer VK Murthy. “Together they fashioned a look that was to become the hallmark of all subsequent Dutt films: striking long lens close-ups, affording a degree of intimacy with stars, rarely seen outside silent cinema, a deeply detailed chiaroscuro, most distinctively realised as a “found” effect as the camera follows actors through cleverly illuminated sets,and an imaginative and thoroughly disciplined staging of musical sequences” (ibid). Aar Paar/This Side or That (54) as a comedy of class relations broke new ground for Hindi cinema while Mr and Mrs (55), “sustains the mood of lively urban naturalism [of Jaal] in the context of a [Preston Sturges] inspired romantic farce.”
These early films give no hint of the darkness of Pyaasa/The Thirsty One (57) that was to follow, “the tale of an artist crushed by the soulless materialism of post-Independence India.” Dutt plays a rootless and destitute poet, misunderstood and exploited by society and jilted in love. A plot twist borrowed from Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels lightened the darkness for audiences. Filled with stereotypes “it glows with luminosity generated by the emotional intensity of the poet and the high quality of writer Sahir's poetry that is effectively integrated into the narrative, heightening mood and emotional impact,” (Garga) ensuring the film's success with audiences and the critics.
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| Pyaasa |
It was around this time that Dutt suffered his first episodes of depression. However, encouraged by the success of Pyaasa, he followed with his reflexive masterpiece Kaagaz ke Pool/Paper Flowers (1959), the closest a director has come to assume the full mantle of auteurin the fifties heyday of Hindi cinema, and probably since. Central is the decline and fall of a director in thirties Bombay cinema “whose tragic flaw is an inability to distinguish between real life and celluloid fantasy […] a multi-layered interplay with dramatic irony: poet Singha's romantic obsessions and drink-sodden decline paralleling the [classic] tragedy of Devdas,” the director is preparing to film (Levich). It was superbly shot by Murthy in 'Scope fully utilising the widescreen dimensions and the interplay of light and shadow. The film was a failure with audiences and devastatingly also, with the critics; Dutt had underestimated their addiction to happy endings.
He was shattered by the failure and never directed another film. But he did undertake a film as producer and artistic collaborator, another masterpiece, Sahib Bibi aur Ghuman / Master,Wife and Slave (1962), a saga of the declining aristocracy at the turn of the 19th century, the unremittingly slow disintegration of a feudal family similar in subject to Satyajit Ray's Jalsaghar / The Music Room, and it has also been compared with Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons. Levich comments that Dutt had assembled a creative team so well versed in his methods and style that any attempt to attribute creative authority is superfluous. The film was a success, the writer and credited director, Abrar Alvi, received an award for direction but he never directed another film.
In 1960, while the films of Ghatak went unnoticed outside Bengal, those of Satyajit Ray were well on the way to achieving sarkari heera, a 'jewel' status, in international festivals and art houses, that impressed government. The Film Institute of India (FTII) at Pune and the Film Finance Corporation (FFC), were ostensibly set up in 1960 to support minority cinema. By the end of the decade this initiative had made little difference to the cause of such an alternative cinema, the FFC backing only those films seen to have a reasonable chance of success (Krishen). In 1968, the FFC announced a new policy of supporting only those films which would not otherwise attract commercial investment. The following year Mrinal Sen madeBhuvan Shome centred on the story of a hard-boiled railway official who discovers the pastoral delights of rural India, As already noted Bhuvan Shome is generally considered to have inaugurated the Parallel Cinema in India although Ray thought it worked with national audiences “only because it used some of the popular conventions of cinema which helped to soften the edges of its occasionally spiky syntax.” (ibid).
