‘Chinnamul’ to ‘Pather Panchali’: Golden era EXPERIMENTS that led to BENGALI CINEMA RENAISSANCE

Indian cinema have witnessed major breakthroughs in technical aspect of filmmaking, more substance and richness in content and higher path-breaking innovations to redefine feel and texture of films.

Bengali cinema has remained a step ahead since the birth of Indian cinema given the experimentation with content and the medium. Directors like Nemai Ghosh, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, Tapan Sinha and Satyajit Ray to name a few have been stalwarts whose works have inspired future filmmakers. A substantial part of these luminaries’ works contributed to the vocabulary of Indian cinema and such has been their impact that every new generation discovered new meanings and relevance in their works. Why not? They were experimental in every department of filmmaking.

Here we have listed some of the prominent experiments from the golden days of Bengali black and white cinema.

After making a documentary on Bengal Famine (1943), this first feature film of legendary Bimal Roy is one of the early films in New Theatres which showed the sharp divide between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ due to famine, and economic problems of war times. It talks about how the dispossessed maintain their dignity and self-respected as opposed to decline in values of the moneyed class. Critic Ashok Rane says, “The New Theatres concept literally meant new theatre, where there was a conscious effort to create cinema that would be devoid of theatrical gestures and would be realistic.” And this film adheres to this philosophy quite well.

Directed by Nemai Ghosh (not the photographer), this was the first film that deal with the partition of India. The film’s story is about a group of farmers from East Pakistan who had to migrate to Calcutta because of the partition of Bengal in 1947. This was the early attempt at partition theme even before it became a leitmotif in auteur Ritwik Ghatak’s oeuvre.

This film was the first film of Ghatak which was made before Pather Panchali (1955) and considered by critics as Bengali cinema’s first art film. Unfortunately, the film was released twenty four years after its making. Ghatak was dead by that time. It is a story of an unemployed person and repercussions of Bengal partition on people around him.

This film is an epoch in Indian cinema. It provided ‘template’ for future filmmakers not only in Bengali language but also other languages in Indian cinema. Be its deeply meditative frames, acute but appropriate use of music, enormous sense of subtlety in dealing with delicate emotions or that rare and formidable ability to weed out the ‘superfluous’, this film is hermitic observations of Indian ethos with utmost dispassion. Based on the novel by the same name by Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, the film is a journey of a family that goes through economic hardships and struggles to eke out a living in their rural ancestral home and the growing up years of their son Apu.

This film by Ghatak is an experiment in its truest sense. Using an inanimate object as a character in a story was an experiment ahead of its times. Saibal Chatterjee says, “Making a car, which is an inanimate object, a character of a story and creating a gripping and sensitive narration out of it was quite an experiment by Ghatak for its time.”

This is a milestone in Indian cinema. Using epic approach and coincidence device of Bertolt Brecht, this film is absolute experiment in every sense. Ghatak’s deep understanding of mythology and contextualizing it in problems, hardships and struggles of Bengal partition, all of Ghatak’s works have been experimental. This film for which he is widely known uses melodrama to tell a story about a woman’s sacrifice for the sustenance of her family. In this tradition of filmmaking, Ghatak’s Subarnarekha (1962) is also an experiment in different way of interpreting Indian society in a socialist way.

This is Mrinal Sen’s first film of which received international acclaim. It is known for the struggle of a couple to survive in Bengal famine and other calamities in their lives. The film depicts loss of values and emotions in people who beset by famine. A scene in the film shows Priyanath, after three days of starvation, eating greedily some rice and without leaving some rice for his wife who resents more his selfishness than the starvation.

This is one of most experimental films of Mrinal Sen. It is a successful depiction of how in times of crisis, the deep and long-suppressed biases of people come to fore. It is a story of woman who is a sole breadwinner of the family and her missing one night, brings forth the suppressed emotions of the family and neighbours.

This is one of the biggest technical innovations in Indian cinema in terms of narratives, themes and presentation. Here Ritwik Ghatak amalgamates the Jatra folk theatre and epic theatre in cinematic medium and successfully creates a deeply sensitive narrative. It deals with creation of plight of people after creation Bangladesh, decline in values in society and Naxalism along with various other themes of Bengali society.