by Pauline Kael
In addition, he illustrated books, and it was after he had illustrated an edition of the popular novel Pather Panchali that he began to think about visualizing it on the screen.
What I lacked was first-hand acquaintance with the milieu of the story. I could, of course, draw upon the book itself, which was a kind of encyclopaedia of Bengali rural life, but I knew that this was not enough. In any case, one had only to drive six miles out of the city to get to the heart of the authentic village. While far from being an adventure in the physical sense, these explorations . . . nevertheless opened up a new and fascinating world. To one born and bred in the city, it had a new flavor, a new texture; and its values were different. It made you want to observe and probe, to catch the revealing details, the telling gestures, the particular turns of speech. You wanted to fathom the mysteries of “atmosphere.”
Ray’s statements and articles have been widely published, and his English is perfectly clear, but the critics can’t resist the chance to play sahib. Pather Panchali provided Crowther with an opportunity for a classic example of his style and perception:
“Chief among the delicate revelations that emerge from its loosely formed account of the pathetic little joys and sorrows of a poor Indian family in Bengal is the touching indication that poverty does not nullify love and that even the most afflicted people can find some modest pleasures in their worlds . . . Any picture as loose in structure or as listless in tempo as this one is would barely pass as a ‘rough cut’ in Hollywood.” In a review of Aparajito, Kingsley Amis, then Esquire’s movie critic, thought that “Satyajit Ray, the director, seems to have set out with the idea of photographing without rearrangement the life of a poor Indian family, of reporting reality in as unshaped a form as possible.” The World of Apu, which died at the box-office, got short shrift from Macdonald: “Pather was about a family in a village, Apu is about a young writer in a city, a more complex theme, and I’m not sure Ray is up to it.” (Somehow he makes us feel that he’s more sure than he ought to be; he condescends promiscuously.)
Each of the films of The Apu Trilogy represents a change, I think a development, of style. Unfortunately, those who responded to the slow rhythm of Pather Panchali felt that this pace was somehow more true to India than the faster pace of the third film, The World of Apu. But Ray’s rhythm is derived from his subject matter, and for the college students and artists of The World of Apu, the leisurely flow of the seasons on which Pather Panchali was based would be ludicrous. Even those who prefer Pather Panchali to his later work should recognize that an artist cannot retain his first beautiful awkward expressiveness and innocence, and that to attempt to do so would mean redoing consciously what had been beautiful because it was not completely conscious. An artist must either give up art or develop. There are, of course, two ways of giving up: stopping altogether or taking the familiar Hollywood course — making tricks out of what was once done for love.
Ray began his film career with a masterpiece, and a trilogy at that; this makes it easy to shrug off his other films as very fine but not really up to the trilogy (even critics who disparaged each film of the trilogy as it appeared, now use the trilogy as the measure to disparage his other works). It is true that the other films are smaller in scope. But, if there had been no trilogy, I would say of Devi, “This is the greatest Indian film ever made.” And if there had been no trilogy and no Devi, I would say the same of his still later Two Daughters, based on Tagore stories, of which the first, The Postmaster, is a pure and simple masterpiece of the filmed short story form. (The second has memorable scenes, beauty, and wit, but is rather wearying.) Ray’s least successful film that has been imported, The Music Room (made early, for respite, between the second and third parts of the trilogy), has such grandeur in its best scenes that we must revise customary dramatic standards. By our usual standards it isn’t a good movie: it’s often crude and it’s poorly constructed; but it’s a great experience. It’s a study of noblesse oblige carried to extremity, to a kind of aesthetic madness. It recalls the film of The Magnificent Ambersons and, of course, The Cherry Orchard but, more painfully, it calls up hideous memories of our own expansive gestures, our own big-role playing. We are forced to see the recklessness and egomania of our greatest moments — and at the same time we are forced to see the sordid banality of being practical. The hero is great because he destroys himself; he is also mad. I was exasperated by the defects of The Music Room when I saw it; now, a month later, I realize that I will never forget it. Worrying over its faults as a film is like worrying over whether King Lear is well constructed: it doesn’t really matter.
