Their neighbours are relatively better off (even in their poverty), and delight in rubbing that in.Īt this point, some of you may be thinking that Truffaut guy might've been onto something. Rounding out the household is the inevitable "aunty," a toothless old woman so withered and bent she resembles (barely) ambulatory driftwood.Īpu and Durga play and fight and grow, and Mother and Aunty squabble and perform their repetitious, quotidian chores, in and around their broken-down home in the midst of what might as well be a jungle. His wife (need I add the adjective "long suffering"?) is mostly left alone to raise their two children: impish little Apu and his enigmatic older sister Durga, by turns caring and careless. The father, an itinerant poet-priest, nurtures fantasies of success which (we realize during his first scene - WATCH) will never materialize. Pather Panchali is a slice of one family's life, set in rural India circa 1910. The trouble with talking about Pather Panchali is that, well, you have to use words. His "actors" (but for one) were amateurs.īasically, Satyajit Ray was Ed Wood, but with talent.
Pather panchali full movie movie#
Ray's Pather Panchali "cinematographer" had never operated a movie camera before the first day of shooting. De Sica's neorealist Bicycle Thieves impressed him most he resolved to somehow make a similar movie, one made in and about India, but stringently stripped of Bollywood's already formulaic wacky dance numbers, overripe colour and manic histrionics. Ray, a Calcutta graphic artist and cinephile, had imbibed 99 European films during a business trip to London. Perennially lauded as one of the greatest films ever made by Sight & Sound and Time Out, its director wasn't a "director" at all. Such are the paradoxes of Pather Panchali: Pather Panchali won - not the Palme D'Or, the Grande Prix or even the Special Jury Prize (Cannes' "Miss Congeniality") - but the "Most Human Document" award, which (as its off-key, by-committee moniker attests) the jury cooked up on the fly. When Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali debuted at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival, no less a personage than Francois Truffaut stomped out early, declaiming, "I don't want to see a movie about peasants eating with their hands." "Not to have seen the cinema of Satyajit Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon." – Akira Kurosawa On what would have been his hundredth birhday, we present our late friend Kathy Shaidle's take on his 1955 classic Pather Panchali: Ray was born on May 2nd 1921 in Calcutta in the Bengal Presidency of British India. Tomorrow, Sunday, is the centenary of Satyajit Ray, novelist, publisher, illustrator, composer, lyricist.
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