Articles on Ghatak (the third phase ) compiled in active remembrance of someones wonderful ecriture on the same subject.

Rajendralala mitra On human Sacrifice text http://books.google.co.in/books? id=8FQIAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

Her Mother's Son Kinship and History in Ritwik Ghatak Moinak Biswas

ROUGE

1. Ritwik Ghatak, 'Ekamatra Satyajit Ray' in Chitrabhash 18:1-2, 1984, p 108.

2. Bibhutibhushan Banerjee,Aparajito, 1931.

3. A close look at the Apu Trilogy as a whole, however, would reveal that Ray follows the novelist's cue more closely than Ghatak's comment would suggest. He introduces naturalist dispersal into the realist narrative and works with an incomplete separation between the individual and the natural horizon.

The Citizen's Journey and the Eternal Return Commenting on Satyajit Ray's The World of Apu (Apur Sansar, 1959), Ritwik Ghatak wrote that the film's ending suffers from a major misconception. (1) Ray's film ends with Apu walking away from the horizon, towards the camera, with Kajol on his shoulders, they are set on the path to the future. However, the novel (2) ends with Apu returning to his ancestral village with his son, Kajol. As the young boy stands before the ruins of their abandoned home the place itself and its lost inhabitants dead family members, local gods, characters from the local lore and from The Mahabharata begin to speak to him. They announce the return of Apu in the incarnation of the boy. The return to the bosom of the ancestral village at the end of Bibhuitbhushan's novel is poignant in its very refusal to follow the archetypal novelistic journey from the country to the city. It is a return of the village itself as a lost consciousness. Ray does away with this episode, and seems to offer an affirmative image of the trajectory of the citizen. (3) Ghatak's comment, made towards the end of his career, reveals more about his own art than about anything else. It tells us about his approach to questions of selfhood and narrative. Ghatak expressed deep admiration for the first two films of the trilogy, Pather Panchali (1955) andAparajito (1956), but even with Pather Panchali, Apu's movement away from the village at the end bothered him, he found it lacking in depth, that the wanderer's

4. Foreword to Ritwik Ghatak'sCinema and I, 1987, reprinted in Ritwik Ghatak, Rows and Rows of Fences (Calcutta: Seagull, 2000) p. ix.

generous melody was absent in that ending. The mythical power of return will fascinate Ghatak; he was not satisfied with a form that enacts the historical flow but sought to turn history itself into an object of investigation. That one important task seemed to be to give expression to the sense of violation brought on by the historical transportation of his people into the scene of the contemporary nation. He could not do this by positing a wholesome tradition and past, over and against modernity, a road taken by much of popular cinema since the 1970s, but he had to remain strangely solitary in his choices. Ray was to write of Ghatak, One doesn't notice any influence of other schools of filmmaking on his work. For him Hollywood might not have existed at all. The occasional echo of classical Soviet school is there, but this does not prevent him from being in a class by himself. (4) It was as much a matter of choice as of training, his cinema was 'intellectual' (5) in the sense that there was a conscious attempt to make cinema itself a tool in the search for what, rephrasing Bertolt Brecht's words, one can call a 'fighting conception of the modern'. Ghatak's solitude should be a challenge to the critic, not least because it cautions us against using his example as one of questioning modern modes from the side of tradition as is sometimes done. (6) Let us remember that his use of popular forms of narrative and performance did not win him any popular audience in his time. The City of Oblivion At the end of their night-long revelry in Subarnarekha (1962), the two renegades, Iswar and Haraprasad, take a taxi ride down the streets of Calcutta. Earlier, in the pub, verses from the Upanishadwere chanted against the theme music of La Dolce Vita. The great spiritual delirium of the city continues to bring cultural quotes into a spectacular collage as the two drunken friends are swallowed up by the night. On the haze of streetlights passing across the screen we hear their voices:

5. Marie Seton was one of the first critics to use this term in her essay 'New Wave in Bengali Films' (1960), cited in Rajat Ray, 'Paschatya Samalochoker Dristite Ritwik Ghataker Chhabi' in Ritwik O Tar Chhabi, Vol. 2, ed. Rajat Ray (Calcutta: Annapurna Pustak Mandir) pp 112116. 6. An example of this would be Amiya Kumar Bagchi's 'Ritwik Ghatak', Frontier, July 7, 1984, where he tried to read Ghatak's work in conjunction with the 'conservative' tradition of 19th century Bengal, a tradition that, in the work of the poet Iswarchandra Gupta or dramatist Dinabandhu Mitra, was more critical of the colonial rule than its liberal counterpart. The general leftist reaction to the 'traditional' aspect of Ghatak's cinema was negative, contributing to his isolation from the most likely of his patrons in the radical period of the late 1960s and early 1970s. For typical examples of such reaction see the essays by Iraban Basu Roy and Prabrit Das Mahapatra in Ritwik Ghatak O Tar Chhabi, Vol 2. The Assamese Marxist critic, Hiren Gohain, raised similar objections to Bagchi's essay cited above in Frontier.

Haven't seen the Atom Bomb Haven't. Haven't they? Never. Haven't seen the War, haven't seen the Famine, haven't seen the riots, haven't seen the Partition... Useless that old hymn to the glory of the Sun ... Iswar will turn up at his sister's quarter as her first customer soon after this.

She will slash her own throat with a kitchen knife. Ghatak names his project with fearsome accent here: remembering not to forget.

7. See, for example 'Interview with Ghatak' in Ghatak: Arguments/ Stories, ed. Ashish Rajadhyakasha and Amrit Gangar (Bombay: Screen Unit) 1987, pp 88-89. 8. The Indian People's Theatre Association. Launched in 1943, it led a highly creative movement of politically engaged art and literature, bringing into its fold the foremost artists of the time. Ghatak and Mrinal Sen are among the direct products of the movement. 9. See his lyrical reminiscences in 'Chhabi Kora' in Chitrabikshan, 18:1-2, 1984, p35.

He recorded his debt to the socialist political-cultural project of the 1940s. (7) The 40s was the decade of the Bengal Famine, the partition of India, Hindu-Muslim riots, Independence. And it was also the decade of the Quit India movement, the naval mutiny, peasant rebellions, thousands of strikes, barricades on the street raised by workers, students and ordinary citizens, a decade of cultural resurgence led by the IPTA. (8) He would perceive the tragedy of the decade not so much as the failure of revolution but as oblivion for a people. He talked about the lost Bengal in a language close to the author of Pather Panchali, in terms of childhood, plenitude and home (9); but the excavation of memory in his films is not so much a matter of a return to roots as it is sometimes thought, it is meant to bring back the moment of rupture to consciousness, a moment that the traumatised do not know how to remember. It is possible to address the question of selfhood and form in his work in connection with the project of remembrance he undertakes, keeping in mind the essential challenge his films pose: they sound the recall, but on the other hand, they refuse to accept a chronology that demands submission to its logic of violence. To come to terms with history did not mean in Ghatak's work accepting it essentially as progress, or accepting the present as the only possible outcome of its processes. Which is perhaps why the outward journey from the country to the city, figured as destiny, celebrated as movement towards an envisaged future would make him uncomfortable. His work, in film or in writing, on the other hand, does not leave any scope to lapse back into a history versus myth argument; it proposes a much more difficult course: to lay bare the irrational substratum of the present, to make history face its other at its heart, and therefore, also break open the secret alliance of realism and melodram

As he prised open that interlock the combination without which realism or melodrama hardly ever functions Ghatak had to alienate himself from the trend in more than one way. Let us remember that around the middle of the 1950s both realism (or art film) and melodrama (or popular film) arrived at their classic formulations in Indian cinema. The new melodrama responded to the modernising impulse of the new nation more consistently. It celebrated the urban adventure, sought to figure the journey to citizenship by capturing the seduction of the city space; the new romance it formulated was in many ways a romance with modernity. There was a visible attempt to conceive the domain of the romantic couple in its autonomy from the familial domain a desire that often ended up giving rise to unstable tropes of space. In displacing historical tragedy into upheavals in kinship relations, Ghatak was following a well-worn logic of melodrama, but let us remember how in its bourgeois articulation, the contemporary melodrama was seeking a compromise between the shelter of the old family and community on one hand and the dream of individualism and industrial progress on the other. Close at hand was the example of Bengali melodrama that came to be known after its most successful star, Uttam Kumar. It developed a powerful form out of this compromise, and still remains the most potent articulation of the fantasy of the journey to the city for the Bengali middle class of the

individual's emergence into the historical open without having to abjure the protection of the past. Ghatak's melodramatic turn was truly scandalous; he followed the logic of the form to its end so that, by stepping into the enclosure of primal bonds, the kernel of resistance to the individual's development, one could produce the most acute observations of historical processes.

