4 NEOREALISM
Pather Panchali Satyajit Ray (1955) India
Ray, Satyajit. Pather Panchali, Song of the Little Road. Sony Pictures Classics, [Culver City, CA] in association with the Merchant and Ivory Foundation Ltd. produced by the Government of West Bengal 1955.
The image above of Apu opening his eye, or his sister, Durga, prying his eye open to wake him up for school, exemplifies perspective in film. Pather Panchali is Apu’s story. It begins before he is born, but even before his birth, the story is from his perspective and recounts events that he knows from family stories and from his understanding of the narrative story of his life.
India is the seventh largest country in the world with more than 1.3 billion people. It is a Democracy. At the time of the emergence of motion pictures, India was a British Colony. The British ruled India for 300 years.
India gained independence from Britain with the guidance of Mahatma Ghandi in 1947. Ghandi believed in Ahimsa, non-violence. The transition from colonialism was peaceful, but it was followed by the Great Partition which created the nation of Pakistan.
Muslim Indians moved North to Pakistan and Hindus and Sikhs moved south to India. It was the greatest mass migration in human history. 15 million people were uprooted, many died. The Himalayas, the tallest mountains on Earth, are north of India, east of Pakistan, a difficult land to cross. Communities that had lived in relative peace, attacked each other. Gangs of killers set villages on fire, women were raped and disfigured, and many people died in the violence or in the trek north.
The emergence of sound in film was not a great breakthrough for India because there are many languages spoken on the sub-continent: Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil, Punjabi, Kashmiri, Marathi, and Telugu. Film united India by telling stories from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. The emergence of sound brought back the issues of caste and religious differences in India.
Satyajit Ray lived in Kolkatta, the historical birthplace of India’s greatest poet, Rabindranath Tagore. Ray came to film as a scholar, artist, and the founder of the Calcutta Film Society. He was aware of trends in international cinema, particularly Italian Neo-Realism. His goal was to tell the story of India to a global audience.
Auteur Theory was the concept developed by the filmmakers and film critics in the French New Wave. They considered the film director to be the author of a film. The French New Wave filmmakers were watching films and writing about the art of film in their magazine, Cahiers du Cinema. Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa, and Jean Renoir were some of the auteurs celebrated by the French New Wave. Satyajit Ray and his partner, Hari Das Gupta, were screening their films at the Calcutta Film Society when French Director, Jean Renoir came to India to make The River.
Renoir asked Ray and his partner for help finding locations and crew for his film. Ray studied Asian and European film be