Pather Panchali (1955)
Directed by Satyajit Ray

Film Review

The film that brought Indian cinema to an international audience for the first time was this remarkable debut work from Satyajit Ray, India's greatest filmmaker and one of the most highly regarded cineastes of all time.  Pather Panchali is the first instalment in a series of three films which make up Ray's acclaimed Apu Trilogy.  The following two films, Aparajito (1956) and Apur Sansar (1959), continue the story of Apu's growth from childhood to fatherhood.  The literal translation of Pather Panchali is Song of the Little Road, a title which succinctly captures the simplicity and understated poetry of Ray's film.

Prior to this, Indian cinema was not concerned with realistic portrayals of everyday life.  In common with Hollywood, its raison d'être was to entertain the masses, to distract ordinary people from their uncomfortable, unfulfilled lives, not to remind them how awful things were.  Badly made and prone to the worst excesses of melodrama, there was no international market for such films, and the rest of the world could have been forgiven for thinking that India had no film industry of any kind.  Satyajit Ray's debut feature was to change this perception forever.

The story of the making of the Pather Panchali is worthy of a film in its own right.  In the mid-1940s, employed as a graphic designer, Satyajit Ray was working on an illustrated version of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay's best selling novel when he decided he would like to adapt it as a film.  With his limited resources, he set about making the film in 1950, hiring a cast of mainly non-professional actors and still photographer Subrata Mitra, who had no prior experience, as his cinematographer.  What little understanding of filmmaking Ray had was obtained by watching Jean Renoir and his crew at work during the shooting of The River (1951).  The only professional film actor to appear in the film was Kanu Banerjee, who plays Apu's father.  Revelling in the part of the wizened crone Indir is 80-year-old Chunibala Devi, a retired stage actress with so much charisma (and so few teeth) that she almost steals the film.

Within a few months, Ray exhausted his own funds (which he supplemented by selling his LP collection) and had to suspend filming for a year whilst he raised money to complete the film.  By somehow creating the impression he was making a documentary about road-building, Ray managed to persuade the Government of West Bengal to grant him a loan. After a personal recommendation from John Huston (who was reconnoitring locations for an aborted attempt to make The Man Who Would Be King) he secured additional funding from New York's Museum of Modern Art.  From start to finish, the film took five years to complete, but the experience was to prove invaluable for Ray and his technical team, who would go on to deliver a string of uncompromising realist masterpieces.

When he was preparing this film, Satyajit Ray was inspired by the social realist movement that was beginning to impact on European and American cinema in the early 1950s.  He was particularly influenced by the Italian neo-realists and was greatly affected when he saw a screening of Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948) during a brief stay in London.  Ray combines the harsh realist approach of De Sica and Roberto Rossellini with a poetry reflective of Indian culture to create something new and beguiling.  Pather Panchali is a film that laments the torment of poverty whilst celebrating the miracle of existence, a work that is both intensely heart-wrenching and spiritually uplifting.  Ravi Shankar's music, played mostly on sitar, the instrument that is most evocative of India, adds to the sublime poetry of the stark black and white images.  There is a searing authenticity and lyrical power to this film that makes it virtually unique in the medium of cinema.

The slow pace of the film and its rambling narrative reflect the languorous and uncertain lives of its protagonists, reminding us that life is a messy, chaotic affair, not the tidy painting-by-numbers nonsense that we find all too often in conventional cinema.   Although the film is loosely structured, it has a coherence which becomes more and more evident as it builds towards its tragic climax.  Not only are the characters convincingly drawn, we also see the world through their eyes.  We experience something of the desperation of a mother who wonders how she will feed her family.  We share the fanciful optimism of the father who believes a better future awaits him and his loved ones.  We feel the rebellious spirit of the daughter as she approaches womanhood with trepidation. And we see the world from the perspective of the young Apu, not as a nightmare filled with torment and anguish, but as a marvellous adventure playground, a place of limitless wonder and excitement.

Reaction to Pather Panchali was initially lukewarm when it was first seen in India and the Bengal government was hostile to its negative portrayal of their country, yet the film soon became enormously popular.  Its international release was no less spectacular, even if some critics (notably François Truffaut) were highly dismissive of it, and it won the Best Human Document prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956.  The film's success established Satyajit Ray as a leading filmmaker and overnight transformed the fortunes of Indian cinema, laying the foundation for what is now one of the country's largest and most successful industries.

More than half a century after its first release, Pather Panchali has lost none of its power to enthral and move an audience.  One of the most beautifully composed and humanist works in world cinema, it has universal appeal because it deals with themes we can all relate to.  The never-ending struggle to overcome adversity.  The need to face up to disease, decay and death with dignity.  And something else: that innate part of us that compels us, even on the darkest day, to look upon the world with a child's wonder and delight, and smile, perhaps in gratitude.

Film Synopsis

A poor Bengal village in the 1920s.  Like many of his people, Harihar Ray struggles to earn enough money to keep his family from starvation.  An educated man, he has dreams of becoming a writer, but with a family to support he must put these ambitions on hold.  He works as a bookkeeper for a local landlord, but his earnings are meagre and often overdue.  His wife Sarbajaya finds the hardship she must endure increasingly intolerable and vents her frustration on her daughter Durga, berating her for stealing fruit from a neighbour's garden to feed her old aunt, the crippled beggar woman Indir.  The Rays' young son, Apu, is also proving to be a handful.  Sharing his sister's streak for trouble, he often goes off to explore the area, determined to see the railway line of which he has heard so much.   One day, Harihar leaves his family so that he can earn more money in the cities.  Months pass but Sarbajaya has no news from her husband, and no money either.  As she sinks further and further into poverty, things become unbearable.  Then tragedy strikes...