The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)
IN CONTEXT
GENRE
Drama
DIRECTOR
Satyajit Ray
WRITERS
Satyajit Ray (screenplay); Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay (novel)
STARS
Kanu Banerjee, Karuna Banerjee, Subir Banerjee, Chunibala Devi
BEFORE
1948 Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief inspires Ray to make the story of Apu.
AFTER
1956 Ray’s follow-up to Pather Panchali, Aparajito, continues the story of Apu, who journeys to a new life in Calcutta.
1959 The final movie in the “Apu Trilogy,” Apur Sansar follows the adult Apu on a trip to a provincial town that will change his life forever.
Pather Panchali tells the story of Apu (Subir Banerjee), a young boy learning about the world around him. He lives with his mother, father, sister, and aunt in an impoverished Bengali village in India. The family edges ever closer to financial ruin, but Apu’s eyes are full of wonder. Although his life is blighted by despair, he doesn’t yet know it, and director Satyajit Ray allows the audience to share in his protagonist’s innocence.
Apu isn’t the only one who is learning. Ray himself had never written or directed a movie before; his cast had never acted before, with the exception of Chunibala Devi; the photographer Subrata Mitra, whose cinematography captures the languid beauty of an Indian summer, had never worked with moving images; even Ravi Shankar, who provides the movie’s shimmering sitar score, and who would later be world famous, was a novice.
On the first day of shooting, Ray had no script, but Apu’s story—based loosely on the novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay—was all in the director’s head. He had already visualized it in a series of illustrations for the novel, which perhaps explains why so much of Pather Panchali’s beguiling power can be found in its imagery: white-hot light cutting swathes through the forest; the gathering clouds of the monsoon; water bugs twitching on a pond; a steam train glimpsed on the horizon.
The family cares for the elderly Indir Thakrun, played by Chunibala Devi, who died before the movie was released.
Slow speed
Apu and his sister Durga (Uma Das Gupta) delight in running alongside the train, whose whistle vibrates along the wires of vast electricity pylons and can be heard long before the train itself appears. This is the fastest moving thing in Ray’s tranquil movie.
“When I’m better,” says Durga later on, as she lies dying of a fever, “we’ll go and look at the trains again.” It’s possible that Durga believes she will recover, and that Apu believes it too, but the audience knows there is really no hope. The camera paces queasily to and fro in the storm-wracked sickroom, following Apu’s mother, Sarbojaya, as she watches her daughter slip away. It’s a long, heartbreaking moment, and one that Apu will carry with him to the end of the movie and beyond, into two more movies about his life.
"Beautiful, sometimes funny, and full of love."
Pauline Kael
Sarbojaya Ray (Karuna Banerjee) tends to her sick daughter Durga (Uma Das Gupta). She is helpless to stop a deadly fever.
SATYAJIT RAY Director
“Never before had one man had such a decisive impact on the films of his culture,” wrote American film critic Roger Ebert, summing up Satyajit Ray’s contribution to cinema in his review of the filmmaker’s “Apu Trilogy.” Before Ray, Indian movies were generally musicals, romances, and swashbucklers; after Apu, something of what it meant to be alive in India had been captured on film, and a new cultural tradition was born.
Ray founded Calcutta’s first film society in 1947. He was working at an advertising agency when he directed his first feature, Pather Panchali, which won awards in France, London, and Venice. This and the two other Apu movies all strove for realism, but Ray later experimented with genre cinema, including fantasy and science fiction. His instinct for character, however, remained strong. He died at 70 in 1992.
Key movies
1955 Pather Panchali
1956 Aparajito
1959 Apur Sansar
1964 Charulata
1970 Aranyer Din Ratri
What else to watch: The Bicycle Thief (1948) ✵ Jalsaghar (1958) ✵ The Cloud-Capped Star (1960) ✵ Charulata (1964) ✵ Ashani Sanket (1973)