Debut
The film is considered one of the ten best film debuts in history
Satyajik Ray, the most prominent figure in Indian film history, was a film director, writer, composer, film producer, screenwriter, film editor, lyricist, journalist, songwriter, children’s literature writer, painter, cinematographer, poet and film critic. His debut feature, ‘Pather Panchali’ (‘The Song of the Road’), is a film of dazzling beauty, considered one of the ten best film debuts in history.
Satyajit Ray was born in Calcutta, when India was part of the British Empire, on May 2, 1921, dying, also in Calcutta, on April 23, 1992. He is considered one of the great artists of the twentieth century for his style films subtle, austere and lyrical. Ray was born into an important Bengali family of literati and artists. He graduated from Presidency College in Calcutta and studied fine arts at Santiniketan, where he was deeply influenced by the humanism of Rabindranath Tagore, the founder of the university.
After completing his training, Ray studied graphic design before turning to film directing. When Jean Renoir came to Calcutta to shoot the movie ‘The River’. Satyajit Ray helped him find locations, and that’s when he brought up his idea to shoot ‘Pather Panchali’, which had been on his mind for some time, and Renoir encouraged him to keep going. In 1950, Ray was sent to London for work. During his three-month stay in the British capital, he watched 99 films, including the neorealist film ‘Bicycle Thief’ by Vittorio De Sica, which had a strong impact on him. Ray would later say that he left the room that day determined to be a filmmaker.
Ray had decided that ‘Pather Panchali’ – a classic formative account of Bengali literature (published in 1928) – would serve as the plot for his first film. This somewhat autobiographical novel tells the moving story of a Bengali family plagued by bad luck. The father, Harihara, is a secular priest, healer, dreamer, and poet. Sabajaya, the mother, works to feed a family, which welcomes with joy and hope the arrival of a new son, Apu. Ray focuses on describing the growth of Apu,
For the shoot Ray assembled an inexperienced crew, although later on, both his camera operator Subrata Mitra and his artistic director Bansi Chandragupta would garner great acclaim. The cast consisted of mostly amateur artists. Filming began in late 1952, using Ray’s personal savings. I was hoping that once the first shots were done, I would be able to raise the funds the project needed; however, that investment would never come. “Pather Panchali” was shot over an unusually long three-year period, as filming only became possible from time to time, when Ray or production manager Anil Chowdhury managed to raise the necessary money. During filming, Ray rejected funding from sources that required some script change or producer oversight, and ignored advice from the government (which ended up funding the film anyway) to incorporate a happy ending by uniting Apu’s family to a development project. Even greater than Renoir’s spirit was to receive him after showing a sequence to John Huston who was in India looking for locations for ‘The Man Who Could Reign’. The sequence shows the particular vision that Apu and his sister have of the train crossing the fields.
Thanks to a loan from the Government of West Bengal, the film was finally made and released in 1955, obtaining great success among critics and audiences. Issues such as misery, despair, social inequality, calamity, misfortune, old age, death, loss, progress, are seen through the eyes of Apu during his humble childhood in a fierce but beautiful, sad way. but of great spiritual richness, relying on tracking shots, panoramas, close-ups and very close-ups in the most appropriate way possible.
The film is selected for the Cannes Festival, achieving the award for the best human document, and from where it was released for worldwide distribution, screening in long sessions both in India and abroad. In Spain it was released with the subtitle of ‘The song of the way’ through TVE in the 70s.
‘Pather Panchali’ was the first installment of the so-called ‘Apu trilogy’, by Satyajit Ray, although at first it had never been planned as a first installment. It was the worldwide success that led to the character of Apu being retaken in the director’s next two films, ‘Aparajito’ (1956) and ‘El mundo de Apu’ (1959).
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