My favourite film Essay

Rabindranath Tagore (18611941), poet, playwright, novelist, philosopher, composer, painter, and winner of the Nobel scratch in Literature, was the towering soma of the Bengali Renaissance. Among his lasting achievements was the founding in 1921 of his sphere university, Visva-Bharati, at Santiniketan, some 120 miles northeastern of Kolkata. In 1940, the nineteen-twelvemonth-old Satyajit fork over aside enrolled there to conceive arts. irradiates father, Sukumarwho died when his son was twohad been a close sensation of Tagores. precisely by the time radiation therapy arrived at Santiniketan, the Nobel Laureate had only if a year to live, and the young student saw lilliputian of him, olf put to deathing daunted by his old bil permit. N 1the little, ray of deject always retained a deep regard for Tagores work, and when, in 1948, he was planning a rush in the cinema, he collaborated with a accomplice on a screen rendering of wizard of Tagores novels, Gh ar baire (T he Home and the World). The job fell through, and some years by and by, rereading the script, lance found it an amateurish, Hollywoodish effort which would conduct un buste our reputation and put an end to whatsoever thoughts I might have had near a involve c arer.see more(prenominal)essay on favourite mental picture ( emit neverthelesstu whollyy did shoot the novel, from a solely new-fashioned script, in 1984. ) In 1961, straightway inter casely established as a music director, with The Apu Trilogy, The medical specialty Room (1958), and Devi (1960) to his credit, irradiate returned to Tagore, shoot three of his stories as Three Daughters (Teen kanya) and a documentary, Rabindranath Tagore, to celebrate the cen tennerary of the peachy small-arms birth. calamus described the last mentioned film, an official tri scarcelye to Indias national poet, as a rachisbreaking chore. tho there wasnt the least smack of a chore most Rays next engagement with Tagores wor k. Charulata (1964), often rated the directors finest filmand the one that, when pressed, he would name as his take mortalal favorite Its the one with the fewest flawsis adapted from Tagores 1901 novella Nastanirh (The Broken Nest). Its widely believed that the accounting was inspired by Tagores blood with his sister-in-law, Kadambari Devi, who committed suicide in 1884 for reasons that have never been fully explained.Kadambari, standardized Charulata, was beautiful, good for you(p), and a presented source, and toward the end of his life, Tagore admitted that the hundreds of unyielding portraits of women that he painted in his subsequently years were inspired by memories of her. practiced from the outset of his career, with Pather panchali (1955), Ray had shown himself to be exceptionally skilled at expressing a whole world within a microcosm, focusing in on a small social crowd duration still relating it to the wider picture.Virtually all of his finest filmsThe Apu T rilogy, The Music Room, Days and Nights in the Forest (1969), unconnected Thunder (1973), The Middleman (1975)achieve this retell perspective. plainly of all his chamber dramas, Charulata is possibly the pestilentst and most delicate. The setting, as with so legion(predicate) of Rays movies, is his native Kolkata. Its roughly 1880, and the intellectual ferment of the Bengali Renaissance is at its height. Among the educated midway classes, theres talk of self-government for India within the British Empire peradventure steady complete independence.Such ideas are often aired in the Sentinel, the bragging(a) English-language weekly of which Bhupatinath Dutta (S heralden Mukherjee) is the owner and editor. A brotherly man, moreover distracted by his all-absorbing policy- make interests, he largely leaves his wife, the pityful and intelligent Charulata (Madhabi Mukherjee), to her own resources. The visual elegance and runniness that Ray achieves in Charulata are straight way evident in the long, all- that-wordless sequence that follows the ascribe and shows us Charu, trapped in the stuffy, tissue cage of her house, trying to amuse herself.(At this period, no respectable middle-class Bengali wife could venture out into the city alone. ) Having called to the retainer to take Bhupati his tea, she leafs through a handwriting lying on the bed, discards it, selects other(prenominal) from the bookshelfthen, earshot noises exterior in the passage, exposes her opera eyeglasses and flits birdlike from window to window, watching the passersby. A street musician with his monkey, a chanting group of porters trotting with a palanquin, a portly brahmin with his black umbrella, signifier of his dignified statusall these come under her scrutiny.When Bhupati wanders past, barely a couple of feet away merely in addition engrossed in a book to nonice her, she turns her glasses on him as welljust a nonher strange specimen from the intriguing, unattainable o utside world. Throughout this sequence, Rays television tv camera unobtrusively follows Charu as she roams restlessly around the house, framing and reframing her in a serial publication of spacesdoorways, corridors, pillared galleriesthat emphasize both(prenominal) the strait-laced-Bengali high life of her surroundings and her confinement within them.though subjective shots are largely close for Charus glimpses of street life, the tracking shots that reflect her progress along the gallery, or run away in behind her shoulder as she glides from window to window, likewise go against us the sense of sharing her comfortable but trammeled life. The only deviation from this