Ray is sometimes (for us Westerners, and perhaps for Easterners also?) a little boring, but what major artist outside film and drama isn’t? What he has to give is so rich, so contemplative in approach (and this we are completely unused to in the film medium — except perhaps in documentary) that we begin to accept our lapses of attention during the tedious moments with the same kind of relaxation and confidence and affection that we feel for the boring stretches in the great novels, the epic poems.
Although India is second only to Japan in the number of movies it produces, Ray is the only Indian director; he is, as yet, in a class by himself. Despite the financial conditions under which he works, despite official disapproval of his themes, despite popular indifference to his work, he is in a position that almost any film maker anywhere in the world might envy. The Indian film industry is so thoroughly corrupt that Ray could start fresh, as if it did not exist. Consider the Americans, looking under stones for some tiny piece of subject matter they can call their own, and then judge the wealth, the prodigious, fabulous heritage that an imaginative Indian can draw upon. Just because there has been almost nothing of value done in films in India, the whole country and its culture is his to explore and express to the limits of his ability; he is the first major artist to draw upon these vast and ancient reserves. The Hollywood director who re-makes biblical spectacles or Fannie Hurst stories for the third or sixth or ninth time is a poor man — no matter how big his budget — compared to the first film artist of India. American directors of talent can still try to beat the system, can still feel that maybe they can do something worth doing, and every once in a while someone almost does. In India, the poverty of the masses, and their desperate need for escapist films, cancels out illusions. Ray knows he can’t reach a mass audience in India (he can’t spend more than $40,000 on a production). Outside of West Bengal, his films are not understood (Bengali is spoken by less than fifteen percent of India’s population — of those, only twenty percent can read). In other provinces his films, subtitled, appeal only to the Indian equivalent of the American art-house audience — the urban intellectuals — not only because the masses and the rural audiences want their traditional extravaganzas but because they can’t read. Probably India produces so many films just because of the general illiteracy; if Indians could read subtitles, American and European films might be more popular. (India has so many languages, it’s impractical to dub for the illiterates — the only justification for dubbing, by the way.)
It’s doubtful if Ray could finance his films at all without the international audience that he reaches, even though it’s shockingly small and he doesn’t reach it easily. Indian bureaucrats, as “image” conscious as our own, and much more powerful in the control of films, prefer to send abroad the vacuous studio productions which they assure us are “technically” superior to Ray’s films (everyone and everything in them is so clean and shiny and false that they suggest interminable TV commercials).
Devi, based on a theme from Tagore, is here thanks to the personal intercession of Nehru, who removed the censors’ export ban. According to official Indian policy, Devi is misleading in its view of Indian life. We can interpret this to mean that, even though the film is set in the nineteenth century, the government is not happy about the world getting the idea that there are or ever were superstitions in India. In the film, the young heroine is believed by her rich
father-in-law to be an incarnation of the goddess Kali. I don’t know why the Indian government was so concerned about this — anyone who has ever tried to tell children how, for example, saints function in Catholic doctrine may recognize that we have a few things to explain, too. Those who grow up surrounded by Christian symbols and dogmas are hardly in a position to point a finger of shame at Kali worship — particularly as it seems so closely related to prayers to the Virgin Mary, Mother of God. As the film makes clear, Kali is generally called “Ma.”
The film has so many Freudian undertones that I was not surprised when the film maker sitting next to me in the empty theater muttered, “Think what Buñuel would do with this.” I’m grateful that it’s Ray, not Buñuel, and that the undertones stay where they belong — down under. Buñuel would have made it explicit. Ray never tells us that this is the old man’s way of taking his son’s bride away from him; he doesn’t tell us that this is the old man’s way of punishing his Westernized, Christianized son; he never says that religion is the last outpost of the old man’s sensuality, his return to childhood and “Ma” love. But we experience all this, just as we experience the easy drift of the lovely silly young girl into the auto-intoxication, the narcissism of believing that she is a goddess. She is certainly beautiful enough. In one sense the film is about what Christians might call the sin of pride: the girl who finds it not too difficult to believe that she is a goddess, fails to cure the nephew she adores; when the child dies, she goes mad. But that is a Christian oversimplification: what we see is the girl’s readiness to believe, her liquid acquiescence; not so much pride as a desire to please — the culmination, we suspect, of what the culture expects of a high-born girl. And, surrounded by so much luxury, what is there for the girl to do but try to please? The whole indolent life is centered on pleasure.
