Pather Panchali

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"Pather Panchali", Satyajit Ray's debut film about life in a Bengali village, was the first movie from India to gain wide recognition and acclaim in the west. It is an affecting story of a rural family struggling to deal with poverty and tragedy in their ancestral home. Ray adapted the script from Bibhuti Bihushaw Banerjee's semi-autobiographical novel of the same title and retells it with natural beauty and a quiet perspective. The filmmaker, who came from a literary and artistic background(He was a product of the Indian Renaissance) was interested in the contemporary problems of his country-and he shared with the Neorealist films from Italy- a simple and direct approach to making movies. Ray created ordinary scenes that were incredibly life-like. His films contained very few strains of artifice. He believed that the raw material of cinema was life itself. Ray generally concentrated on small subjects and ordinary people. He favored using non-actors and shooting on location to heighten the realism. He made films in his own style; dignified and subtle; sincere and with a conscience. In "Pather Panchali" (Song of the Little Road") Ray makes superb use of his milieu. The viewer immediately feels the cramped conditions of the families' decaying house and the open-air confines of the surrounding forest. When Ray sends his camera beyond the village, the observer can sense the allure and freedom of the vast fields that spring immodestly from a thin, winding trail. Rays' was a cinema of thought and feeling, in which emotion was deliberately restrained because it is so strong. This restraint adds to the psychological intensity in his work. Nearly all of his films are marked by this remarkable depth of feeling. "Pather Panchali", the first installment of the Apu Trilogy("Aparajito" and "The World of Apu" would follow) depicts a young boy (Apu) exploring his ever-expanding universe with a growing sense of wonder. Ray excelled at showing how children and adolescents confront mystery and joy; sadness and death. The director shows Apu's burgeoning awareness with a masterful use of the long shot. High-angled, distant shots track Apu and his older sister Durga, as they run spiritedly through white-kashed fields. This sense of discovery gives the film it's emotional power. The director's main subject was India-it's customs and culture. It's conflicts between the traditional way of life and the impact and influence of the West. He tried arduously to capture this synthesis between western ideas and traditional Hindu values. His concern for human problems and not issues of national politics gave his films universal appeal. "Pather Panchali" delineates the small joys and acute sorrows of a poor Indian family. It is an endearing testament that poverty does not nullify love and that even the most afflicted person can find some modest pleasures in their world. The film's indigenous sound track is vital to Ray's story of ancestral limitations. Twanging ektaras, wailing tarshehnais and six-stringed sitars resound liberally throughout the movie. It would be difficult to imagine "Pather Panchali" without it's memorable score. Satyajit Ray was an unpretentious filmmaker. He was genuinely uninterested in commercial considerations. His films were life-affirming, authentic and honest; gentle and poetic- truthful observations on human behavior that employed simple but strong themes. Ray's unadorned style of film-making was intimate, probing, and revealing. (Possible spoiler) The final scene shows the grieving family leaving their home in an ox-driven carriage to begin a new life. A trailing camera in medium close-up captures a compelling mixture of emotions on their faces. Expressions of pain and resolution; hope and despair; the future and the past. A seemingly simple yet unmistakably powerful scene that typifies Satyajit Ray's profound cinema. A cinema of gentle but deep observation, understanding and unabashed love of the human race.

I won't go into detail about this film, because the greatest films ask that you really just sit back and enjoy them without questioning. This is in a very very small handful of films that create a kind of 'ecstatic truth' that Werner Herzog is always talking about. There is not a moment of hand-fed emotion, and that's probably what hits you first after the film is finished. This is probably why the film has not hit even the first 250 on the IMDb list, while it is more easily accessible than, say, most 'foreign' pictures, it still refuses at every turn to make a cliché out of itself or to be unfair to the audience or its characters by making its machinations obvious, a ploy that most filmgoers fall for time and time again. A reason for this might be that Ray, a young director at the time who had already worked with Jean Renoir on his landmark film about India called 'the River', really didn't have a lot of money or power to wield around, and made this tight, intimate story on a shoestring with an amateur crew, without real concern for anything else but this story that he wanted to tell. A lot of that comes across - the locations, the actors - were all real, however this is a work of masterful collaboration between director, cinematographer, actors, sound recordist, and particularly the editors, a collaboration that is unparalleled in most modern, big budget films. This is a movie created solely with passion, and I am joining in the crusade to make this one of the top 250 on IMDb, though it should, by default, belong on the top 10 of anybody's list.

I am a big fan of many Italian Neo-realist films, particularly films by De Sica, such as "The Children Are Watching Us" and "Umberto D." and I have really enjoyed several of Indian director Satyajit Ray, such as "The Big City"...so I assumed I would enjoy "Pather Panchali". After all, Parallel Cinema (also called 'New Indian Cinema') is India's answer to this style of film which uses real folks (non actors) in realistic situations. But, as I watched, I was shocked that I did not like this film. I felt oddly disconnected from it and at odds with the film experts who see "Pather Panchali" as a classic. Heck, it's currently the highest rated Indian film on IMDB....yet I just didn't like it. I felt the film was very, very slow and I had a hard time focusing on the story...mostly because there really wasn't much of one. These people are very poor, generally miserable and it just felt oppressive. Just because I didn't like this film doesn't mean I won't try the other two films in Ray's 'Apu Trilogy'...but I felt disappointed by this one and I really wanted to like the movie...but didn't. By the way, I've probably reviewed at least a couple hundred Indian films....so it's not like I don't enjoy their pictures nor Ray's work. It was just this particular one...and much of it might be because there's been so much hype about this being a great film, my expectations couldn't help but be too high.

