Pather Panchali
Release Date: 26 August 1955
Director: Satyajit Ray
“Pather Panchali” is Satyajit Ray’s debut film
about life in a Bengali village. It was the first
movie of Satyajit Ray. It is an affecting story
of a rural family struggling to deal with
poverty and tragedy in their home. Ray
adapted the script from Bibhuti Bihushaw
Banerjee’s semi-autobiographical novel of
the same title and retells it with natural
beauty and a quiet perspective. The
filmmaker, a simple and direct approach to
making this movie. Ray created ordinary
scenes that were incredibly life-like. His films
contained very few strains of artifice. He
believed that the raw material of cinema was
life itself. Ray generally concentrated on
small subjects and ordinary people. He
favored using non-actors and shooting on
location to heighten the realism. He made
films in his own style, dignified, sincere and
with a conscience. In “Pather Panchali”
(Song of the Little Road) Ray makes superb
use of his milieu. The viewer immediately
feels the cramped conditions of the families’
decaying house and the open-air confines of
the surrounding forest. Rays’ was a cinema
of thought and feeling, in which emotion was
deliberately restrained because it is so
strong. This restraint adds to the
psychological intensity in his work. Nearly all
of his films are marked by this remarkable
depth of feeling. “Pather Panchali”, the first
installment of the Apu Trilogy (‘Aparajito”
and “The World of Apu” would follow) depicts
a young boy (Apu) exploring his ever-
expanding universe with a growing sense of
wonder. Ray excelled at showing how
children and adolescents confront mystery
and joy; sadness and death. The director
shows Apu’s burgeoning awareness witha
masterful use of the long shot. High-angled,
distant shots track Apu and his older sister
Durga, as they run spiritedly through white-
kashed fields. This sense of discovery gives
the frilm it’s emotional power. The director’s
main subject was India-it’s customs and
culture. It’s conflicts between the traditional
way of life. He tried arduously to capture this
synthesis between western ideas and
traditional Hindu values. His concern for
human problems and not issues of national
politics gave his films universal appeal.
“Pather Panchali” delineates the small joys
and acute sorrows of a poor Indian family. t
does not nullify love. It would be difficult to
imagine “Pather Panchali” without it’s
memorable score. Satyajit Ray was an
unpretentious filmmaker. His films were life-
affirming, authentic and honest; gentle and
poetic-truthful observations on human
behavior that employed simple but strong
themes. Ray’s unadorned style of film-
making was intimate, probing, and revealing.
The final scene shows the grieving family
leaving their home in an ox-driven carriage to
begin a new life. A trailing camera in medium
close-up captures a compelling mixture of
emotions on their faces. Expressions of pain
and resolution; hope and despair, the future
and the past. A seemingly simple yet
unmistakably powerful scene that typifies
Satyajit Ray’s profound cinema. A cinema of
gentle but deep observation, understanding
and unabashed love of the human race.