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| Girish Karnad |
In 1970 two uncompromising new films emerged that were to represent two new contrary trends in the Parallel Cinema. Samskara / Last Rites (1970), the script adapted from a Kannada novel by a poet and social activist Pattabhirama Reddy, “one of the leaders of progressive Telugu writing in the 1950s,” questioned the relevance of tradition to contemporary life centred on issues surrounding cremation. This aroused protest from the Brahmin community which resulted in the banning of the film for a time. On the admission of the project's prime mover and lead actor, Girish Karnad (1938-2019), the direction by Reddy of a wholly non-professional cast was “fired by the enthusiasm of a number of contributors” to achieve a fresh authenticity. Virtually “all the technicalities” were left to resourceful Australian cinematographer Tom Cowan. Samsara earned a modest return but was made for a pittance of 200,000 rupees ($US12,500) showing for the first time outside Bengal that a realistic low budget cinema was possible. (ibid)
Samskara marked both the beginning of a new Kannada language cinema in the state of Karnataka, and also led to Oxford educated Karnad's career in theatre - he wrote two acclaimed plays - and film in partnership with B V Karnath who had staged Karnad's plays. Their first film collaboration, Varnasha Vriksha/The Family Tree (1971), takes up issues involving the Brahminical code (Karnad was himself a high caste Brahmin) in the context of marriage. Karnath then scored and directed the landmark Chomana Dudi / Choma's Dream(1973) on the theme of the tribulations of untouchability (Garga 280-1).
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| Mani Kaul |
The second trend was represented by two other filmmakers making their first films with FFC loans “India’s first truly experimental film, probing the very boundaries of narrative cinema ” With Uski Roti/A Day's Bread (1969), Mani Kaul (1944-2011) in his first film made “India’s first truly experimental film“ (Krishen 29) […] cleverly manipulat[ing] one of the enduring images of traditional Indian art, the woman who waits for her lover to return.” In the film it is a Punjabi truck driver's wife who waits, day after day, on the highway outside her village for her husband to stop and collect his lunch packet. “Kaul intended to evoke the breakup of village society, the loss of innocence and purpose in the machine age.” While Samskara achieved a cinema release, Uski Roti was too slow and disconcerting to have other than special single screenings (ibid). Undismayed Kaul followed Uski Roti in 1973 with Ashadh and Duvidha (1973) in which he carried further forward “his aim of disrupting conventional narrative and realistic modes of speech and performance” (ibid 30). In this Kaul was no longer alone, fellow Film Institute colleague Kumar Shahani making Maya Darpan (1973) “even more preoccupied with abstract formal issues.”
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| Basu Chatterjee |
In another trend, which broke less radically with the established pattern, Basu Chatterjee (1917-2020) a film society regular “enchanted most of all by comedies from Czechoslovakia, had long thought of making films himself” (Vasudev 34). Given the opportunity by the FFC, Sara Akash (1971) described by Vasudev as “low budget, coherent, mildly thought-provoking cinema [which] was to become an established viable alternative to the cinema of spectacle.” Made without stars in a middle class setting “its style is neo-realistic, the content frequently social conflict, the structure linear narrative.” Many Indian films to follow were patterned as classical narrative contrasting with the commercially and aesthetically mainstream Hindi film.
The movement for a new cinema had been gathering some momentum in Kerala in the South dominated by the huge Madras - based Tamil film industry. The impetus for of ‘another kind’ of film in Malayalam language came from the success of Chemmeen / The Shrimp (1965), filmed out of the studio on location, the story set in a Keralan fishing village with its culture and mythology. Made by Ramu Kariat based on a novel by Kerala’s best known author, Chemmeen made history as the first film from the South to win the national best film award. The strong presence of film societies in Kerala provided a further support for the local viability of the regional cinema.
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| Adoor Gopalakrishnan |
Adoor Gopalakrishnan a recent graduate of the Pune Film Institute, with other graduates within different filmmaking disciplines, built up a co-operative over five years with studio facilities, taking on not only production, but also distribution and exhibition of what they considered were “quality films”, publishing film literature and starting film societies (Vasudev 85). Gopalakrisnan’s first two feature films, Swayamvaram / One’s Own Choice (1972) and Kodiyettam / The Ascent (1977), the latter five years in the making, took up the issue of the dilemmas faced by the individual, in contrast to the post-Samskara new Kannada cinema preoccupation with the community based issues of Brahminism, untouchability and casteism (ibid). Gopalakrishnan made an international impact with his third feature Elippathayam / The Rat-Trap (1981) described as “a pitiless study of a man, Udi, who is too selfish to face a changing future and withdraws like a rat in a hole” (Garga 271). Garga quotes Gopalakrishnan’s confession that “ Elippathayam is probably the closest to me. I have almost reproduced my own family in it. The house that you see in the film is a recreation of my ancestral home and in some ways the character is also me” (ibid).