Ray creates an atmosphere that intoxicates us as well; the household is so rich and the rich people so overripe. The handsome, soft-eyed men in their silks and brocades are unspeakably fleshly; the half-naked beggars on the steps outside are clothed in their skins, but the rich are eroticized by their garments. And perhaps because of the camera work, which seems to derive from some of the best traditions of the silent screen and the thirties, perhaps because of the Indian faces themselves, the eyes have depths — and a disturbing look of helplessness — that we are unused to. It’s almost as if these people were isolated from us and from each other by their eyes. It is not just that they seem exotic to us, but that each is a stranger to the others. Their eyes link them to the painted eyes of the Hindu idols, and, in the film, it is this religion which separates them. They are lost behind their eyes.
Sharmila Tagore (Tagore’s great-granddaughter), fourteen when she played Apu’s bride, is the seventeen-year-old goddess; she is exquisite, perfect (a word I don’t use casually) in both these roles. And the men are wonderfully selected — so that they manage to suggest both the handsomeness of almost mythological figures and the rotting weakness of their way of life. Ray has been developing his own stock company, and anyone who mistook the principal players in the trilogy for people just acting out their own lives for the camera, may be startled now to see them in a nineteenth-century mansion. In the early parts of the trilogy, Ray was able to convince many people that he had simply turned his cameras on life; he performs the same miracle of art on this decadent, vanished period. The setting of Devi seems to have been caught by the camera just before it decays. The past is preserved for us, disturbingly, ironically, in its jeweled frame. Are we not perhaps in the position of the “advanced,” ineffective young husband who knows that his childish wife can’t be Kali because he has “progressed” from Kali worship to the idols of Christianity? (Can we distinguish belief in progress from the sin of pride?)
It is a commentary on the values of our society that those who saw truth and greatness in The Apu Trilogy, particularly in the opening film with its emphasis on the mother’s struggle to feed the family, are not drawn to a film in which Ray shows the landowning class and its collapse of beliefs. It is part of our heritage from the thirties that the poor still seem “real” and the rich “trivial.” Devi should, however, please even Marxists if they would go to see it; it is the most convincing study of upper-class decadence I have ever seen. But it is Ray’s feeling for the beauty within this disintegrating way of life that makes it convincing. Eisenstein cartooned the upper classes and made them hateful; they became puppets in the show he was staging. Ray, by giving them the respect and love that he gives the poor and struggling, helps us to understand their demoralization. The rich, deluded father-in-law of Devi is as human in his dreamy sensuality as Apu’s own poet father. Neither can sustain his way of life or his beliefs against the new pressures; and neither can adapt.
Like Renoir and De Sica, Ray sees that life itself is good no matter how bad it is. It is difficult to discuss art which is an affirmation of life, without fear of becoming maudlin. But is there any other kind of art, on screen or elsewhere? “In cinema,” Ray says, “we must select everything for the camera according to the richness of its power to reveal.”
How the Long Distance Runner Throws the Race
Alan Sillitoe’s short story The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner is very good in a simple but disturbing and suggestive way. The long distance runner who is writing his own story expresses a rejection of official values that, to one degree or another, we all share, or at least feel. Like Kafka’s heroes, or Dostoyevsky’s in Notes from Underground, this hero’s anxieties and fears and pettiness get under our skin. He is a small-minded, spiteful boy-man; nevertheless, he expresses what we often feel to be our most courageous side. He says, “I’m not having any. It’s all yours.” He is a close relative of those juvenile delinquents that Hollywood dropped as heroes because they became too hot to handle. It became increasingly difficult to resolve the plots, to explain them away. They went from A pictures to B and C and D pictures, where from the start they could be so ludicrous and meaningless that disposing of them wasn’t any problem. Sillitoe’s hero, however, is more defined than a delinquent or a rebel; his origins are in poverty and deprivation but he’s not a worker; he’s a proletarian, all right, but a proletarian thief, and at the end of the story he’s becoming a more clever, a bigger thief.