10. The critical reappraisal of Ghatak in the 1980s stressed his experiments with narrative. The first important treatment was by Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Ritiwk Ghatak, A Return to the Epic (Bombay: Screen Unit, 1982) (see especially, 'Chapter Three'). Some important essays are collected in Ghatak: Arguments/ Stories.

The challenge of history is recognised in two ways. In the first, he tries to figure history as a horizon into which the narrative must open, and from which it draws its final coherence. The best example is probably EFlat (Komal Gandhar, 1961), a film that does not hold together unless one uses historical memory to re-order it. Of the other process Subarnarekha tells us most clearly remembrance as not simply recognition of the past, but an excavation of what has passed under the cover of historical reality. The first process has been studied in some detail already (10); I would like to make a few points here on the second aspect of his melodramatic turn.

11. By the end of 1947, 16 million people had lost their homes, the number of refugees in West Bengal by 1951 was 3.5 million. A conservative official estimate put the number killed in riots by 1948 at 1 million, but the actual figure is thought to be much higher.

Ghatak took one rupture in the history he witnessed as central the partition of Bengal. As he went on extending that event into a metaphor for everything that was alienating and destructive in the experience of his community, and talked about the pervasive degeneration of his country sometimes solely in terms of it, he faced puzzlement and even incomprehension from his contemporaries. Wasn't he being obsessed with a single event? Wasn't he living in the past, cutting himself off from the contemporary? The full irony of the situation is probably now coming to light: the Partition a joint treachery committed by the colonial power and the nationalist leadership cost millions of lives (mainly in Punjab and Bengal, but also in other provinces as the communal riots spread) and left millions homeless (11), but had hardly any thematic impact on film or literature. People forgot to talk about it. In the face of this silence the history model of narration itself had to be played with, it had to be crossed with elements borrowed from traditional community-centred forms epic, chronicle play, allegory, musical theatre. But in the face of historical denial Ghatak would also resort to a drama where a few hapless characters would say just that 'we deny it'. These are people who howl against the rocks that they want to live, who place negation against negation by closing the circle before violent interdictions of change. A particular kinship relation takes on an acute dimension in this drama. It works to defeat the melodrama of couple formation even as it destroys the logic of the other, pre-bourgeois melodrama: the feudal family romance.

The First Films With the exception of Ajantrik (1958), the films from the 1950s and 60s show a compulsive engagement with the brother-sister relationship. The absence of the couple, however, connects Ajantrikalso to the same preoccupation. Here the two-term, pre-social bond is between the hero Bimal and his jalopy, Jagaddal. (12) Bimal is an eccentric, a loner; the only

12. Jagaddal means the immoveable.

13. Which is to say that it functions like what Lacan called the gaze, a look that belongs to no one.

conversation he can have is with the car and the young garage boy, Sultan. His fellow taxi-drivers make fun of him, 'Is the car a woman?' they ask. Perhaps it is, but what kind of woman? In a rare moment of eloquence, Bimal tells Sultan that in these days of hardship, the old car gets him his day's meal; it came into his life, he says, the year his mother passed away. Let us recall the sequences with the runaway bride. The moment she appears Bimal is seized by a strange and almost comic disturbance, which is matched by the reactions of the car (its gets murderously jealous, even tries to run over the woman). After the woman, cheated and abandoned by the man she had eloped with, leaves in the train, this play of identification the humanisation of the car, the humanism of the story disintegrates before our eyes. Bimal tries to catch her in the next station by taking a shortcut through the hills. The car breaks down on the way, gets reduced to the 'thing' as it were, it refuses to be human any more. Nature stands grandly aloof, watching. The very look of the camera breaks free of diegetic sources and begins to flow in from nowhere. (13)

As the hero steps into the domain of social sexuality, as the possibility of romantic couple formation is suggested, it is the realist order of the narrative that falls into crisis. Why should transition from the pre-social to the social create a crisis for the realist logic? The answer might tell us about Ghatak's distance from not only familiar forms but also from the agreed upon equations between forms and feelings. When we move into the other kinship bond that forecloses couple formation the brother-sister bond rather than the bond with the mother the whole question becomes much more complex, generates formidable challenges. The conflict between maternality and conjugality is simpler after all Indian melodrama has been negotiating a resolution of that conflict for decades but none of us were prepared for the those brothers and sisters of Ghatak to appear as exemplars of the pure couple. Towards the end of Nagarik (1953), the unemployed hero Ramu receives the promise from his beloved Uma that she will join him in the slum his family is moving into. As she makes the promise, we see a close-up of the starving Uma: her face awash with soft light, strong backlight throwing a rim of silver dust on her hair. It reminds us of the close-up of Nita in The CloudCapped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara, 1960) at the end of the duet she sings with her brother. Uma's expression of solidarity inspires Ramu to urge their tenant, Sagar, to accept his sister Sita as his partner, to be a fellow traveller in their impending journey into the night. But the Ramu-Uma relationship is dealt with briefly, almost with reluctance in Nagarik, the real emotional bonding exists between Ramu and his sister Sita. Sita, wasting away at home as the unmarriageable daughter, can laugh and become playful only in the company of her elder brother, and Ramu finds in her the friend who knows him more than anyone else, believes in him despite his repeated failure to get a job. The parents appear at times to have become calloused by the daily privations, but tenderness is preserved in the domain of interaction between the two siblings. Theatrical use of the body at climactic points, which evolves into significant sculptural and dance-like postures in the three films of the 60s, appears in its cruder form in the film. But significantly, these gestures appear with the same intensity in the scenes between Ramu and his sister as in those between Ramu and Uma. They come at points of emotional saturation between Ramu and Sita, when the pain of one seems to pierce the other. Names are almost never without allegorical import in Ghatak's films; they are called Ram and Sita after the divine couple from the Ramayana. The tale of a village boy's adventure in Runaway (Bari Theke Paliye, 1959) places the mother as the princess, she is the woman for whom the boy seeks the treasure in the city. However, the sister one who is younger in age (the elder sister often figures as an extension of the mother in Indian families) appears as part of a proto-romance in the story. The runaway Kanchan meets the little Mini in the city, is very attracted to her, and dreams

of taking her home to his mother. Mini's ailing mother treats Kanchan as a son, he finds a second home in Mini's house. The two children look like early incarnations of lovers, foreshadowing the young Abhiram and Sita in Subarnarekha. That film will also show that in a way it is consistent with the 'obsession' with the mother archetype in Ghatak's films that the brother and sister should form the primary basis of love. Against the Mandate of Separation: The three films of the '60s The overvaluation of this kinship bond in the films has gone unnoticed but it is insistent. Nita in The Cloud-Capped Star fails in her relationship with Sanat, but then the relationship is something in which she hardly participates with any enthusiasm, and it does not seem to occupy her much once Sanat's betrayal is confirmed. On the other hand, she and her elder brother Shankar create an island of happiness and belonging in the turbulent waters of the refugee home. It is the secret sharing of a language that their relationship thrives on. They exchange poems and songs of Rabindranath Tagore, indulge in childish play, together they devise means to tackle the daily humiliation of the artist and the dreamer.

14. Tagore song.

Sanat's marriage to Nita's sister brings on a climax. Shankar will decide to leave the house after this, Nita will begin to wither away. Before the wedding she asks Shankar to teach her a Rabindrasangit. (14) As they sing in duet ('The night the storm broke open my doors') Nita's body goes through an ecstatic choreography. We know it is not merely the lover's desertion that has caused this anguish, this mourning. The ecstasy joins the two figures of Shankar and Nita into a series of iconic compositions, bringing out into the open the iconic potential in the use of bodies that the film has built up. The song is thrown like a cry against the walls made of bamboo mats, moonlight trickles in as if in answer. In the climax the musical notes give way to sounds of lashing. Let us recall the mythical allusions in the story. Nita was born on the day the goddess Jagaddhatri (Durga) is worshipped, the wailing choric voice in the soundtrack impersonates Durga's mother Menaka, calling her back to her bosom, to her parental home in the hills. She will set out on that journey, as if abandoning the shelter on earth where no one recognised her. Shankar is another name for Shiva, Durga's husband.

