Country: India
Director: Satyajit Ray
Time: 2 hours and 5 minutes
What it Elicits: Childhood, poverty, a changing world
Where Can I Get It: Criterion
Directed by the prolific Satyajit Ray, a one-man institution of Bengali cinema, the elegant and moving Panther Panchali traces a poor family in West Bengal at the beginning of the twentieth century. The action, based on the 1929 novel of the same name and shot on a shoestring budget, centers on the rural Bengali village of Nischindipur, offering a series of vignettes featuring the family’s four members and their elder cousin Indir. Sensitively capturing both the support and strife bound up in the quotidian frustrations and joys of village life, the film underlines both the aspirations and disappointments of the impoverished, while paying homage to subjects often absent from classic Indian cinema of the period. Built around the experiences of the two central children, Durga and Apu, the film likewise functions as a bildungsroman, exploring both the self-discovery inherent in adolescence and the world’s unfurling wonder (both enchanting and tragic) as caught through children’s eyes.
Bollywood, the film industry most typically associated with India and at this point often used as a catchphrase for Indian cinema, refers to Hindi language films—the “B” a reference to Bombay, the erstwhile name of Mumbai. Ray’s lineage and influence, though broad, remained tied much more to Bengali cultural production and experience. In this way his film marks a double departure, emphasizing the Bengali language and experience and self-consciously departing from Bollywood subject matter of the period by focusing, as the film’s star Soumitra Chatterjee later put it, “on the common masses... bringing forth a fresh and true picture.” In this respect, Ray’s quite open debt to Vittoro De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) informs the “neo-realist” flavor of the film, with its insistence on location shoots, non-professional actors, and its depiction of village life without undue romance or sentimentality. To quote Chatterjee once again, “[Panther Panchali] changed not only the nature of Bengali films but of Indian films in general. People began to reconsider what cinema could be.” It’s well worth your time.
Go Down The (Satyajit Ray) Rabbit Hole With:
Satyajit Ray — The Big City (1963)
Satyajit Ray — Days and Nights in the Forest (1970)