The Leeds Film Festival showed the restored version of Aparajito in the 60th anniversary year of its appearance on the world stage. Satyajit Ray’s film, the second part of his Apu trilogy, received many prizes on its first appearance and much praise from cinephiles over the following decades. This was initially mainly from international rather than Indian audiences, though a balance has since been restored. As such a revered classic, there is a danger that an audience now might take it for granted. Personally, I found that the restoration, although it couldn’t overcome every aspect of the damage done to the original film following years of neglect, still managed to produce a print of startling clarity and I felt like I was watching a new film.
As the second film to be based on the original novels by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, Aparajito (‘Unvanquished‘) bridges the two novels. Satyajit Ray did alter the narrative in significant ways. The young Apu has moved to Benares with his father and mother. Father works as a priest on the ghats, but quite quickly catches a fever and dies. Apu and his mother move back to the village of Apu’s great-uncle where the boy decides to abandon his apprenticeship as a priest and attend school. It is the final section of the narrative that Ray changed in terms of the relationship between widowed mother and son – and in doing so, alienated more traditional audiences.
The presentation of Apu’s development and his eventual estrangement from his mother is very subtle and effective. I admire and respect Ray for what he achieved in this film, but I was most taken by Subrata Mitra’s camerawork (and the accompanying music by Ravi Shankar). The early scenes of Benares in what is meant to be the early 1920s are beautiful and make an interesting comparison with the recent film, Hotel Salvation (India 2017) also set on the ghats of Benares (now Varanasi). The later images of the village recall the train on the horizon as it was in Pather Panchali, but I was delighted to see images of Calcutta, including shots by the Hooghly River and on the Maidan. What is surprising (and possibly a result of the very limited budget) is the complete absence of any evidence of the British Raj in a city which up until 10 years earlier was the capital of British India and still the major commercial city of India. Perhaps this absence is one of the factors which gives the Apu Trilogy its ‘timeless and universal’ appeal? Ray hints at the impact of modernity on the adolescent Apu as he sets off for Calcutta clutching the globe given to him by his village schoolteacher and wearing his first lace-up shoes. In Calcutta he is delighted to find his room has electricity for lighting. All this is very effective, but what are we to make of the presentation of Calcutta without the crowds? Was it really so sleepy and deserted in the 1920s? Or again, is it just a matter of budget, technology and learning what can be done with the available technology? Marie Seton’s Portrait of a Director: Satyajit Ray (1971) has quite a bit to say about the innovations made by Ray, Mitra and designer Bansi Chandragupta in photographing the studio sets and matching them to location shots in Benares. The key was the discovery of so-called ‘bounce lighting’ using diffused studio lighting and reflectors to simulate daylight seeping into the Benares house.
The outpouring of critical praise for the film in the West and the reluctance to recognise the ‘modernity’ of the relationships by the Bengali audience were indicative of the way Ray soon became institutionalised within the international ‘humanist art film’ movement of the 1950s. He also quickly became the kind of director who would be seen as an auteur, a ‘personal’ filmmaker. I haven’t read the original novels from which he took the Apu character but looking at the photos of the young Ray in Seton’s book, it isn’t difficult to see the young Apu (played by Sumiran Kumar Ghosal) as the same tall spindly young man who Ray was when going to Presidency College some ten years later in the 1930s. Apu even lives over a print shop where he works part-time. Ray’s family had once owned a printing and publishing business. I was also entertained by the university classroom scenes in which I finally learned how to explain the meaning of ‘synedoche’. But in the end, Aparajito‘s greatest gift for me is to set the scene for Ray’s 1960s films set in Calcutta and before that the third film in the trilogy, Apur Sansar (The World of Apu, 1959).
The print shown in Leeds is the restoration distributed on Blu-ray by Criterion in the US: https://www.criterion.com/boxsets/1145-the-apu-trilogy
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