E-Flat is the only film in Ghatak's oeuvre where romantic love is central. The extended metaphor is that of marriage, the love triangle serves as an allegorical core elaborated into relationships between individuals, groups and places of dwelling. Ghatak captures his own autobiography as a radical theatre activist and playwright, weaves the story of his own marriage into the plot, talks about the Partition of 1947 directly for the first time, as something witnessed by his protagonists. This audacity was greeted with silence and slander. The film was booed out of the theatres, Ghatak's old colleagues turned against it. More than the obsession with Partition, at this point it was the articulation of personal experiences that alienated his audience. But that is the task that the film sets itself. A traditional marriage song sung by women works as the leitmotif; marriage and love become depersonalised through ritual enactment. In the tussle between the two rival theatre groups Anasuya, the heroine, works as a mediator; but her crossing over to Bhrigu's group is also an anthropological act of exchange between two sides, here put into effect by woman herself. The love story, thus refracted, connects with the theme of re-unification of the divided Bengal. Conjugality calls for separation from the original family and community; it is quite possible to think that E-Flat uses the motif of marriage, paradoxically, to suggest an overcoming of the imperative of separation. Not simply the joining of two hearts, here the theme of marriage suggests the healing of the sore of

separation. To mourn the separation a new political drama is envisaged: Bhrigu (and Ghatak himself) goes back to Kalidasa's Abhijnan Shakuntalam to fashion the epic form he is searching for. The scenes from the play that we see centre around the heroine Shakuntala's departure for her husband's kingdom. At the end of the film Anasuya and Bhrigu stand close to the railway tracks joining hands in a gesture reminiscent of the wedding ritual. The motif of the railway track is introduced in a scene early in the film, through an inspired sequence of orchestrated spaces, actions and songs. During an outing, Bhrigu and Anasuya stand at the very end of the tracks in that scene; they look beyond the river Padma and reminisce about their lost homes on the other side. From what they say they seem to share the same family, the same home and childhood. On the second outing, in the Kurseong hills, Anasuya tells Jaya, her younger teammate, about her activist mother who was killed in the communal riots. Her mother had a rare fire in her eyes, she says, and she can see that light in Bhrigu's eyes. Later, on their third excursion in Bolpur, she will hand over her most precious possession, her mother's diary, to Bhrigu, and tell him, You are my mother's son, I knew it the moment I saw you.

15. We are made to face our self-destructive incestuous longings which are otherwise so delicately camouflaged by both our sophisticated and vulgar filmmakers, 'Violence and Responsibility' inGhatak: Arguments/Stories, p 62. See also Ashish Rajadhyaksha,Ritwik Ghatak, A Return to the Epic, pp 104-110.

16. In by far the best commentary available on the film Ghatak tries to explain the 'melodramatic lapse' into coincidences in the film by drawing attention to the role played by coincidence in his 'epic' form. The central event, the brother turning up as the sister's client, being a coincidence, everything else could be. But what kind of coincidence is it? (one) has to understand that whichever woman the

Subarnarekha of course underlines the theme in some ways. Kumar Shahani has written that the film exposes a general pathology, the selfdestructive incestuous drive of a class, which is mirrored here in the relationship between Iswar and Sita. (15) What is more interesting to note in the Iswar-Sita relationship, however, is not incestuous drive, but a substance within the kinship bond that is 'more than itself', which defies social naming, pre-exists known sexual elaborations including incest. Iswar has no woman in his life, as he tries to build a new home in the refugee colony he has to play the father's role to the little Sita, his sister. He leaves the colony ('deserts it', as Haraprasad says) to take up a job in the desolate Chatimpur, primarily thinking of her future. Abhiram, the orphan boy he has adopted, comes along. Sita will be his sole companion in Chatimpur after Abhiram is sent off to a boarding school. It is predictable that in the grownup Sita Iswar would find the reflection of their dead mother. How do you look so like the mother you have never seen? he asks her. His love is not unmixed with jealousy. His distance with the adult Abhiram and his insane anger at the realisation of the latter's romantic involvement with Sita, or his 'madness' after her elopement with him are all explained by narrative motivation, but the pattern of reactions has another logic of a secret accumulation of affects. Iswar will go to the city on the invitation of Haraprasad, to drown himself in the 'grotesque fun' that Calcutta is, will end up at Sita's quarter as her first client, she will be destroyed once they are reunited thus. The use of coincidence disturbed his viewers, but Ghatak did not think it was much of a coincidence, so far as he was concerned whichever woman he visited would have been his sister. (16)

brother visited would have been his sister, 'Subarnarekha Prasange' (1966),Chitrabikshan, 18:1-2, 1984, p 41.

As the director keeps playing with his favourite low-angle shots the impending destruction comes to be signalled through the image. Iswar draws Sita close to him, asks her how she could exactly be like the mother she has never seen. Sita leans forward, caresses his forehead and whispers in his ear that she is his mother. We see the two of them in an extreme low-angle shot that takes in part of the fan whirling on the ceiling. The strain on the limits of the frame begins to point to the breaching of the borders of named relations. Later, after Sita's desertion, the frame will be repeated: Iswar would try to hang himself from the hook where the fan was hanging in the earlier scene. Sita marries the low-born Abhiram. His mother, we are briefly told, is called Kaushalya after the hero's mother in Ramayana. The untouchable refugee Ram and Sita grow up like siblings. When they run into the abandoned airstrip their playful figures momentarily but strongly recall Apu and Durga running into the fields in Pather Panchali. They do not seem to have any other playmates save each other in this remote and profoundly quiet country. As soon as the grown-up Abhiram comes back from the town, the film offers us their love as a simple fact, as if nothing else could have been the case. If the film strives to reveal the self-destructive drives of a threatened community then it does so in keeping with the general value that Ghatak places on such bonding in his films, its nurturing potential is also underlined. Sita, Abhiram and Iswar spend extended days of childhood at an idyllic remove from the turbulent city. Sita loses her brothers when the man-woman relationship is invoked in the space of the city which embodies the historical present. Tales and History Ghatak's own essays are among the best commentaries available on the films, but he shares the silence of his commentators on this particular theme. He did feel the need to invoke psychoanalytic categories to explain some of his persistent motifs, but it was Jungian theory that engaged his attention. He needed conceptual tools that would compensate for the lack of attention to questions of subjectivity and tradition in contemporary Marxist thinking, and Jung helped him think of these questions in relation to the collective experience. Given the intellectual atmosphere he belonged to, Freud would have meant too much of a retreat into the individual. One would, however, like to know how Ghatak, with his keen anthropological interests, would have responded to the critical possibilities of rethinking the family complexes beyond individual destinies or universalist claims, as insights into the social formation of subjects, as allegories of passage into the realm of social exchange.

17. Ramanujan, 'The

These brothers and sisters form a two-term relation that seems to resist the Oedipal passage, and thereby also the normative historical development of the individual. The objection to the universalist claims of the Oedipus complex has often come from anthropologists; the question, however, is not to find some variant of the Oedipal structure in Indian society or in the films in question, but to see if the Oedipal metaphor can help one understand the dynamics of resistance involved here. In a memorable essay, the poet and critic A.K. Ramanujan showed how the Oedipus tale is part of the folklore

17. Ramanujan, 'The Indian Oedipus' in Oedipus, A Folklore Casebook, ed. Lowell Edmunds and Alan Dundes (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995) pp 238261.

repertoire in India but is almost always told from the point of view of the mother. Desire is directed from her side towards the son, and most often mothers narrate the story to the daughter. (17) Poetic articulations of the tale show how the gap between laws of desire and laws of the family evolve into creative consciousness in a culture. In one such tale, the woman discovers she has married her son after she gives birth to a son by him; before she hangs herself by its swaddling clothes she puts the baby to sleep singing a lullaby:

Sleep O son O grandson O brother to my husband Sleep O sleep Sleep well.

One could imagine Sita remembering such a song before her death. The Indian tales Ramanujan lists are surprisingly close to the Greek myth, but the very fact that most of them are mothers' stories, told by the woman, disturbs the whole Freudian theme of growth through the resolution of the Oedipus complex. The tale becomes pre-Oedipal once ordered from this perspective, in the sense that it tells of resistance to the insertion of the third term into the two-term bond that brings on the moment of the complex. (18) How to find stories that would resonate with narratives already embedded in a social life? One could try to make sense of the tragic overvaluation of blood ties with such artistic problems in mind. As a storyteller Ghatak invests the relation with his own value and meaning, which gains resonance through the existing anthropological possibilities of ordering that relation.

18. Sophocles's play shows how from Jocasta's perspective the tale is pre- or nonOedipal, she knows there is hardly any man who has not desired his mother.

19. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, '457', trans. A.V. Miller, Analysis and Foreword by J.N. Findlay (Delhi: Motilal Banarasidas Publishers As someone deeply interested in myths, Ghatak might have remembered Pvt. Ltd. 1998) pp 274the story of Oedipus's daughter, Antigone. This story provides the most well 275. known example of the brother-sister relation posing resistance to the mandate of becoming a citizen. Hegel offered a famous formulation of the 20. I would not have conflict between two laws that arises as Antigone takes the decision of done the forbidden thing breaking the law of the city to give her brother a burial. About the For any husband or relationship itself he wrote that it is one free of transience or inequality. The for any son. sister is intuitively close to the highest form of ethical life, because as a For why? I could have daughter the woman must accept resignedly the passing away of her had another husband parents; as mother and wife she is contingent someone else could have And by him other taken her place and is bound by desire; in the unequal relation to her sons, if one were lost; husband, moreover, she cannot 'recognise' herself in another; but in the But, father and mother brother her 'recognition of herself is pure', the loss of the brother is therefore lost, where would I get irreparable to the sister. (19) These are Antigone's words from Sophocles. Another brother? (20) Sophocles, Antigone, The Theban Plays, trans. E.F. Watling (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1947) p

150.