The narrator of the story is a thief with an outsider’s view of society, an outlaw’s rejection of the whole shebang. He is as intransigent, as dedicated to his outlaw view — to his own brand of cunning — as Joyce’s hero was to silence, exile, and cunning. But, and this is what makes the figure so peculiarly disturbing, he is almost subhuman. His contempt and resentment are the whole man: he has no responsibilities toward his family, he isn’t interested in anything but living it up like a lord with some tarts for his pleasure. His only feeling of connection is with his father who lived miserably and died in horrible pain — rejecting the modern medicine offered him; Colin is as unyielding. He would kill the representatives of authority, he tells us, if he had the chance. He represents, and this is the power of his image, not only the rejection that we share, but the underlying threats of that rejection. He doesn’t merely say no to the more dehumanized and brutal aspects of modern society but to education, art, humanity, sympathy, love, and all the rest of what we care about. He asks no quarter and he gives none. He is consistent in his outlaw’s position — as we are not — and he is thus not a whole man. He shows us how narrow, how Pygmy-like would be our view of life if we were consistent in our rejections. He is the representative of the hatred building up in the modern urban consciousness — hatred which we know to be at least partly valid.
The movie, also written by Sillitoe, turns him into a socialist hero who, in one supremely embarrassing moment, even discovers some rudimentary form of socialism all by himself: he explains that he wouldn’t mind working if the bosses didn’t get the profits. As a theatrical experience this risks comparison with the unforgettably embarrassing last few minutes of Odets’s Awake and Sing when the hero, having at
last discovered the meaning of it all, rushes on stage with a copy of The Communist Manifesto.
Tom Courtenay’s performance draws upon the original conception of Colin Smith. But Sillitoe’s movie script and Tony Richardson’s direction have turned the story into a study of class warfare — and a very familiar kind of class warfare at that. The race of the story with its undifferentiated competing runners, has, for example, become a competition against a posh public school. And the film is full of easy ironies — the Borstal boys singing Jerusalem is intercut with shots of a boy who has run away being beaten up by the authorities; the workshop scene shows the Borstal boys dismantling gas masks. The bite of the original character was that Colin wasn’t merely at war with the upper classes but that he refused the proletarian role. He wasn’t a worker; he was a thief. The film, supplying the usual ironies of class distinctions, ridiculing the old-school-tie once more, obscures the point, tries to make a much easier point — one more demonstration of social inequality under capitalism.
To make Colin a more conventional, “misunderstood” victim of society, his character is softened. The Colin who had the best time of his life when his mother collected the 500 pounds death benefits on his father, becomes the Colin who burns the death money his mother hands him. His fantasies about living it up with some tarts become a poignant romantic interlude with a scared, love-hungry working-class girl. In the movie he’s calculating and resentful only with representatives of the authoritarian society; he’s gentle and defenseless and loyal and naive and touching with his own kind — though stern as the ham in Hamlet when his mother misbehaves (“You brought your fancy man into the house before my father was cold”). He’s a sensitive, good boy; he’s even given a gamin-like charm and a sudden, crooked smile that lights up the withdrawn, aged, downtrodden face. I think we are supposed to feel — “Why, look, he never had a chance to be young. He only steals for a lark, for a bit of a good time, for fun. He’s really innocent and harmless.” The implication is unmistakable that in a different social system, this basically good Colin, which the movie suggests is the true Colin that society is crushing, would take over. He’s defiant, not as in the story because the ugliness and mechanization of modern life make work and adaptation seem like a living death; he’s defiant because of social injustice.