What a wonderful film. For those who have not watched any films from India or heard of Ray, I strongly recommend it. Full of sadness, hope, innocence, and despair, it is an emotionally evocative portrait of the life of an Indian family, their trials, and their courage and persistence throughout. They go on, not because they are exceptional, but because they must, because they are human. Ray does a masterful job of capturing the simple joys of childhood, and the ambitions and dreams which make us all human, regardless of where we are. Simple scenes such as a disfigured elderly woman seated on a porch, singing of her approaching death, are very moving. I have never seen the basic elements of life treated with such an incisive yet soft touch as Ray has in this film. It is wonderful to watch in comparison to the broad writing strokes and vulgar generalities of most directing and writing today. At the risk of sounding trite, this is a film which is not merely entertainment or art, but one which reaches into your heart and makes a place for itself there. It belongs there.

...it is one of those greatest works of art..so lyrical yet so composed. there is one phrase that Ray has used extensively in his writings; something that his professor use to say when he was studying painting in Shantiniketan: "look at Fujiyama, Fire within and Calm without. There is the symbol of true oriental artist..." i think it best describes Ray's work where he suggests in his cinema enormous reserves of power and feelings which never spill into emotional displays. the strength and variety of the cinematic craftsmanship in this film can be explored endlessly, but what strikes me the most, is the way his work has confirmed, sustained and nurtured the existence of an art form, western in origin, transplanted and taking root in Indian soil. in a way pather panchali is so 'rooted'. it is so earthy and 'regional' at core and may be thats why its 'international', may be thats why, despite being the product of its time and place it is universal in its appeal. the moods and moments that he creates are simply 'matchless'. so simple, and yet so profound. the Indir Thakuran sequences of the film remain for me the highest, noblest and rare expression of art in Indian films so far (except films by Ghatak and Mrinal Sen) The film induces a kind of contemplation and a sense of wonder, about the truth, individual and privet. almost without you being aware of it it opens windows to the truth that lies within and beyond the boundaries of cinema itself.

One recurring theme is the precondition, the act and the aftermath of theft of goods belonging to the neighbor: the children first steal vegetables, then even the beads of a necklace, finally only a coconut which had fallen from a tree due to the Monsoon wind. The embarrassment caused is understandable, as the people are very poor. There was at least funny scene: a kitten playing with a dog. Else the kittens are always kept at their neck (as if we could not keep them under their belly) and thrown to ground. In an extraordinary scene we see a Bengali steam train passing by, and the boy running beneath it. The boy, as meager as he is, anyway seems at every opportunity be running through backyard and field. Note that I wrote SILENT PICTURES, not SILENT MOVIE, because this film makes a persistent static impression. So that I fell twice into sleep, something which had never happened to me before. Hitchcock warned not to make films by photographing people who are talking. This films shows a lot of scenes with mother, children, neighbors talking. In addition, we become witness of how to cook under that environment. What kept me a bit under suspense: the people always walk or run bare-feet through the bosky backyard and garden, as if there could never be a snake. The sound was of bad quality, the soundtrack by Ravi Shankar, too. It is not sufficient just to play the sitar a fast a possible. I have the impression that it is the one and same person who wrote the other reviews, which are too good to be true. Or maybe they are employees of the Bengali film office, since that was the sponsor and producer of the work. I have written reviews for films which are nearly 100 years old (and they are FAR better than this one). I have also annotated another upbringing film: Padre Padrone. Thus I don't consider it primarily due to my lack of understanding that I cannot agree with the adulations here.

There is this one scene in Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali when the eruption of a conflict between Apu's family and a quarrelsome neighbour brought the film to a complete standstill (for me anyway). Those few characters' state of mind and their relationship dynamics at that point in time, was conveyed with such explosive intensity, I got gut punched drunk. Pather Panchali boasts of suitably melodramatic yet highly intuitive performances. Its breath taking cinematography ranks alongside existential beauty this side of Malick heaven. The musical scoring, by the great Ravi Shankar, is identifiably Indian, yet universally sublime. Together, these myriad parts melded into a whole so grand in its social consciousness, so incisively intimate in its portrait of one family, I could do nothing but be slowly devoured like a most willing prey. On 4th Oct 2003, I saw my all time favourite film, Tokyo Story. The feeling I got today from Pather Panchali, is as close as is possible from that fateful October day. Pather Panchali is one of the best films I have ever seen. This will be a night to remember. Now on with the other two then.

I have just finished Pather Panchali. To be honest, it took almost two weeks to watch it. Not only interruptions, but the shear poverty of the individuals--the family--is overwhelming. Each member exhibits their poverty and destitution in a different way. My favorite character is Durga, who gives and gives until she reaches the point where she is tired of not receiving. I will forever remember this movie, and I hope to watch the other two parts of the trilogy. I have to have this film in my collection. Movies that make you think and think again, and search your heart for answers that sometimes never come.