Records Down The Road

On Friday, April 29 2005, the Press Club, Kolkata organised a talk with audio-visual support, on the occasion of the Golden Jubilee of Satyajit Ray's 'Pather Panchali' (1955). The air-conditioned hall gathering consisting of mediapersons, mass media and mass communication students from George Telegraph, Jadavpur University and University of Calcutta, were witnessed to an enlightening discourse on the classic Bengali movie that revolutionised the world of Indian movies. Press Club Secretary, Mr. Snehasish Sur introduced the subject to the audience and Press Club Cultural Sub-committee Convenor, Mr. Saibal Biswas extended his thanks to the collectors who had contributed the Apu trilogy posters for display at the venue. The programme had an auspicious beginning with the panelists, including Press Club President, Mr. Raj Mithaulia, paying their floral tributes to the portrait of Satyajit Ray.

Dr. Ashoke Mitra shed light on the profound impact that the contemporary social scenario and Ray's familial environment, as also his personal experiences, had on the making of the path-breaking classic. The speaker's anecdotes enlivened the nostalgic journey down Satyajit Ray's path to Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay's 'Pather Panchali'.

Prof. Sanjoy Mukhopadhyay kept on waxing poetic, in support of Dr. Mitra's point of emphasis that Ray started this movie with a meagre resource of eight thousand rupees. Clarifying the point that evergreen classics like 'Pather Panchali' elevate movie to the status of academics, Prof. Mukhopadhyay emphasised on some technical aspects of movie-making with reference to 'Pather Panchali'. He described how Ray translated a great novele into the audio-visual medium. Satyajit Ray was primarily attracted by the fact that 'nothing happens' in 'Pather Panchali' (1928), the novel. He worked this 'lack of action' in the source novel to his advantage to depict the nuances of the characters. Prof. Mukhopadhyay highlighted the constant tonal variation of light in the movie to depict the subtle changes of illumination between dawn and dusk and from season to season. Ray rejected the usual wordiness of Bengali movies in favour of soul-touching silence, where the use of background music reached new heights of aestheticism, as realism blended with humanism to beautify the strangeness associated with the central perspective of Apu's way of looking at the ways of the world. The establishment of Durga, the train sequence and Durga's death were shown to establish the fact that 'a film is made with images, not ideas'. Prof. Mukherjee was apt to comment that Ray knew how to bathe in light and his camera knew how to discover the same. The speaker was visibly ecstatic over the darkness-n-brightness chiaroscuro effects and particularly the rain scene in the movie. Ray in 'Pather Panchali' narrated the story through 'objective correlatives'; like the English poet, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Ray preferred not to say but to show, not to present but to represent.

Even nature outside seemed to pay homage to Ray's rain of montages, by a drizzle accompanied by a cooling breeze, as the enlightened student community in particular, relished the tea to go with the snacks, at the Press Club lawn.