Pather Panchali (1955) directed by Satyajit Ray.
The screenplay is by Satyajit Ray from a novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay. This is Ray’s debut and it’s an amazingly strong film, especially for that era. It seems like already a very mature work.
B&W, with very nice cinematography and really good camera work - I don’t know who was responsible for the camera work, but it’s very good. The film is notable for many things, but the story is great, with many interweaving subplots, a very strong structure, excellent acting, and with full humanity on display, not a “film world reality”.
It’s a film that really stays with you, a mark of great works of art.
Admittedly, I don’t know Ray’s other work, and intend to explore it. Maybe he was a unique talent like Orson Welles, whose greatest film was his first? In any case, this movie is a classic of cinema, IMHO.
And again, I admit, I have had no luck with Indian films. I have tried time and again to explore Indian cinema, and I just find it really lacking - with the exception of Ray (based on this film). No doubt I have not explored all of Indian cinema, and no doubt there are issues of subjective taste involved, but what I find shocking is just how bad these films are from a purely technical point of view (Pather Panchali being a notable exception). The DP work in general is unimpressive (again, of the films I’ve seen, and I’ve only seen a tiny fraction), the camera work uniformly abysmal (again, Pather Panchali excepted), problems all over the place. The writing in general seems weak. It’s hard to comment on the acting, because there are different schools of acting and I don’t want to use a Western metric to judge other film acting cultures (f.ex. Japanese acting tradition is very different).
This is a puzzle to me, as I find it impossible to believe that by pure statistics there really are no good film directors in India. It’s a over a billion people, more than the population of Europe and North America put together. And it’s not like the industry there is not flourishing - more films are made in India than anywhere else, the tradition stretches from the time of before WWI at the dawn of cinema anywhere to the present. Huge industry, huge talent pool, decades of tradition. I don’t get it. And Indian talent excells in most other art forms, from music to literature, and technical excellence and innovation. I figure I must simply have not come across anything decent (from my point of view, of course) just due to not having seen enough. So I keep trying. I’m therefore very happy to have finally seen Pather Panchali and it’s a legit great film. And I’ll keep trying. At the same time, I don’t believe it’s just because it’s a different culture, because for example, I have no issues finding great films and film directors from, say, Japan. YMMV, and all IMHO.
My rating 10 starts out of 10.
The screenplay is by Satyajit Ray from a novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay. This is Ray’s debut and it’s an amazingly strong film, especially for that era. It seems like already a very mature work.
B&W, with very nice cinematography and really good camera work - I don’t know who was responsible for the camera work, but it’s very good. The film is notable for many things, but the story is great, with many interweaving subplots, a very strong structure, excellent acting, and with full humanity on display, not a “film world reality”.
It’s a film that really stays with you, a mark of great works of art.
Admittedly, I don’t know Ray’s other work, and intend to explore it. Maybe he was a unique talent like Orson Welles, whose greatest film was his first? In any case, this movie is a classic of cinema, IMHO.
And again, I admit, I have had no luck with Indian films. I have tried time and again to explore Indian cinema, and I just find it really lacking - with the exception of Ray (based on this film). No doubt I have not explored all of Indian cinema, and no doubt there are issues of subjective taste involved, but what I find shocking is just how bad these films are from a purely technical point of view (Pather Panchali being a notable exception). The DP work in general is unimpressive (again, of the films I’ve seen, and I’ve only seen a tiny fraction), the camera work uniformly abysmal (again, Pather Panchali excepted), problems all over the place. The writing in general seems weak. It’s hard to comment on the acting, because there are different schools of acting and I don’t want to use a Western metric to judge other film acting cultures (f.ex. Japanese acting tradition is very different).
This is a puzzle to me, as I find it impossible to believe that by pure statistics there really are no good film directors in India. It’s a over a billion people, more than the population of Europe and North America put together. And it’s not like the industry there is not flourishing - more films are made in India than anywhere else, the tradition stretches from the time of before WWI at the dawn of cinema anywhere to the present. Huge industry, huge talent pool, decades of tradition. I don’t get it. And Indian talent excells in most other art forms, from music to literature, and technical excellence and innovation. I figure I must simply have not come across anything decent (from my point of view, of course) just due to not having seen enough. So I keep trying. I’m therefore very happy to have finally seen Pather Panchali and it’s a legit great film. And I’ll keep trying. At the same time, I don’t believe it’s just because it’s a different culture, because for example, I have no issues finding great films and film directors from, say, Japan. YMMV, and all IMHO.
My rating 10 starts out of 10.
