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Post by spindrift on Dec 9, 2011 22:38:15 GMT
Bixa and tjoe...I am so happy that you like my efforts; i have only come, so recently, to Bengali cinema. Ray picked his actors and actresses so skillfully. Where did he find such beautiful women? Take, for instance, the village men in 'Postmaster'..here again, he choose each character and presented them perfectly. His choice of the actor who played the Village Idiot was brilliant. It is now one week since i saw this film and yet it keeps coming into my mind. No doubt I will soon be compelled to watch it a second time! So it is with all of Ray's movies. tjoe, thank you for looking through your collection in the hope of finding The Lost Jewels. Maybe, one day, it will come into my possession
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Post by tjoe on Dec 21, 2011 5:58:26 GMT
RITWIK GHATAK
The last century has sweeped to its concluding days floating Ritwik Ghatak as a fine Bengali filmmaker getting accelerating popularity than his own time. Gradually the feelings coming out of his films have been deepening and culturally concentrating. The current trend and tendencies of appreciating Ritwik Ghatak’s cinema value as a very much Indian celluloid chapter– through which an air filled with the sensibilities of Bengal is enthusiastically present. Satyajit Ray subtly presented the Bengali life and culture. Though his films were basically developed centering the Bengali life. Still in his works the art overcomes the portrayed time and space in an extraordinary way. Paralleling Satyajit Ray’s sophistication we get in Ritwik’s films a sort of fresh air bearing various sheds of feelings out of human lifewith its happiness, sorrow, pain and pathos. Through various elements like economics, politics, both the inner and the outer nature– especially through the iconogrphy of Bengali women and althrough the transperant cinematic images, the sensibility of Bengal comes out of Ritwik’s cinema. Such a type of treatment we have never seen in any other’s cinematic works.
The Bengali emotion, the course of thinking, the customs and variety of lifestyles, the tremendous suffering for the division of India and it’s after effects and the consequent flow of decadence, especially significant womanhood – as envisaged Ritwik exist as cultural seeds in spite of the great changes of the Bengali life both in outside and inside. Ghatak’s relative obscurity, however, isn’t solely due to his personal shortcomings. With a couple of exceptions, his films are discomfiting – intentionally so – to the complacent upper-middlebrow types who constitute the key tastemakers, and much of the traditional audience, for international art cinema. To them, Satyajit Ray is the suitable boy of Indian film, presentable, career-oriented, and reliably tasteful. Ghatak, by contrast, is an undesirable guest: he lacks respect, has “views,” makes a mess, disdains decorum. There is a kind of impudence, too, in Ghatak’s ceaseless tinkering with film language. Where Ray’s films are seamless, well-made, conventional narratives that aim for the kind of psychological insights prized by 19th-century novelists, Ghatak’s are ragged, provisional, intensely personal, yet epic in shape, scope, and aspirations. With Ray, you feel safe in the hands of an omniscient, authoritative master. Viewing Ghatak is an edgy, intimate experience, an engagement with a brilliantly erratic intelligence in an atmosphere of inquiry, experimentation, and disconcerting honesty. The feeling can be invigorating, but it’s never comfortable.
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Post by spindrift on Dec 21, 2011 17:41:54 GMT
Ritwik-da produced films with basic and starkly realistic storylines; so much so that when his film Subarnarekha was released in 1962 he found himself unable to find financial backing for any other film during the l960s. Subarnareka (means Golden Thread and refers to the river depicted in the film) was a commercial failure. It addressed the issue of refugee-hood. In 1998 this film was ranked at #11 greatest film in the world!The film is set in the years of (and after) the Partition of India in 1947. British India was divided in three parts on the basis of religious demographics - this led to the creation of the states of Pakistan in the west, Bangladesh in the east and the Republic of India. In such troubled times when millions of displaced people were moving east to west and west to east it is estimated that 12.5 million people were refugees on the move and between hundreds of thousands to one million died during this immense upheaval. I provide this link for those who might be interested to know that even today there are unknown numbers of refugees still living in penury due to Partition 60 years ago. www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/aug/05/india.theobserverPerhaps when you see this picture of Ritwik-da you may understand his character from his face. I do. I have found a YouTube link for the film itself
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Post by spindrift on Dec 21, 2011 18:20:05 GMT
The film starts in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Calcutta it is then was. Notice the desolation of this little family seeking a better life which, at the very least, includes a house to live in. The principal actors in this story are ~ Madhabi Mukerjee who plays Sita Abhi Battacharya is Ishwar and Satindra Battacharya as Abhiram. to be continued.
