A River Called Titas opens to the eerily desolate yet tranquil sight of a receded river basin as the expressive voice of a traditional folk singer (Dheeraj Uddin Fakir) serenades the mighty Titas River in East Bengal with a soulful ode on the river’s inconstant ebb and flow that manifests its alternately fickle grace, mercy, […]
Ritwik Ghatak’s films are deeply haunted by the specter of the Partition of Bengal in 1947, and this sense of dislocation and self-inflicted human tragedy created by artificially imposed social division casts a pervasive sentiment of despair, instability, and perpetual exile through all the rended families and uprooted ancestral communities of Subarnarekha. Opening to the […]
In an impoverished refugee village in Calcutta, an attractive and industrious young woman, Nita (Supriya Choudhury), breaks a sandal while passing through the market square, and without complaining, continues barefoot on the graveled street, unable to buy a replacement pair of sandals for the walk home. Patently aware that Nita has received her monthly salary, […]
The opening image of Ritwik Ghatak’s first feature film, The Citizen, consists of a steady motion, acute angle dolly shot of mature trees (a symbolic image that is similarly implemented in the introductory sequence of The Cloud-Capped Star) lining an anonymous street, a juxtaposition of transience and permanence that serves as a seeming reflection of […]
An off-screen narrator dispassionately delivers the terse news account that on December 25, 1978, the body of an Adivasi tribeswoman named Lahanya Nagi (Smita Patil), was found at the bottom of a dry, abandoned well near the village of Kondachiwadi, as the image of the somber faces of a group of resigned villagers, having quietly […]
Anila Bose (Mamata Shankar) receives a curious letter sent from New Delhi, affectionately referring to her as “baby”, presumably from her uncle, Manmohan Mitra (Utpal Dutt). Having left Calcutta immediately after his graduation when Anila was only two years old, Manmohan is eager to reunite with his sole surviving relative, imploring on her sense of […]