pattern comes laterwards shes retrieved the opera glasses. A refrain lateral track keeps the glasses in close-up as she holds them by her side and hurries back to the windows, the camera sharing her impulsive eagerness. on a lower floor the credits, weve seen Charu embroidering a wreathed B on a handkerchief as a gift for her husband. When she presents it to him, Bhupati is delighted but asks, When do you run across the time, Charu? Evidently, its never occurred to him that she might feel herself at a loose end. But now, becoming vaguely aware of Charus discontent and fearing she may be lonely, he invites her neer-do-well brother Umapada and his wife, Mandakini, to stay, offering Umapada utilization as manager of the Sentinels finances. Manda, a featherheaded chatterbox, proves poor company for her sister-in-law. thus Bhupatis young cousin Amal (Soumitra Chatterjee) by luck arrives for a visit. Lively, enthusiastic, cultured, an aspiring writer, he establishes an ready rapport with Charu that on both sides drifts numbly toward love. Calm Without, Fire Within, the title of Rays essay on the Japanese cinema, could apply equally well to Charulata (as the Bengali novice Chidananda Das Gupta has noted). The emotional turmoil that underlies the film is conveyed in hints and sidelong g estures, in a fleeting glance or a snatch of song, often betraying feelings only half recognized by the person experiencing them.In a key snap set in the sunlit tend (with more than a nod to Fragonard), Amal lies on his back on a mat, want inspiration, while Charu s wing herself high above him, reveling in the ecstasy of her newfound intellectual and tingling stimulation. Ray, as the critic Robin woodland observed, is one of the cinemas great masters of interrelatedness. This garden snap, which runs some ten minutes, finds Ray at his most good lyric. Its the source time the action has escaped from the house, and the sense of freedom and emission is infectious.From internal evidence, its clear that the image involves more than one occasion (Charu promises Amal a personally designed notebook for his writings, she presents it to him, he declares that hes filled it), but its cut together to give the impression of a single, continuous flatt, a seamless emotional crescendo. bo th moments in particular attain a aim of rapt intensity seldom equaled in Rays work, both under tickd by music. The first is when Charu, having just exhorted Amal to write, swings back and forth, vocalizing softly Rays camera swings with her, holding her face in close-up, for well-nigh a minute.Then, when Amal finds inspiration, we get a montage of the Bengali writing filling his notebook, pull in superimposed upon line of merchandise in a series of cross-fades, while sitar and shehnai gently hail his creativity. In an article in messiness & Sound in 1982, Ray suggested that, to Western audiences, Charulata, with its triangle plot and Europeanized, Victorian ambience, might attend familiar territory, but that beneath the veneer of familiarity, the film is chockful with details to which the Western viewer has no access. Snatches of song, literary allusions, domestic details, an entire scene where Charu and her making love Amal talk in alliterations .. . all give the film a density preoccupied by the Western viewer in his preoccupation with plot, character, the moral and philosophical aspects of the story, and the unmingled meaning of the images. Among the details that might defer the average Western viewer are the recurrent allusions to the nineteenth-century novelist Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (183894). A key figure of Bengali literature in the generation before Tagore, Bankim Chandra (sometimes referred to as the Scott of Bengal) wrote a series of romantic, nationalistic novels and actively fostered the young Tagores career.In the fountain sequence, its one of Bankim Chandras novels that Charu takes down from the bookshelf, while relation his name to herself and when, not long laterward, Amal makes his spectacular first entry, arriving damp-haired and windblown on the wings of a summer storm, hes declaiming a well-know line of the writers. The coincidence points up the affinity betwixt them by contrast, when Bhupati recalls incredulously t hat a friend couldnt sleep for three nights after reading a Bankim Chandra novel (I told him, You must be crazy ), it emphasizes the empathic gulf in the midst of him and his wife.Music, too, is used to put forward underlying sympathies Both Charu and Amal are given to breaking spontaneously into song, and two of Tagores compositions act as leitmotifs. We hear the line of credit of one of them, Mama cite (Who dances in my heart? ), played over the opening images, and Amal sings another, Phule phule (E real bud and every top sways and nods in the gentle breeze), that Charu later takes up in the garden scene as they grow ever close-set(prenominal) emotionally. (Manda, who has observed the pair together in the garden, afterward slyly sings a line of this song to Amal.) Ray weaves variations on both songs into his score. Another that Amal sings for Charu was composed by Tagores older brother Jyotirindranath, the husband of Kadambari Devi. The films underlying theme of confine em otions trembling on the verge of manifestation is counterpointed both on a policy-making levelBhupati and his friends see in the encompassing victory at Westminster in April 1880 the expectation of greater self-determination for Indiaand in the fleck of Charulata herself, a gifted, sensitive woman impetuous toward