Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955)

As I've addressed here and on other forums, I had no direct exposure to the Official Film Canon as such. Coming to cinephilia from a focus on painting and sculpture, I gravitated toward experimental cinema, and being a grad student during the 90s, I was steeped in the Godardian "counter-cinema" trajectory, partly because those films provide more grist for critical theory, but also because they were the works being rediscovered at the time. This is all a long way of saying that I saw all of Ritwik Ghatak's features long ago, dabbled in Mrinal Sen, but had limited exposure to Satyajit Ray.

It's easy to see why Pather Panchali crossed over to become a the very definition of Indian art cinema in the West. I'm not sufficiently schooled in Ray's style to make broad claims, but I certainly detect the post-Renoir lyricism that made filmmakers like Truffaut and de Sica so well-loved at the time. There's also an approach to photographing the natural world that calls Kurosawa to mind -- strongly etched black and white images of fields and forests, serving as concrete metaphors for the basic toil of life. Pather Panchali also evokes Italian Neo-Realism in its willingness to deviate from the primary narrative in order to follow poetic tangents, implying that the film is merely a framework for understanding the world, not an attempt to contain it. 

In fact, one of the most seemingly inconsequential scenes in the film struck me as a kind of statement-of-purpose on Ray's part. The traveling players, with their ridiculous gestures and empty stock characterizations, seem to appear as a not-so-subtle dig at his country's preferred popular entertainment. In particular, the pantomime is shown to occupy the peasantry while clearly having no connection to their lives. This isn't to say that Ray completely abandons mythic or archetypal figures in his own work. (His secondary characters, in particular, display a bit of that outsized John Ford typicality.) But he's much more interested in making cinema that at least acknowledges the conditions of its presumed audience, even if Ray doesn't exactly propose solutions, like Ritwik the Brechtian Naxalite. 

In this regard, I should note that I have seen criticisms of Ray, and Pather Panchali in particular, claiming that the film romanticizes poverty. I'd disagree; if anything it romanticizes childhood, depicting it as a state in which deprivation exists in counterpoint to the wonder of things, since Apu (Subir Banerjee) and Durga (Uma Dasgupta) share only inklings of another possible existence -- specifically the orchard-owning Brahmins next door. Also, as we see, there is an absolute gender divide. Apu goes to school, Durga prepares for marriage. But as kids, these boundaries are as fluid as they will ever be. The closeness of the sibling relationship hints at what probably cannot survive into adulthood, which of course it does not.

Accomplished as it undoubtedly is, Pather Panchali does sometimes exhibit the learning curve of a debut film, most notably in its articulation of women's relationships. Ray is clearly attempting a kind of proto-feminism in the sense that that the community of women will come together when the chips are down. This does not entirely explain the shifting relationship between Sarbajaya (Karuna Bannerjee) and her neighbors, who are shaming her one minute, then offering help the next. I sense that Ray wants us to understand that the women's common understanding of male incompetence is the leveling element here. Other women in the village know that the absent Harihar (Kanu Banerjee) is a prideful fool, and that Sarbajaya simply drew a bad lot in life. Still, a lot of this remains a bit too buried in the subtext to make narrative sense. Likewise, Sarbajara's irritation with the old aunt Indir (Chunibala Devi) escalates into unexpected hardheartedness, what we now call "horizontal violence."

But Ray is much more exacting when it comes to showing the struggles between Sarbajaya and Durga. The mother's frustration with her situation is frequently deflected onto the daughter, who often shows an independence that Sarbajaya aims to break. That's of course because, as she says, she too had dreams. Now she is trapped in isolation and servitude. Apu, meanwhile, is on the outside and studies these fraught relationships. He will undoubtedly harbor the loss of Durga as a defining psychic wound. Ray's unflattering depiction of Harihar, the priest and would-be poet, isn't just a dig at India's feckless intelligentsia. It also serves as a contrast to Apu's quiet observation. As Pather Panchali demonstrates again and again, there is much more to be learned by simply keeping your eyes open.