A depiction of rural Bengali life in a style inspired by Italian neorealism, this naturalistic but poetic evocation follows a number of years in the life of an Indian family.
EN
“I can never forget the excitement in my mind after seeing it [Pather Panchali]. I have had several more opportunities to see the film since then and each time I feel more overwhelmed. It is the kind of cinema that flows with the serenity and nobility of a big river.
People are born, live out their lives, and then accept their deaths. Without the least effort and without any sudden jerks, Ray paints his picture, but its effect on the audience is to stir up deep passions. How does he achieve this? There is nothing irrelevant or haphazard in his cinematographic technique. In that lies the secret of its excellence.”
Akira Kurosawa1
“Ray never had a finished script for the movie because, he said, he saw and heard it in his head. Perhaps that accounts for the film’s remarkable evenness of rhythm, its mood of sustained contemplation. The story of Pather Panchali is episodic, but it moves forward with the force of a held thought. Akira Kurosawa put it another way: ‘It is the kind of cinema that flows with the serenity and nobility of a big river.’ In making a film whose narrative depends almost entirely on the rhythmic arrangement of minute observations, the first-time director was in some sense putting into practice a ‘little theory’ of his about the fundamental flaw of his country’s cinema. ‘Indian directors,’ he believed, ‘tended to overlook the musical aspect of a film’s structure... The sense of form, of a rhythmic pattern existing in time, is what was mainly lacking in our directors.’ It is not lacking in Pather Panchali.”
Terrence Rafferty2
- 1Akira Kurosawa, cited in Andrew Robinson, The Apu Trilogy. Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic (New York: I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd, 2011), 91.
- 2Terrence Rafferty, “The Apu Trilogy: Every Common Sight,” The Criterion Collection, 17 November 2015