21. Jacques Derrida has suggested this in his Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr,. and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).

It has been pointed out that Antigone not only opposes the law of the family to the law of the city, but by such overvaluation of one bonding over others she ends up violating the very economy of family relations. (21)

The allegory of the law and the state is relevant to our discussion to the extent that it illuminates the content of a resistance to the imperative of growth, to the official narrative of development in Ghatak's cinema. His contemporary Indian cinema was trying to negotiate the making of the modern Indian citizen. Ghatak's response to this obsession was to speak of the mourning that must underlie the celebration. Like Antigone, the logic of love in his films designates a space outside both family and state by positing an excess in the economy, by predating the necessary social partition of the two-term bond. The project of historical remembrance thus takes recourse in his cinema to a 'denial' of the historical separation. For a historian this would be a dangerous thing to do, close as it is to reactionary attitudes all too familiar to us, but for the artist here was a chance to extend a popular mode to the limit of genuine articulation. The melodramatic tendency of displacing the social into the domain of kinship and family is pushed beyond the limit of its triangular allegories of subject formation. The brother and sister in their love withdraw from the Symbolic, from the domain where names are fixed and destinies are already narrated. This withdrawal is meant as protest against chronicles of becoming foretold, against the genocidal victories of history.

22. Juliet Mitchell, Women: The Longest Revolution, Essays on Feminism, Literature and Psychoanalysis ( London: Virago, 1984) pp 287-294.

Withdrawal from the Symbolic, from the realm of social meanings, produces silence and primal cries, inexplicable pain. How else can one explain the body in ecstasy in The Cloud-Capped Star, or the voice travelling through the hills beyond the limits of the familiar world? Women like Nita seem to refuse to go through the passage that would put them in contact with the outside, the adult world, because it has come as a violation of the landscape as home. The fascination with 'return' ends up in the symbolic form of a child's game here. The withdrawal can become a retrograde stand, but it is also a necessary gesture of radical negation. One of the most memorable instances of a romantic relationship subsumed into the brother and sister bonding is found in the protagonists of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Catherine and Heathcliff. Juliet Mitchell likened the retreat from the Symbolic or the social order in that novel (Catherine finally says to Nelly, Heathcliff is me) to the discourse of the hysteric. That discourse is essential for the woman's voice to function, because there is no going back, the only way to speak is from within the regime of discourses created by capitalist patriarchy. Mitchell found an essential trait of the bourgeois novel itself in this discourse; it can produce the Mills and Boon romance, but it can also produce the truth of a Wuthering Heights. (22)

Ghatak never made the political films a sworn Marxist like him would be expected to make. His politics becomes emotionally so rich because, alongside the bold picturing of everyday struggles, he repeatedly captures

the necessary but tragic denial by individuals to tread into the full light of the day. Nita, Anasuya or Sita are fully engaged individuals in relation to labour, daily hardships and challenges of survival, but they also seem to be unspeakably tender, almost luminous beings. The choric grocer in The Cloud-Capped Star says of Nita, The tender girl ... how can she bear such hardship? Partly unprepared to deal with the cruelty of the world, they cling to the one who is part of their own selves. The fullness of being is gathered into this fold, the implacable sense of pain in Ghatak's cinema seems to stem from this hidden enclosure. Such passion is not simply endorsed or negated (in fact Nita, Sita and Iswar stand accused to some extent in the films), but is presented as material for the tragic form that neither melodrama nor realism of the day was adequate to. The formal deviations from realism that caused such misgivings about Ghatak's cinema function not in opposition to the modern mode, which the filmmaker embraced, but as a critique from inside it, pointing to the cost at which such modes are assimilated into our lives.

Moinak Biswas and Rouge 2004. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors of Rouge. http://www.rouge.com.au/3/ghatak.html Essay The relentless tragedy of Ritwik November 2003 By Partha Chatterjee Nearly quarter of a century after his death, Ritwik Ghatak's films show the power of creativity of a people's artist who authored an Indian/South Asian language of cinema. If only we knew... Share An artiste, even in this age of mindless greed and hurry, captures the public imagination, if only for a moment or two, should he or she answer to type, that is, of being a romantic idealist. Ritwik Ghatak, the Bengali filmmaker and short story writer, was such an individual and an alcoholic to boot like the Urdu poet of romance and revolution, Majaz Lucknawi; or Sailoz Mookerjea, the painter whose soul made a daily creative journey across continentsfrom the French countryside of the Impressionists to the verdant green Bengal of his childhood and youth, and austere, dusty Delhi where he finally settled down. Like them, Ghatak died young in his fifty-first year, on 6 February 1976. His send-off was perfunctory, like the ones accorded to Majaz and Sailoz, and it took a long time for a larger public to gauge the worth of the three of them. The reason for this neglect was probably lack of access to their work. In retrospect, Ghatak stands a better chance of being in the public gaze because of the nature of his mediumcinemawhich has a far greater reach than either poetry or painting. He had problems finding finance for his films because of his inability to suffer fools, especially in the film world, and this compounded with a talent for insulting hypocrites, including would-be producers, when drunk, made his own life and that of his family completely miserable. He forgot that he lived in a country that was simultaneously half-feudal and half-capitalist and was still emerging from the shadow of colonialism. Directness and honesty in private and professional life were qualities lauded in the abstract but viewed with suspicion, even fear, in the real world. In Ghataks case it was inevitable that alienation and unemployment would lead to alcoholism, bankruptcy and an early death. His worldly failure was somehow seen as the touchstone of artistic worth by a certain section of the Indian elite and he was claimed by them as one of their own some ten years ago. This is all the more ironic for they have neither knowledge nor intuition of the language or the culture that made a genius like him possible. Like many communists of his time, Ghatak came from the feudal class but from its educated

minority that had access to Sanskrit, Bengali, Persian, English, the literature and philosophy of Europe, including the writings of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, and the heritage of Hindustani and Western classical music. To this formidable intellectual baggage he added, in later years of artistic maturity, the ideas of the psychoanalyst, CG Jung, the explorations in cultural anthropology, including the Great Mother image in Joseph Campbells prose, derived from Erich Neuemanns The Great Mother, and the vast repertoire of folklore and folk music of India, and the two BengalsEast and West. Like many young people of his generation Ghatak joined the Indian Peoples Theatre Association (IPTA), the cultural wing of the Communist Party of India (CPI). This organisation had rendered yeomen service during the Bengal famine of 1943, which witnessed a death toll of five million. IPTA had brought succour to the starving and destitute in the state by bringing them food supplies and, in Bijon Bhattacharya, found a dedicated actor and playwright who wrote the path-breaking Bengali play Nabanna (New Harvest) on the cataclysm. Bhattacharya, was to soon marry Ghataks niece, Mahashweta Devi, who is the celebrated writer and activist of today. IPTA travelled from village to village and to the small towns in Bengal apart from playing in Calcutta and its suburbs and soon had roots all over India. It did contemporary Indian plays and significant Western ones as well. In addition, the song squad was famous for its musical acumen and rousing repertoire. The organisations role in the evolving of cultural values in independent India was seminal. To say that modern ideas in Indian theatre and cinema grew out of the activities of IPTA would be no exaggeration. His own growth as an artiste and a socially conscious individual can be linked to Ghataks apprenticeship in the IPTA as a fledging playwright, actor and director. He took his first tentative steps in the cinema in Nemai Ghoshs left-wing neo-realist Chinna mool, about East Bengali refugees who come to Calcutta after Partition. He himself played a young comb seller. Ghatak could never give up acting and cast himself in cameo roles in some of the films he was to direct later. The three earth-shaking events of twentieth century India, viz, the Bengal famine, the second world war and the partition of country in 1947 marked him for life. The bestiality and madness that perverted human relations during this period made him a confirmed pessimist, though he tried bravely to bring hope and sunshine in the last scenes of all his films. The psychological effect usually was the opposite. When Ghatak made his first film, Nagarik, in 1952, he was nearing 27. It was produced on half-ashoe-string budget with actors mostly from IPTA, and had for its story the travails of a middleclass refugee family from East Bengal which had banked unwisely on the job prospects of the older son to keep it afloat. Rather a grim beginning for a budding artiste. The film was never released in his lifetime and only a negative struck from a damaged print discovered at Bengal Lab, in Tollygunge, Calcutta, a year after his death made a token two-week commercial release possible. The lack of outward polish in Nagarik could not suppress innate qualities that revealed a genuine involvement with social issues; a caring attitude towards the sorrows of the deprived; an unusual sense of music, incidental sound and camera placement and confident handling of actors. The great Bengali stage actress Prabha Devis performance as the nurturing mother was the high point of the film and a close second was Kali Prasanna Dass music, that included the song, Priye Pran Kathin Kathore, set to the lyrics of Maithili mystic poet, Vidyapati. There was enough in this first work to indicate the arrival of a director capable of rising to great heights given the opportunity. But that was still five years away. His second feature film, Ajantrik, came after much struggle. Following the non-release of Nagrik, three-and-a-half years were spent in Bombay, writing scripts, first for Filmistan Studio whose boss, S Mukherjee, he tried to wean away from the hackneyed charm of commercial Hindi cinema. Ghatak then worked for Bimal Roy Productions and wrote the story and screen play for the memorable ghost-romance, Madhumati. His other worthy script was for Hrishikesh Mukerjees debut film, Musafir, that included in its three tales O Henrys The Last Leaf. Ghataks 1957 release Ajantrik too was based on a literary work like his very first venture, Bedini (1951), abandoned after a 20-day outdoor schedule when the shot footage got spoilt by a camera defect. Tarashankar Bandopadhyays tale about gypsies never got to the screen, but Subodh Ghoshs memorable short story did. It was about a cranky, poetic cab-drivers attachment to his 1926 model Chevrolet named Jaggadal that he drives in the Chhotanagpur tribal belt in Bihar. It

