Term Paper on "Pather Panchali"

Term Paper 15 pages (3990 words) Sources: 3 Style: Chicago

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali

The prolific Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray once defined his cinematic aesthetic as follows:

Realism in film is not the naturalism of the painter who sets up his easel before his subject and proceeds to record faithfully what he sees. For a film maker there is no ready-made reality that he can straightaway capture on film. What surrounds him is only raw material. He must at all times use this material selectively. Objects, locales, people, speech, viewpoints - everything must be carefully chosen, to the serve the ends of his story. In other words, creating reality is part of the creative process, where the imagination is aided by the eye and the ear (Ray 20-21).

In what follows, we will analyze Ray's most famous film, Pather Panchali, from the standpoint of this doctrine of cinematic realism. In doing so, we will draw comparisons with the Italian neo-realist film that had the greatest influence on Ray's burgeoning aesthetic, the Bicycle Thief. In considering the two films together, we hope to show the ways in which neo-realist filmmaking effectively subverted the dominant filmmaking paradigm of Hollywood in the mid-20th century.

The Plot

Pather Panchali takes place in the Bengali countryside in the 1920s. The film tells the story of a family, at the center of which is a young boy, Apu, who is played in the film by Subir Banjeree. The father of Apu is Harihar Ray (Kanu Banjeree). The family lives in Nischindipur, a tiny village, which is Harihar's ancestral home. They are incredibly poor. Harihar is barely able to support the family, etching out a meager existence as a priest. He dreams of becoming an esteemed writer, and works at night on his plays and poetry, but to little avail. Harihar's main problem is that he is too trusting of other people. This is something that is wife, Sarbajaya (Karuna Banerjee), complains about early on in the film. She feels that he is too trusting of his employers, and they take advantage of him as a result. They promise him pay, but do not pay him. When he is being exploited, he seldom has the courage to demand his rightful salary. As a result, the family is now heavily in debt. They are also unable to take care of basic household expenses, as a result of which, their daughter Durga (Uma Dasgupta) has taken to stealing - much to the mother's consternation.

Much of the stress of the family's day-to-day existence seems to fall on Sarbajaya. Not only does she have to look after the two children, she is also faced with the burden of looking after her elderly sister-in-law, Indir Thakrun, who is portrayed by Chunibala Devi. Despite the fact that the woman is so old she is practically on the verge of death, Sarbajaya nonetheless resents the fact that she has to share her precious home and resources with the old woman. While we empathize with Sarbajaya's plight, we also feel sorry for the old woman - she bends over when she walks, has no teeth, and is obviously unable to take care of herself. She thus rounds out the principle cast, and helps to evoke a very real feeling of helplessness that seems to haunt all of the characters' lives.

Durga is one of the few characters who feel any real empathy towards Indir. Whenever she steals fruit from the neighbors, she inevitably winds up sharing it with the old woman. Again, it is Sarbajaya who must suffer as the result of her daughter's behavior - the neighbors yell at her and humiliate her in front of the whole village, holding her personally responsible for her daughter's sticky fingers. At a key moment of tension in the film, Durga is implicated in the disappearance of a little girl's beaded necklace. After a heated confrontation, Durga denies having stolen the necklace. Nonetheless, she is severely punished by her mother, revealing the violence that poverty ultimately leads people to commit.

As siblings, Durga and Apu are very close. They seem to realize that they can only rely on each other, given the harsh circumstances that they live in. While Durga teases her brother relentlessly, she also takes care of him in a motherly way, as the family's real mother is so busy tending to day-to-day matters that she can hardly look after the children round the clock. The scenes with Durga and Apu playing together are some of the happiest moments in the entire film. When a man selling sweets drives by the house one day, the children are too poor to buy anything from him. Instead, they decide to follow him on his rounds - and have almost more fun in the process than they would have had they actually gotten to purchase some of his wares. In another typical scene, they enjoy a performance by a traveling theatre group that comes to their village. One day, after having heard a train go by their house, they decide to go catch a glimpse of the train, having never seen one before. Shortly after this exciting episode, the children go play in the woods, where they discover the corpse of their Aunt Indir, who had been kicked out of the family home by their mother.

Indir's death occurs while Harihar is away. He has left the village behind in a desperate attempt to make money elsewhere. He promises to return soon with enough money to pay off their debts and fix up the house, which is falling to pieces. As he stays away for longer and his letters grow increasingly seldom, Sarbajaya grows increasingly depressed. The family sinks into terrible poverty, and Sarbajaya becomes very depressed, owing to loneliness and isolation.

One day, with the father still gone, the monsoon season arrives. The first monsoon occurs while the children are out playing one day. While Apu runs under a tree in order to seek shelter, his sister stays out for a particularly long time in order to dance in the rain. As a result of this foray, she becomes seriously ill. She eventually catches a fever. Then, one night, during a particularly fierce storm that completely desecrates the family home, she dies.

The girl's death leaves the mother devastated. She appears to be at the end of her wit. One day, the father returns home. Harihar excitedly begins unpacking his bags, showing his wife all of the wonderful gifts he has bought for the family from the city. It is when he unveils the new sari he has bought for Durga that the mother breaks down and begins to cry. It is at this point that the father realizes that he has lost so much by going away in order to provide for the family on a material level.

At the end of the film, the family decides to leave the village once and for all. The storm that took place the night that Durga died has completely ravaged the house beyond repair. What is more, they are all still haunted by memories of Durga. Even though the father had previously shied away from the prospect of leaving his ancestral village, he realizes that it has only brought him bad luck. Thus, in the final shot of the film, we see Apu and his parents riding off to their new destination on a card led by oxen. We do not know where they are going, but are left with a strong feeling of empathy for them in their helpless plight.

Narrative & Style

Ray realized early on, before he even began making films, that Hollywood exerted a powerful effect on Indian filmmakers - oftentimes, to the detriment of the films being made in his native country. As he wrote in 1948 - nearly a decade before Pather Panchali would be realized:

The superficial aspects of the American style, no matter how outlandish the content, were imitated with reverence. Almost every passing phase of the American cinema has had its repercussion on the Indian film. Stories have been written based on Hollywood successes and the cliches preserved with care. Even where the story has been a genuinely Indian one, the background music has revealed an irrepressible penchant for the jazz idiom (Ray 21-22).

After encountering Italian neo-realist cinema in the form of the famous film the Bicycle Thief, Ray was able to find an escape route from the Hollywood formula. The Bicycle Thief opened up a world of possibility for the fledgling director, a world in which it was possible to reflect the problems of the real world rather than developing an escapist fantasy to serve as the "opiate of the masses."

From the standpoint of narrative adaptation - an important issue in this case, as Pather Panchali was adapted from a novel - Hollywood tends to do one of two things. They either distort the original plot in order to make sure it conforms to the crude Hollywood formula, or they make the screenplay so faithful… READ MORE

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