Pather Pancheli 50

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Pather Panchali 50
Arup K De

THE story of the making of Pather Panchali, the all-time masterpiece that
established Satyajit Ray's reputation for being "one of the greatest and
most sublime filmmakers to emerge in the fifties" at one stroke, is well
documented. Ray was toying with the idea of quitting a lucrative job for a
career in cinema when he met the French-born American director Jean Renoir,
who came to Kolkata in 1949 to look for locations to shoot The River.
Meeting Renoir was an immediate experience that encouraged Ray to take the
plunge in filmmaking.
It was not until his 1967 tour of the USA that Ray got a chance to watch The
River, shot entirely in Bengal with a partly Indian cast. The screening
over, both Renoir and Ray were invited to the stage. "Ray owes a lot to
Renoir," said the introducer. But Renoir said, "I don't think Ray owes me
anything. I think he had it in his blood. Though he is very young, he is the
father of Indian cinema," he said.
The idea of filming Pather Panchali took shape while Ray did the
illustrations for Aam Antir Bhepu, a children's edition of Bibhuti Bhusan
Ban-dyopadhyay's classic novel, about the growing up of a wonder-struck
child in rural Bengal. In 1950, Ray went to London with wife Bijoya for a
five-month stay. He wrote the screenplay of Pather Panchali on his way back
on the ship.
"I produced a book of wash drawings describing the scenario of the film,"
said Ray in an interview with the London-based Bengali author Sasthi Brata.
"But none of the producers from top down wanted to know. They all said, you
cannot work on location, you cannot shoot in the rain, you cannot do this,
you cannot do that." Finally he started to shoot on his own.
The shooting of Pather Panchali, which continued fitfully over a period of
nearly two years, started in October 1953, in a field filled with autumnal
kash flowers, near Shaktigarh in West Bengal's Nadia district. The initial
funds - which they soon ran out of - were raised by pawning Ray's rare music
albums and his wife's jewellery, and borrowing Rs 20000 from Rana & Dutta.
Bela Sen put Ray in touch with West Bengal chief minister Dr BC Roy, who
arranged financial assistance to complete the film.
Ray had to edit the film at breakneck speed to meet the American deadline
for the New York world premiere in April 1955, four months before its
domestic release. The world premiere of Pather Panchali at New York's Museum
of Modern Art took the Ame-ricans by storm. They had little idea about
India, far less of Indian films. Ray's portrayal of an impoverished village
family with all its simplicity, lyricism and pathos was a wholly new and
overwhelming experience. The film had an eight-month run at a commercial
theatre in New York. Looking back, Ray wrote in 1982, "I watched the
audience surge out of the theatre, bleary-eyed and visibly shaken. An hour
or so later, in the small hours, came the morning edition of The New York
Times. It carried Bosley Crowther's review of my film. Crowther was the
doyen of New York critics, with power to make or mar a film's prospects as a
saleable commodity. He was unmoved by Pather Panchali. In fact, he said the
film was so amateurish that it would hardly pass for a rough cut in
Hollywood."
Jay Carr made amends after Ray's death. "It will be the Apu trilogy for
which Ray will be best remembered," Carr wrote in The Boston Globe.
"Attacked by a New York Times review as loose and listless and unlikely to
pass as a rough cut in Hollywood, the lovingly inscribed Pather Panchali
rem-ains a landmark in humanist cinema," he added.
Pather Panchali would surely have disappeared by now had Satyajit Ray Film
and Study Collection (Ray FASC) of the University of California Santa Cruz
(UCSC) not taken the initiative to restore its negative. Dilip Basu,
founder-director of the Ray FASC, came to Kolkata in December 1992 with
David Shepard, a film conservationist of world renown, to survey the
condition of Ray's films.
Shepard, who examined the negatives of Pather Panchali and many other Ray
classics, wrote in his report: "The original negative [of Pather Pan-chali]
is in poor condition. Each reel has many tears in the picture area, patched
either with cell overlays or with mylar tape, and in many reels bits of lost
footage have been replaced with blank spacer. Three of the 12 reels have
considerably deteriorated from the 'vinegar syndrome'. Seve-ral reels
contain copy negative sections replacing previously-damaged scenes of the
original negative. The negative has been 'fotoguarded' and this process,
which cannot be removed, has sealed in some damage. Restoration of this film
will require a second image source."
Basu and Shepard thought the negative lying at a London laboratory could be
used as a "second image source". But a mysterious fire at the lab burned the
negatives of Pather Panchali and five other Ray films soon thereafter. So,
in case of Pather Panchali, the restorers in the USA had to work not from
the original negative but, as Basu said, from good quality positive print
and from the inter-positive that was made in 1968 for the Pune National Film
Archive in India. The restored print is preserved by the Ray FASC in
sub-zero temperature at the climate-controlled vault of the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles.
The organisers of the Cannes Film Festival, which awarded Pather Panchali
the best human document prize in 1956, will pay a tribute to Ray on 12 May
this year to mark the golden jubilee of the making of the movie. The
restored print of Pather Panchali would be borrowed from the Academy for
screening at Cannes. Luminaries from the world film community, including the
Academy's president Frank Pierson, will attend the screening. The festival
will also show Renoir's The River, restored recently, on the same day as yet
another Cannes classic, presumably to underscore the links between two great
masters of world cinema.
The Ray FASC has its own plans as well to celebrate 50 years of Pather
Panchali. In July, informed Basu, some restored Ray classics, including
Pather Panchali, would be shown at the Delhi Asian Film Festival. There will
be an anniversary screening in Kolkata on 25 August, the day Pather Panchali
was first shown in town. The year-long Pather Panchali tour will end in
October in the Silicon Valley, USA where it will be shown at the
newly-repaired California Theatre in San Jose.
By his own admission, Ray, a city-bred man, discovered rural Bengal while
making Pather Panchali, which, in its turn, helped the world discover India.
Ray was India's cultural ambassador, who, after Tagore, built a new bridge
between the East and the West. The secret of Pather Panchali lies in its
power to "capture both that is unique in the Indian experience and that
which is universal," to borrow the words of Audrey Hepburn, who introduced
Ray and his works at the Oscar award ceremony on 30 March, 1992.
"I never imagined that any of my films, especially Pather Panchali, would be
shown throughout this country [the USA] or in other countries," Ray said in
1982 to the American film journalist Dan Georgakas. "The fact that they have
is an indication that if you are able to portray universal feelings,
universal relations, emotions and characters, you can cross certain barriers
and reach out to others, even non-Bengalis."

The author edits Salt Lake Post, a news-fortnightly published in Kolkata