was Ghataks first major artistic success. He had prepared for it by directing a two-reel documentary simply entitled The Oraons of Chotanagpur on the tribe of that name for the Aurora Film Corporation, Calcutta, and another short, Bihar Ke Kuch Darshaniye Sthaan (Some scenic locales of Bihar), for the state government. These exercises helped Ghatak develop a grasp of the landscape that became an organic part of Ajantriks narrative. Perhaps it was for the first time that nature was used with such poetic authority in an Indian film to bring into focus both its concrete and abstract elements. When the jalopy is sold as scrap, after its final breakdown following an expensive restoration job, to a dealer wearing diamond earnings, the most stone-hearted viewers heart is wrenched despite the premonition of the inevitable that hovers over the film almost from the beginning. The final moments have indeed the clarity of a parable, as Bimal (Kali Banerjee), the taxi driver, hears and sees a little boy playing with the discarded horn of his beloved car on which he had lavished the attention he would on a dearly loved wife. The wisdom and charm of Ajantrik is elusive, almost metaphysical, although it deals with a very real situation in human terms. The Communist Party of India welcomed the film with open arms after driving away its director on grounds of being a Trotskyite. The left felt it depicted the dialectics between man and machine to great effect. Still others saw it as a satire on the haphazard industrial development in the newly independent country and its negative effect on the countryside. But there were too many disparate elements within the story to ensure a clear-cut, all-embracing interpretation. What, however, could not be accounted for was the prominence given to the local lunatic, Bula (played unforgettably by Keshto Mukherjee), who is attached to his aluminium plate and is the butt of cruel jokes of the children who hover around him. The only concession to rationality in the conception of his role is when towards the end of the film he is seen jubilantly hugging his new plate and dancing around, saying, Oh my new thali, my new thali! This bit prepares us for the idea that will assert itself in the end that the old makes way for the new and, therefore, of the continuity of life. It is, however, difficult to interpret in strictly intellectual terms the backward descent of Jaggadal down a steep slope, with fields of ripening paddy on either side, during its test run after Bimal has spent all his savings towards repairs. Then, of course, there is that deceptive shot that follows soon after. It looks pat but is not. Bimal pushes his broken-down car over a high bridge with the help of adivasi men and women, some of whom are seated in the vehicle. Just as they reach the middle, a steam locomotive comes roaring in on the tracks below. There is also the charming little scene of Bimal all dressed up with his boy assistant to get himself and his car photographed by the local view-camera master who asks him not to smile foolishly lest the picture be spoilt! A night dance in the forest by the Oraon tribals that Bimal attends and is quite drunk at the end of, is extremely lyrical. Shots of the car making its way through rain-lashed landscapes and, of course, Ustad Ali Akbar Khans haunting rendering of raga Bilas Khani Todi on the sarod, all add up to create a work of art that makes the viewer feel that he has been onto important things, indeed privy to secrets related to man and nature. A fairly low negative cost of one lakh thirty-five thousand rupees was difficult to recover with Ajantriks release. Even the money spent on prints and publicity expenses was not recouped. The Bengali audience of 1957 was completely bewildered by a film in which a recalcitrant old car was the hero, with its eccentric driver as its most effective supporting cast. There were, of course, other fine cameo performances. But the viewers in Calcutta, despite Pather Panchali and Aparajito by Satyajit Ray, were completely unprepared for Ghataks cinematic poem. More than a quarter of a century went by before recognition came for the films path-breaking qualities. Cahiers du Cinema compared its directors unique juxtaposition of sound and image, after its Paris screening in 1983, to the explorations of great European experimentalists like Jean Marie Straub, Jacques Tati and Robert Bresson. Sadly, recognition first came abroad. Small sections of discerning viewers in India gradually woke up to its merits. The films use of incidental sounds served the purpose of another voice, giving a human dimension to a machine by its presence. Pramod Lahiri, the producer, had already made a touching serio-comedy, Paras Pathar with Satyajit Ray and was about to embark on a new film with him when, at Rays insistence, he decided to do Bari Theke Paliye, based on a story by humorist Shibram Chakravarti, in 1959 with Ghatak in the hope of making up his losses on Ajantrik. The story of a stern village schoolmasters pre-teenage son who runs away to the metropolis of Calcutta in search of the EI Dorado that he has read about did not gell. What could have been a sparkling childrens film became a dull tract on the heartlessness of city life where only the poor have humanity and the rich are indifferent. The director fell prey to the necessity of having a sabak or moral lesson for the prospective young viewer. What one remembers after all these years about the film is the charming performance of young Parambhattarak Lahiri, the producers son, as Kanchan, the

runaway little boy, and the lilting musical score by Salil Chowdhury. Predictably, the film failed. Even Khaled Chaudhurys hilarious poster could not attract children in sufficient numbers to see it. A married man with responsibilities, Ghatak turned now desperately to saleable material. For his new venture he chose a well-written popular novel, Koto Ajaana Rey by Shankar. Mihir Law, a successful paint manufacturer, provided the wherewithal for an expensive production, albeit by Bengali standards. Ghatak bought additional insurance by engaging a big star like Chabi Biswas to play Barwell, the English barrister, a crucial figure in the novel. He also had Anil Chatterjee, a fine actor whose star was rising at the box-office, and a supporting cast that included Karuna Banerjee from Pathar Panchali and Aparajito, and a powerful young left-wing theatre actor named Utpal Dutt. The shooting progressed well and both director and producer were happy with the results. Then, as in many other times, in the artistes later life, shooting came to a halt over an absurd incident. He had instructed the literal minded Gorkha watchman of the studio not to let anyone in as he was shooting a crucial scene in the script. The producer, Mihir Law too was denied admission by the zealous sentry. Deeply insulted, he closed down production after having already sunk several lakhs of rupees; big money for a black-and-white production in the late 1950s! Ghatak kept the home fires burning by scripting Swaralipi for Asit Sen, a successful commercial director and a highly skilled craftsman. Mahendra Kumar Gupt, the producer of this film, teamed up with the scriptwriter with a certain talent for attracting trouble to produce in 1959-60 Meghe Dhaka Tara, a film that turned the tide in the directors life and art. At the outset, Ghatak felt he had been forced into a commercial transaction. But it proved a big hit and, to everybodys surprise, a genuine critical success as well. It is the one film on which Ghataks reputation rests; the one work that everyone hails as an unqualified masterpiece; a seminal depiction of the existential dilemma of the Indian lower middle class, where the sacrifice of the one good, meek, dutiful daughter - she dies tragically of TB in the end - ensures the survival of the rest of the family. Shaktipada Raj Gurus ordinary melodrama, Chena Mukh, thus became the source of one of the most emotionally rich films ever made anywhere in the world. Gross misdemeanours Ghatak promptly invested the two-and-a-half lakh rupees he had earned from this film in the new one, Komal Gandhar, a marvelous picaresque comedy with serious undertones that obliquely examined the causes behind the failure of the IPTA and, by extension, the CPl. It was a glorious artistic achievement and, ironically, a hopeless tactical error that was to ruin the rest of his life. An original screenplay full of pathos, humour and music and daring technique the film was twenty years ahead of its time - there was enough in Komal Gandhar to drive an aware filmmaker wild with jealousy and the party bosses, who thought they had seen the last of him, to despair. To digress to the background of the film and its subject matter: the communist movement in India reached its height in 1948-49 when, in the Telangana district of Andhra Pradesh, an armed struggle by the peasantry led by the CPI against the Indian state took place. The ill-fed, barelyarmed revolutionaries were soon overwhelmed and the CPI was banned by the ruling party, the Indian National Congress. The left, so to say, was wiped out in a trice, and, after a humiliating compromise in the early 1950s came back to participate in parliamentary politics. There was an elected communist government in Kerala in 1957 and then the breakaway Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) led by Jyoti Basu formed the ministry in West Bengal in 1977. Having eschewed revolutionary politics, the communists in 1960-61, at the time of Komal Gandhars making and release, had become, particularly their middle and upper class leadership, adept coffee house debaters. Their hold on the poor rural peasantry and the exploited urban working class was eroding rapidly. Moreover, their finest cultural workers had already been driven away by a myopic party ideologue by the name of Sudhi Pradhan. Most of them, like Ghatak, Balraj Sahni, Salil Chowdhury, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Kaifi Azmi, Shailendra, Vishmitra Adil and KA Abbas, left to earn a living in the cinema while Shambhu Mitra, Bijon Bhattacharya and Utpal Dutt prospered in theatre. Ghataks criticism of the partys cultural policy in his new film was seen as gross misdemeanor by the bosses and worthy of severe punishment. Of that later. Komal Gandhar was about a committed theatre group that reached out to the people in the countryside, bringing to them genuine works of art. There is the staging of Shakuntala, the Sanskrit classic by Kalidas, in the film. which perhaps was included as an extension of Ghataks own memories of having directed onstage Shakespeares A Midsummer Nights Dream and Rabindranath Tagores Visarjan for IPTA in the early 1950s. There are resonances and nuances

