Director: Satyajit Ray
Screenplay: Satyajit Ray
Cinematography: Subrata Mitra
Music: Ravi Shankar
Genre: Drama
Language: Bangla
Date of release: 1955
‘Pather Panchali’ is the first film in Satyajit Ray’s celebrated Apu Trilogy. Filmed irregularly between 1950 and 1954, the film is set in the Bengal of the 1920s when famine and drought-ravaged rural life. Like Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zamin (1953), only with much more vigour, Pather Panchali announced the arrival of a humanistic, Calcutta-centred Indian art cinema, distinct from the commercial product of Bollywood. It is the first truly global film to come out of India and remains one of the most influential movies ever made. Perhaps the influence is owed to a simple tale, which is timeless despite the specific setting. There is a universality to a story of inevitable human tragedy, all the more because of the organic filmmaking of Ray. Ray's individualism and exceptionality are apparent from his debut With the most organic storytelling and immaculate direction, the movie is a cinematic conversation of a meticulously believable world with the deepest humanist sensibilities of the viewer.
‘Pather Panchali’ follows a young boy Apu and his family who live in the rural heartland of Bengal through a devastating famine. As a child, Apu is merely a witness for most of the film, never really participating in the events that happen. He and Durga(his sister) are the medium of communication to the viewer, their big, innocent eyes framed for many close up reactions. Apu’s father has a meagre income, and apart from his wife, has one extra mouth to feed in his elder sick cousin.
Apu's mother worries about the finances and thinks this will leave her without enough food for her children. The burden of caring for an ageing aunt also adds up to the situation. The film's moral issues are largely played by Durga and Apu. Durga often secretly helps her ageing aunt by giving her food.
The detailed documentary-style observation of village life is rendered well with minute details. The intricacy of camera work is astonishing. One family’s attempt at survival becomes Ray’s observations on life, death, nature and humanity. Though Ray depicts the hardships of the rural households in abject poverty, dreaming and endurance define his characters, sometimes in tragic ways.
The film is ironic and extremely earnest at the same time. There is a lyrical theme to it, a sort of 'epiphany of joy’ of little things, of appreciating life at its daily, mundane, and unhappening.
Deep cinematic symbolism can be seen throughout the film. When the family thinks about moving out of their village, almost as a premonition, after the storm a snake emerges from the ruins indicating this ancestral home will soon be abandoned and barren. In another scene where Apu finds a necklace, Durga stole and throws it away in a pond so that no one can know about it. A sea-weed in the water engulfs the necklace and hides it in itself resembling Apu's agony and ordeal in the situation, which he wants to hide and eventually, forget.
Nature in itself is one of the film’s subjects. Ray often leaves the natural sound of the strong wind in the scenes. His shots linger, and the cinematographer Subrata Mitra’s frames revolutionized lateral movement. The use of huge landscapes, where the wind blows the tall grasses and the trees hustle under sunlight in famine was extremely novel for its time.
Pather Panchali shows strong influences of Italian neo-realism. Like DeSica, Ray’s frames are often more interested in everyday life and chores of its characters than simply events. It is the cinema of exploration, and not retelling that Ray championed, and it is evident from his first film. The dialogues often sound like Gramophone recordings at points. The pace of the film is contemplative and takes its time to set things up. It is a film that takes patience to be enjoyed. The background scores feature pieces based on several ragas of Indian classical music, played mostly on the sitar, composed by legendary Ravi Shankar. In one of the most beautiful examples of the use of music in cinema, when Harihar (the father) returns from the city with presents for his family, the overwhelming background score of shehnai comes in where his wife is unable to break the news of Durga and the aunt being dead so the background score overpowers and the gravity of the situation becomes more intense followed by the complete breakdown of the wife, Sarbojaya.
Shehnai is an instrument, played at Indian weddings is here to remind the audience how Sarbojaya always wanted Durga to marry. The song that the aunt sings in the film, has blended perfectly with the environment of that scene. The sound effect used during the stormy night before Durga’s death is beyond any comparison.
The title of the film means ‘the song of the small road’. There are three scenes in the movie that justify the title. The scene where Apu is taken to school by Durga, then in the middle when Apu walks the road alone and finally when Apu moves away with his family in an ox cart on the same road. These scenes of Apu along Ray made over 36 films in his lifetime and was also a prolific writer, cartoonist, essayist and painter.
Satyajit Ray's debut won 12 national and international awards including the Best Human Document award at Cannes (1956), the Best Film and Best Direction award at San Francisco (1957) and eventually won him an honorary Academy Award (1992). The impact of Pather Panchali and Apu Trilogy at large is undeniable.
What makes this film such a touchstone in film history is that it is the seminal work of Satyajit Ray, who set the precedent for a precedent for making films authentically Indian. He believed that cinema needs less gloss and reflect what is truly in the villages, in the streets and made his philosophy materialize on reel through the Apu trilogy. Pather Panchali is widely regarded as the first Indian art film, one can argue it is possibly the best too.