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Post by tjoe on Dec 22, 2011 5:20:19 GMT
Thank you spindrfift for discussing Subornorekha. It was a very tough time for Ritwik Ghatak then. Many producers and directors of commercial films had ganged up against Ghatak. Hooligans were sent to halls screening this film to disrupt. Ritwik da had no money left, his so called friends deserted him. Alcohol became his only refuge. Only Satyajit Ray stood by him, writting endlessly on the editorial page of the Statesman praising Ghatak's film making.
I was fortunate to see Ritwik da from very close quarters. Ritwik da regularly came to a bar in Esplanade, Calcutta in the evenings. He drank as much bas he wanted and he was never presented the bill. The manager of that establishment kept the bills with him. Ritwik da's affluent fans including poets, novelists, actors routinely squared off the accumulated amount. Some times Ritwik da stepprd out of the bar and hailed a cab. After driving around the strand and the maidan he used to go to Bishop Lefroy road where Ray lived. Ritwik da pointed at Ray's flat and instructed the cab driver to collect his fare from "the tall man" who lived there. Ray always paid the fare.
Partition of Bengal influenced him as a sort of truma. He was obsessed with it, totally tormented. This made him to write “In our boyhood we have seen a Bengal, whole and glorious. Our dreams faded away. We crashed on our faces, clinging to the crumbling Bengal, divested of all its glory.”
The characters of his films, the heroes and heroines of Ritwik's films, are those whose energies had been sapped by a society which can sustain no growth, but had inner resources that seem to assert themselves. They are all brave people.
Having written this I will wait for Spindrift to continue writting about this great creation Subornorekha.
Note: The suffix "da" to a name like Ritwik da means in Bengali elder brother.
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Post by spindrift on Dec 22, 2011 18:57:04 GMT
So I now continue with a brief outline of the film being careful not to tell the whole tale for this would spoil the movie for you if you should ever wish to see it in full. Ritwik-da's plot may easily be compared to a Shakespearian tragedy being played out to the end by culminating and unchangeable conditions leading to woeful effect. It is a masterpiece.
As I said in my introduction this is a story of Hindu (Brahmin) refugees from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) who struggle to find a home and livlihood in West Bengal. Ishwar Chakravorty finds a job in a rice mill situated near the river Subarnarekha and takes his little sister there together with a refugee boy whose mother has been abducted. They all find a degree of happiness but as the children grow up so they also fall in love with each other and hope to marry. However fate intervenes and, by chance, the boy, Abihiram, one day sees his old mother dying by the wayside. This is noticed by bystanders and suddenly Abihiram is delegated to being an outcaste from society and Ishwar opposing his plans to marry Sita dismisses him from his family. Ishwar immediately makes plans to arrange a suitable marriage for Sita. Conflicts ensue that shatter the lives of all those involved.
Most pleasing of all are the many songs (ragas) sung by Sita and interspersed through the film. I can understand why Ritwik-da was censured by his peers for he laid bare, for all to see, the consequences of unyielding traditions that dictate how life must be lived in Indian society with particular reference to the class system & arranged marriages. Poor Ritwik...he only strove to show things how they really are and he was condemned for this.
Now, long after his untimely death his name is becoming known around the world. Ritwik Ghatak - the Genius.
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Post by bixaorellana on Dec 24, 2011 2:36:38 GMT
Just now catching up to this thread again. I am enjoying it -- if that's the right word for the pleasure one takes in learning something completely new from people who feel passionately about it -- very much. Both of you present this in an in-depth way that is still brief enough for the neophyte to be able to absorb.
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Post by spindrift on Dec 24, 2011 15:29:19 GMT
Thank you Bixa.
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