within the story that would have got to the sensibilities of even the most obtuse of partymen. The inclusion of a scene from Shakuntala looks like deliberate guerilla warfare despite its redolent romance. Shakuntala helped by her female companions, is dressing up in her gurus jungle ashram to look beautiful for her lover Dushyanta, a king travelling incognito with his entourage. He, getting her with child, shall forget her on reaching his kingdom. Nothing of the latter part of his life is shown but the story is too well-known in India and Shakuntala at her toilette on camera would subliminally help the audience to imagine her fate. Shakuntala is of course India, Dushyanta the CPI and their prospective child the ordinary people of India. Laughter and tears are good companions in this moving film that makes nonsense of artificial geographic borders and manufactured history. A common heritage of language, music and customs brings people together and the machinations of demented politicians forcibly divide them along with the land where they have their roots. All the wars fought in the last hundred years have been over purely commercial considerations; racism has always been used alongside as an excuse to consolidate business gains. A snatch of an old folksong is heard in the film - Aey Paar Paddaa 0 Paar Paddaa/ Moddi Khaaney Chaur/Tahaar Moddeye Bosheye/Aachen Shibo Saudagor (On this bank is the river Padma / On the other bank is the Padma too / And an island lies between them / Where lives Lord Shiva / The trader-great). Another example of the syncretic culture of undivided Bengal that inflects the film is the chorus literally crying out Dohai Ali! (Mercy Ali!) in gradually increased speed as the camera simulates the movement of a train hurtling forward towards the end of the railway tracks that are closed to acknowledge the presence of the new country - Pakistan. There is also the repeated use of the wedding song from East Bengal - Aam Tolaaye Zhumur Zhaamur / Kaula Tawlaaye Biyaa / Aayee lo Shundorir Zhaamaayee / Mukut Maathaye Diyaa (A stirring of breezes cool in the mango grove / A wedding blessed by the auspicious green plantains all around / Comes now the groom for the beauteous bride / Wearing chivalrys glorious crown). This song comes on at the most unexpected moments in the background, most expressively in the landscape shots of the undulating khoai in Santiniketan when the two protagonists Bhrigu (Abaneesh Bandopadhyay) and Ansuiyya (Supriya Choudhury), unknown to themselves, fall in love with each other. There is also the snatch of a bhawaiyya sung by Debabrata Biswas towards the end of the film as he comes to a concert early in the morning. The use of the two Rabindra Sangeets is effective: first with actor Anil Chatterjee who lips on camera Debabrata Biswass rendering of Aakash Bhauraa / Shurjo Taara (This endless expanse of sky filled/with Suns and Stars) to great effect in broad daylight in Kurseong, of all places; and then in a poetic simulation of moonlight Aaj Jyotsna Raatey Shobaaee Gaecheye Boneye (On this full-moon night/lovers together, go to the woods) sung by Sumitra Sen on the soundtrack. There are old IPTA group songs too that add to the texture of the films narration and serve the same purpose as an obligato would in a musical score. Komal Gandhar, for all its adolescent preoccupation with the idea of mother and motherland and, at the same time, the authentic poetic connection between the two, is also a loving tribute to the nation-building energies that went into the activities of the IPTA which was, before it was sabotaged from within by the CPI, an organisation of idealists who had a purity of purpose and dreamt of building a contended egalitarian India. The release was stymied reportedly by the party with the help of goons who owed allegiance to the ruling Congress party. According to Ghatak, Komal Gandhar played to a responsive packed house in the first week. Then, at the beginning of the second, he began to notice strange happenings in the dark of the theatre. Loud sobbing would be heard from different parts of the hall during funny or romantic scenes and raucous laughter at moments of sorrow, sending conflicting messages to the audience. Attendance rapidly dwindled by mid-week and fell away altogether at the end of it. The film had to be withdrawn, causing an enormous financial loss to the two producers, Mahendra Gupt and Ghatak himself. It was later discovered that a fairly large number of tickets were bought by shady characters, who had been instructed to disturb the real audience. The failure engineered by forces inimical to his integrity as an artiste and person, completely shattered the director. He could not believe that the very people who not so long ago had been his comrades could get together to sink him. His descent into alcoholism had begun. Beer suddenly gave way to hard liquor and relentless drinking occupied him more than cinema, literature, the plastic arts or music. He was signing in three bars for his drinks, and, not being able to drink alone, was also being the generous host, remembered Barin Saba, iconoclast, filmmaker and social activist in 1977, a year after the directors death. Quite naturally, funds were

going to run out sooner than later. People had barely understood Komal Gandhar during its subverted release and that fact too undermined his self-confidence. Then, Abhi Bhattacharya, an old actor friend, appeared out of nowhere to bail him out. Bhattacharya took Ghatak back with him to Bombay, where he lived and worked, to help him recuperate from the excesses of his emotional life. One evening he came back with a proposal. A friend of his, one Radheyshyam Jhunjhunwala, was willing to finance a feature film in Bengali with Abhi Bhattacharya in the lead and to be directed by his beleaguered friend. There was, however, one conditionthat the volatile director behave himself during the entire period of its making. The story, or its bare skeleton, was provided by the producer himself. It was about a brother and sister who are separated in childhood and meet as adults quite by accident, she as a prostitute making her debut and he as her first customer. When they suddenly recognise each other, she kills herself. A desperate Ghatak agreed and took enough of an advance to complete the shooting of the film. The golden line Subarnarekha (1962) was an act of magic in which the artiste transformed the producers puerile story into a multi-dimensional meditation on life, with the Partition serving as a backdrop. When he saw the rough cut, Jhunjhunwala panicked and ran away. Ghatak then did the only advertising short of his life for Imperial Tobacco Company, publicising the popular brand of Scissors cigarettes, courtesy his old friend, Chidananda Dasgupta, who was chief of public relations there. With the proceeds he got the first print of Subarnarekha out of the laboratory. It was only after Subarnarekha was sold to Rajshree Pictures, owned by Tarachand Barjatia, to balance their books in a particularly profitable year, that Jhunjhunwala reappeared on the scene. In the three years between the completion of Subarnarekha and its release in 1965, Ghataks life was like a see-saw. He tried unsuccessfully to get backing for a film based on Bibhuti Bhusan Bandopadhyays Aaranyak. Ghatak was perfect for the subject, for no one since the American documentary poet, Robert Flaherty, had responded to nature with such feeling and understanding in cinema. Set in the wilderness, the novel ran as a counter point to the urban world. It was worthy as anything written by the great writer on nature in English literature, WH Hudson. If there was anyone who could grasp the link between the metaphysical and the physical that was there on the written page and transfer it to the screen without loss of intensity, it was Ghatak. But Jagganath Koley, heir to a well known Calcutta biscuit company and minister of information and broadcasting in the state government, could not, despite his best efforts, convince the bureaucracy under him to sponsor the film and waive the mandatory bank guarantee that the director was unable to provide. Then, of course, there was the adaptation from Italian Alexander Blassettis hit serio-comedy, Two Steps into the Clouds, filmed in 1941. Bagalar Bangadarshan, in its 1964 Bengali reincarnation is completely transformed to suit the local milieu. It flows elegantly in print and captures the abiding values of rural Bengal without appearing to be remotely reactionary, and with unusual wit and charm. The four reels that were actually shot were lovely to look at but Ghataks inability to oblige an unusually decent producer, Raman Lal Maheshwari, by not drinking on the setsas his quick mood changes unsettled the actorsled to its closure. Had it been completed, Bagalar Bangadarshan would have posed real problems for all those people who pigeon-hole him as the tragedian of the Partition of India. The story of an absconding village tomboy, brought home by a young, married Calcutta medical representative she meets on the way, was both touching and hilarious. On their return to her village he is mistaken for her husband. Her fianc lurks about nearby without being able to do anything. It is discovered in the course of events that he ran away after impregnating her in Calcutta because she was in the habit of beating him up! Of course, all ends well in the script of this comedy of Shakespearean resonance. The release of Subarnarekha, meanwhile, was a success and it played to packed houses before Rajshree Pictures realised it had actually bought the film as a tax writeoff, having made huge amounts of money earlier with a Hindi melodrama, Dosti. To Ghataks shock and surprise, his film was withdrawn from Calcutta theatres without explanation. It was the most demanding film he had ever made, and, in scope and breadth surpassed everything he had done before. The filming, it is reported, was improvised on a day-to-day basis. Not even a master improviser like the Swiss-French director Jean-Luc Goddard, had ever been through such an ordeal. Subarnarekha is about rational elements like history, war and its aftermath, mass displacement and loss of an old habitat and hence roots on the one hand, and irrational entities like destiny