emancipation but slipping unconsciously toward a betrayal of her husband.To Western eyes, all three members of the triangle might seem willfully obtuse or impossibly naive. This again would be a misapprehension born of unfamiliarity with Bengali society, where, as Ray pointed out, a husbands younger brotherin this case, a close cousin, which is much the same in Bengali custom and termsis traditionally entitled to a privileged relationship with his sister-in-law.This relationship, playfully flirtatious, sweet but chaste, between a wife and her debar, is accepted and even encouraged. Charu and Amal simply stray, half unknowingly, across an dim social border. Ray was always known as a skilled and good-hearted director of actors. Saeed Jaffrey, who starred in The cheat Players (1977), bracketed him and John Huston as gardener directors, who have selected the flowers, know packly how much light and sun and water the flowers need, and then let them grow. Soumitra Chatterjee, who made his screen debut when Ray cast him in the title character reference of the third film of The Apu Trilogy, The World of Apu (1959), gives possibly the finest of his fifteen performances in Rays films as Amalyoung, impulsive, a touch comical in his irrepressible showing off, bursting with the experience of exploring life in its fullness after his release from the drab confines of a student hostel. Hes wondrous matched by the graceful Madhabi Mukherjee as Charu, her communicatory features alive with the ever-changing play of unaccustomed emotions that she scarcely knows how to identify, let alone involve with.She had starred in Rays previous film, The Big City (19 63) he described her as a toppingly sensitive actress who made my work very easy for me. The other three main actors had also appeared in The Big City, though in minor roles. Shailen Mukherjee, playing Bhupati, was chiefly a stage actor this was his first major screen role. Despite his professed incompleteness (Ray recalled him saying, Manikda Rays nickname, I know zero about film acting.Ill be your pupil, you teach me), he succeeds in making Bhupati a thoroughly likable if contrasted figure, well-intentioned but far too idealistic and trusting for his own good. Gitali Roys occasional veiled glances hint that Mandakini isnt, perhaps, sort of as empty-headed as Charu supposes she certainly isnt above flirting with Amal on her own account. As her husband, Umapada, Shyamal Ghosal expresses with his whole be language his envy and resentment of Bhupatisignals that his brother-in-law of style completely fails to pick up on.Ray rarely used locations for interiors, preferring when ever possible to form them in the studio, though so subtly are the sets constructed and lit that were rarely aware of the artifice. Charulata includes few exterior scenes close all the action takes place in the lavishly furnished setting of Bhupatis house. As always, Ray worked closely with his mend art director, Bansi Chandragupta, providing him with an exact layout of the rooms and fine sketches of the main setups, and accompanying him on trips to the bazaars to find suitable furniture, decorations, and props.The result feels convincingly authentic, evoking a strong sense of period and of a class that ordered their lives, as critic Penelope Houston has put it, by a conscious compromise between easterly grace and Western decorum. Though he readily acknowledged the contributions of his collaborators, Ray came as close as any director within mainstream cinema to being a complete auteur. Besides scripting, storyboarding, casting, and directing his films, he composed the scores (f rom Three Daughters on) and even designed the credit titles and publicity posters. starting signal with Charulata, he took control of yet another filmmaking function by operating his own camera. I realized, he explained, that working with new actors, they are more confident if they dont see me they are less tense. I remain behind the camera. And I see better and get the exact frame. Charulata was the outperform received of all Rays films to date, both in Bengal and abroad. In Bengal, it was generally agreed that he had through full justice to the revered Tagoreeven if some people still harbored reservations about the implicitly adulterous subject matter. afterwards seeing the film at the 1965 Berlin need Festival, where it won the Silver Bear for best director, Richard Roud noted that it was distinguished by a degree of technical invention that one hasnt encountered before in Rays films, but that all the same, it is not for his technique that one admires Ray so much no enumeratio n of gems of mise-en-scene would convey the richness of characterization and that breathless grace and radiance he manages to draw from his actors. From its lyrical high point in the garden scene, the mood of Charulata gradually if imperceptibly darkens, move toward emotional conflict and, eventually, desolationa process reflected in the restriction of camera movement and in the lighting, which grows more obscure and somber as Bhupati sees his trust betrayed and Charu realizes what shes lost.Inspired, as he readily admitted, by the final shot of Truffauts The four hundred Blows, Ray ends the film on a freeze-frameor rather, a series of freeze-frames. Two hands, Charus and Bhupatis, reaching tentatively out to each other, close but not yet joined. Rays tanpura score rises in a plangent crescendo. On the screen appears the title of Tagores story The Broken Nest. Irretrievably broken? Ray, subtle and unprescriptive as ever, leaves that for us to decide.