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Ashish Rajadhyaksha “Indian Cinema ” Oxford History of World Cinema Nowell-Smith ed. 1996
Paul Willemen & Ashish Rajadhyaksha Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema 1999
B.D. Garga So Many Cinemas The Motion Picture in India 1996
Aruna Vasudev The New Indian Cinema 1996
Erik Barnouw & S Krishnaswarmy Indian Cinema 1980
Pradip Krishen “India’s Parallel Cinema” essay in Public Culture v4/1 Fall 1991
Satti Khanna “Satyajit Ray’ International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers vol 2 ed Christopher Lyon 1984
Erik Nether ‘Satyajit’s Apu Trilogy Restored” Hudson Arts Review Summer 2015 available online
Jacob Levich “Guru Dutt” Film Comment Sept.-Oct. 2009; “Subcontinental Divide” (Ghatak & Ray) ibid Mar-Apr 97
John Pym “The Chess Players” review Monthly Film Bulletin March 1979
Adrian Martin “Five Minutes and Fifteen Seconds with Ritwik Ghatak” Mise en Scene and Film Style 2014
Derek Malcolm “Guerrilla Fighter” tribute to Mrinal Sen Sight & Sound Autumn 1981 available online
Shruti Naragamswamy & Mark Cousins Tributes to Mrinal Sen Sight & Sound 2019 available online
Megan Carrigy “Ritwik Ghatak” Great Directors Senses of Cinema Dec. 2003
Helen Goritsas “Satyajit Ray” Great Directors Senses of Cinema May 2002
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Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links
Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more
Part Two - Defining Art Cinema
Part Three - From Classicism to Modernism
Part Four - Authorship and Narrative
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
Part Six (4) - New York Film-makers - Stanley Kubrick Creator of Forms
Part Six (5) ‘New Hollywood’ (1) - Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Pauline Kael and BONNIE AND CLYDE
Part Six (6) Francis Ford Coppola: Standing at the crossroads of art and industry
6(9) France - Part One The New Wave and The Cahiers du Cinema Group
6(10) France - Part Two - The Left Bank/Rive Gauche Group and an Independent
6(11) France - Part Three - Young Godard
6(12) France - Part Four - Godard:Visionary and Rebel
6 (13) France Part 5 Godard with Gorin, Miéville : Searching for an activist voice
6(14) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Bresson
6 (15) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Jacques Tati
6 (16) - Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Carl Th Dreyer
6 (17) - Italy and Luchino Visconti
6(18 - Italy and Roberto Rossellini - Part One
6(19) - Rossellini, INDIA and the new Historical realism
6(20) - Rossellini in Australia
6 (21) - Italy - Michelangelo Antonioni
6 (22) - Italy - Federico Fellini, Ermanno Olmi
6 (23) - Italy - Pasolini, Rosi
6 (24) - Interregnum - Director/Auteur/Autoren
6 (26) - Alexander Kluge Part One
6 (27) - Alexander Kluge Part Two
6 (28) - The Young German Cinema: Reitz, Schlondorff, von Trotta
6(29 ) West German Cinema - Fassbinder
6 (30) West German Cinema - Straub & Huillet
6 (33) Nordic Cinemas - Bergman and Widerberg
6 (34) - Scandinavia - Sjoman, Zetterling, Troell
6 (35) - East Germany - Konrad Wolf, Frank Beyer
6 (36) - East Central Europe - Poland
6(37) - East Central Europe - Hungary Part One
6 (38) East Central Europe - Miklos Jancso
6 (39) East Central Europe - Czechoslovakia
6 (40) East Central Europe - Yugoslavia
6 (42) - Asia - Japan - Part One
6 (44) - Japan - Part Three - Shohei Imamura
6 (45) Asia - India Pt 1 - Satyajit Ray
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