and fate that are not supposed to but do affect human beings and their conduct to alter their lives irreversibly on the other. Ishwar Chakravarti, a man of god as his first name seems to suggest, comes after Partition as a refugee from East Bengal to live with his fellow sufferers in Navjeevan Colony, a settlement for the displaced on the outskirts of Calcutta. With him is hislittle sister, Sita, and an orphan, Abhiram, whom he has accepted as his little foster brother. Ishwar meets Rambilas, an old friend and now a prosperous industrialist, accidentally in the street. Hearing of his plight, he offers Ishwar a job managing his factory by the river Subarnarekha in Bihar. Harprasad, the schoolmaster who has nurtured the new home of his fellow unfortunates, accuses Ishwar of being a coward and for thinking only of his own welfare and not that of the others around him. We are plunged into the heart of a morality tale that can only end in tragedy. And a tragedy it is, borrowing its narrative method from the ancient Indian epics and folk tales where there are digressions in the shoreline with moral and metaphysical ideas thrown up for the audiences knowledge, but the end effect is overwhelming, cleansing and uplifting. Subarnarekha illustrates the idea, long before the Russian master, Andrei Tarkovsky, thought of it and used it as the title of his autobiography, that cinema is indeed sculpting in time. The most illuminating moments occur in Ghataks cinema as in Luis Bunuels, a director he particularly admired, not in great bursts of dramatic action but in the gaps between them. The bravura scenes are there only to confirm what we have intuitively gathered to be the essential ingredients of the unfolding story. These are the real moments of revelation. This is true particularly of Subarnarekha, where plainness and exaggeration coexist in a technique born out of necessity; the producer had to be lulled into believing that a lurid melodrama was in the making, which would on its release make a killing at the box-office. The most talked about revelatory moment in the film is of course when the child, Sita, accidentally runs into the bohurupee (quick change artiste) dressed as Mahakaal, the scourge of time, and is shocked at the sight of him. When he is chided by the broken-down old accountant of the factory where Ishwar is manager, for scaring a little girl, the man replies, I did not try to scare her, sir, she sort of ran into me. The little scene takes on a new dimension when it is learnt that the old man consoling her has been in a precarious emotional state himself ever since his own daughter eloped with her lover. The scene is further enriched when he and Sita walk away from the camera and we hear him ask her name and on hearing it proceeds tell her the story of Janak, the king of Mithila, who one day found his daughter, Sita, in the very soil he was tilling. When seen in the context of the whole film, the scenes function seems to be oracular, a prediction, as it were, of Sita and Abhirams tragic future together as adults. There is a sudden flash of prophetic intuition in a scene from Sita and Abhirams childhood when they pretend to be aircraft taking off from a long-forgotten, dilapidated second world war British airstrip near Panagarh in the Bengal countryside. At the climax of their game, through the use of a subjective camera, they appear to personify an aircraft taking flight. Truth in the arts, particularly the cinema, is achieved through such enunciatory acts. There are other instances of poetic insight in a film where the paradox and irony of life become apparent all of a sudden. On the same desolate airstrip Sita sings a bandish in raga Kalavati, aaj ki anando (oh, how joyful is the day). The raga is also used to create a sombre mood, when she sings a different composition at the same sight at dusk, after her elder brother, who is like a father to her, rejects the fact that she and Abhiram are in love and would like to marry. The abandoned airstrip is used for the last time in the final quarter of the film when Ishwar and the ghost from his past, Harprasad, the idealist schoolteacher and founder of Navjeevan Colony, arrive there after a night of despair, when he is prevented by his friends sudden appearance from hanging himself out of grief following Sitas elopement with Abhiram. The final scene, heart-breaking and of surpassing beauty with Ishwar and Binu, the orphaned little son of Sita and Abhiram, walking away towards a craggy landscape with the horizon far in the background, accompanied by choral chanting of the Charai betiye mantra on the sound track, in search of a new life, sums up the forced political and hence historical displacement of millions, in our own times and earlier, people whose only crime was that they had sought a little peace, dignity and happiness in their lives. Betrayed by belief While Ishwar and his nephew were able to go out to find a new life at the end of Subarnarekha, Ghataks own was fast reaching a point of no return. A cherished documentary on Ustad Allauddin Khan of Maihar, the father figure of Hindustani instrumental music in the post-1940 era, had to be abandoned after the shooting because Ghatak had the first of his alcohol-related

breakdowns. After waiting for a recovery that did not come quick enough, the producer Harisadhan Dasgupta, reluctantly patched together a version for the Films Division of India. It was predictably, not the film Ghatak had conceived. Sheer economic necessity had forced him to join the Film and Television institute of India, Pune, in 1965 as Vice Principal. His controversial 18 months there proved him to be an outstanding teacher. He did ghost-direct the haunting short, Rendezvous, a diploma film credited to Rajendranath Shukla, photographed ingeniously by Amarjeet Singh at the Karla caves in Lonavala near Pune. Always a practical man when it came to filmmaking, Ghatak had once photographed a tree in the early morning light in black-and-white in order to help his students connect with nature in their lives and art. Needless to say, the result was exquisite. This single shot of three hundred feet or three minutes and twenty seconds in 35mm was preserved in the institute vaults for many years and may still be there to inspire new generations of filmmakers. Ghatak came back to Calcutta, having resigned his job at Pune, to resume a career that was already in the doldrums. He wrote the story, Pandit Mashai, now lost, in a non-stop seventeenhour session, and collapsed at the end of it. He produced a screenplay based on it called Janmabhoomi that still survives. The story is of a Sanskrit scholar and teacher who seeks refuge after the partition in a traditional crematorium or burning ghat along with his young daughter. Their lives are destroyed in the course of events as it happened with millions in Ghataks generation who, in order to live, had to adapt to the cruelty and indifference of changing times but could not. They were people who believed in the regenerative powers of love for themselves and for others and were betrayed for their beliefs. Ghatak adapted Manik Bandopadhyays classic novel, Padda Nadir Majhi for the screen and carried a bound copy with him till the end and tried to get his old friend, producer Hiten Choudhury, sculptor Sankho Choudhurys elder brother and editor Sachin Choudhurys younger brother, to produce it in colour. He also wrote the script for the Ashtamsarga of Kalidass Kumara Sambhava. These were two projects that he wanted to do very badly. But failing health and hospitalisation for psychiatric disorders, including a diagnosis of dual personality by doctors at the Gobra Mental Asylum, Calcutta, and chronic lack of even basic expense money prevented him from filming them. His wife, Surama, in the meanwhile, had gone out to teach and keep the wolf from the door. In 1968, he began Ranger Golam, an adaptation of a novel by Narayan Sanyal, with amazing confidence, in the words of Anil Chatterjee, who was to play the lead. Chatterjee had earlier played a cameo as an irresponsible, thieving young husband in Ajantrik and then stellar role in Meghe Dhaka Tara as Shankar the classical singer to whom fame and money come in time to pull his family out of the financial mire but too late to save the life of the beloved tubercular elder sister, Nita. And of course, he was the rebellious, thinking theatre actor in Komal Gandhar. Seeing him work, you wouldnt believe he had been so ill just before he began Ranger Golam, said Chatterjee. A melancholic script added to Ghataks refusal to stop drinking at work led to the closure of this production as well. He was unable to understand that people investing money in a production directed by him also had the right to feel emotionally secure in his presence. Ghatak wrote the screenplay for Premendra Mitras heart-wrenching short story Sansar Seemante. He wanted Madhavi Mukherjee and Soumitra Chatterjee in the lead for the new film. Madhavi was moved to tears by the script and declared it was the best thing she had ever come across. But, she said she would only do the film if Ghatak did not drink on the sets. He flew into a rage and stormed out of her house, kicking her pet Pomeranian standing in his way. Shakti Samanta, a successful producer-director in the Hindi cinema of Bombay, and an admirer of Ghataks work, offered to produce two films of his choice, giving him complete artistic freedom. Again, Ghataks by-now-notorious temper proved a stumbling block. He sent Shakti packing. Another fine opportunity was lost. Between 1968 and 1970, the director made four documentaries on commission. Scientists of Tomorrow and Yeh Kyon were for the Films Division of India, and Amar Lenin and Chau Dance of Purulia for the Government of West Bengal. Of them, only Chau Dance of Purulia had any artistic merit, with certain moments of genuine poetry in it. The rest were bread and butter jobs or, better still, drink providing jobs. The war of liberation in Bangladesh in 1971 made him direct Durbaar Gati Padma, a twenty minute piece of fiction with the improbable pairing of Biswajeet, a chocolate-box hero of Hindi films, and a resurrected retired female icon, Nargis Dutt. To put it mildly, it was a strange film but had some impressive black-and-white shots of his beloved river Padma.

Ghataks anvil Ghatak had known Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the distant past and liked to call her his Santiniketan connection. She had as a girl been all too briefly a student there during Rabindranath Tagores lifetime. He happened to know people close to her, particularly PN Haksar, an ex-communist and her main advisor. It was through her good offices that he got the National Film Development Corporation of India to finance Jukti Tappo Aar Gappo in 1971. The selection committee felt that he was too much of an alcoholic to actually complete and deliver a film within a given time-frame. Their objections were overruled by the prime minister herself. Jukti Takko Aar Gappo had enormous promise as a script. It was the story of one Neelkantha Bagchithe name is deliberately chosen to draw parallels between Lord Shivas blue throat after having swallowed all the poisons-of-the-world during the churning of the ocean and the character in the film, a played-out alcoholic once a respected teacher and intellectual. It is a notso-veiled self-portrait of the director himself. His wife and son leave him for being a failed breadwinner and family man. He is about to leave his rented house before the landlord evicts him, when he runs into Banga Bala, literally meaning Lass of Bengal, who is a refugee from Bangladesh and, like him, is in futile search of a shelter. The return of his protg after the sale of a ceiling fan prompts him to take to the streets with the two youngsters in tow. The rest of the film is about Neelkanthas misadventures and eventual death in the cross-fire between Maoist revolutionaries and the police. Peripatetic but top-heavy with dialogue, the film did nothing for Ghataks reputation. While he was making Jukti in 1971, Bangladesh was liberated, and Pran Katha Chitro, a Bangladeshi production company, invited him to direct a film for them the following year. He chose Adwaitya MalIa Burmans literary saga of an East Bengali fishing community in the early decades of the twentieth century, Titash Ekti Nadir Naam. He shot it in a record 17 days and nearly died in the process. He had to be evacuated from location by helicopter and spent the next 18 months in hospital. The producers released the film, much to his chagrin, without showing him the final cut. Having recovered somewhat, he went over to Dakha to re-cut the film. I am 75 per cent happy with the film. Work needs to be done on the sound, he declared in March 1975 to this writer after a screening of the film in Sapru House, New Delhi, during the first retrospective of his work in his lifetime, organised by the Bengalee Club, Kali Bari, New Delhi. Titash Ekti Nadir Naam is a relentless tragedy. There is no let-up through its two-and-a-quarter hour run. It is dynamically photographed and the ensemble acting is spirited throughout. The cinematic rendering of the novel is a curious case of Thomas Hardy meeting with Hegel and Karl Marx in the riverine culture of Bengal just as industrialisation is beginning to make a dent. The film succeeds perhaps because of its authentic local flavour. Even jades in far-off Manhattan, New York City, were moved to tears seeing it in a retrospective of his films in 1996. Ghataks conscious effort to keep the narrative on an even keel, giving prominence to the river and the village near its bank and the characters living there, would fool the viewer for a while into believing that a documentary by a superior sensibility was unraveling on the screen. Then, suddenly, inexplicably ambiguous poetic elements begin to make their presence felt, infusing tragic grandeur into a story of a river drying up and leaving the fishing community on its banks without livelihood or purpose, and making them prey to attacks of goondas in the pay of city businessmen who wish to take over what has become real estate. Titash is by no means flawless. But its charge of emotion is genuine and sustained from beginning to end and there is a sense of loss in its depiction seldom approached in post-war cinema. Had it been his last film, it would have been a worthy farewell but that was not to be. Jukti Tappo Aar Gappo was received enthusiastically by the young turks of the film society movement in Calcutta, but it was not a film worthy of his genius, four excellent sequences notwithstanding and also Ghataks own gripping performance as a drunken gadfly. The picturisation of the Tagore song, Kaeno Cheye Aacho go Maa on Ghatak himself is kingly in its austerity. But, his health had completely failed and he ran high fever, was vomiting blood during the filming. The end was near. When death came, he had for some years borne a resemblance to King Lear. His hair had turned white, his body had shrunk and he looked thirty years older than his actual age. Yet there was something majestic about him. Broken in health but ever optimistic, Ghatak was full of plans. He had always wanted to make a genuine childrens film and actively engaged in negotiations with the Childrens Film Society of India to produce Princess Kalavati, based on a famous Bengali folktale, Buddhu Bhutum. He devised ways of achieving special effects elegantly and effectively

for the film within a modest budget. The second important project on Ghataks anvil was Sheye O Bishnupriya, a contemporary tale of rape and murder juxtaposed with the fate of the real Bishnupriya, the unfortunate third wife of the medieval Vaishnav saint Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu of Nabadwip, West Bengal. At another level, the script dealt with the males gradual loss of paurush or manliness and sensitivity, his fear of womans innate goodness and creativity, and his attempts to first reject and then destroy it in the course of history. Also on the anvil was an untitled comedy about a fishmonger, who is believed to have won a huge lottery and his predictable rise in the esteem of certain greedy business folk who want to grab his prize money. But luck decrees otherwise. It is revealed that he has actually lost by the margin of a single crucial digit blurred by the constant handling of his lottery ticket with grubby hands. Ghatak wrote the script in tribute to his hero Charlie Chaplin. The best of Ritwik Ghatak continues to be invigorating cinema twenty-seven years after his death: prescient, plastic and rich with under-stated possibility. He always claimed that he did not care for storytelling in his films and that for him the story was only a starting point. But in his own way he was a terrific storyteller, who could, like the Indian literary masters before the industrial age and much earlier, digress from the main story in a seemingly arbitrary fashion and always return to enrich it. In this respect, Ghatak resembled his friend, Ustad A1i Akbar Khan, the supreme improviser in Hindustani music, who at his best can take the listener by complete surprise with his digressions from the main composition in a given raga; by his sly asides, and his startling return to the dominant theme to create new, unforeseen avenues of thought and feeling. There are long stretches in Ajantrik, Meghe Dhaka Tara, Komal Gandhar, Subarnarekha and Titash Ekti Nadir Naam that create a bond with the viewer, thus making him/her an integral part of the films creative process. Only the finest of artistes in the performing arts have this quality. Ghatak at his best certainly did. It is a subcontinental pity he did not work more and was constantly strapped for cash, and that he let the demons in his professional life take over his personal life to the ultimate destruction of both. Ghatak did not have a strong survival instinct like Bertolt Brecht did. He allowed mean and vicious people to hurt him repeatedly and drive him to irreversible alcoholism, at which point he began to hurt those who loved him the most and tried to help him. The left that had made him an artiste in the first place, had by the end of his life - much earlier, actually - abdicated its responsibility towards the exploited and the spurned and begun to nurse bourgeois aspirations. Only he continued to dream of being a peoples artiste, of working towards an Indian film language, though not consciously. He was forced to accept, in penury, a documentary on Indira Gandhi, deluding himself that he would get the better of her by portraying her as Lady Macbeth. He was released from his agony when he turned up late and drunk at Dum Dum airport in Calcutta during a leg of the shooting and she took him off the project, inadvertently saving his dignity for posterity. For a further understanding of the man, one must go back to Paras Pathar, a story he wrote as a young man of twenty-three. In it, Chandrakant Sarkar, a humble clerk in a colliery and a connoisseur of Hindustani music, attacks and robs the assistant manager carrying the companys payroll. He does so in order to fund the research based on knowledge got from a travelling sadhu to bring back to life the recently dead. When the law catches up with him he is seen by a waterfall in the jungle, completely unhinged by the fact that he has lost the piece of paper that had the formula the shaman had given him. Ritwik Ghataks greatness and his vulnerability are symbolically predicted in this story. http://www.himalmag.com/component/content/article/1898-the-relentless-tragedy-of-ritwik.html Woman and homeland in Ritwik Ghataks films: Constructing post-Independence Bengali cultural identity by Erin O'Donnell The Bengali filmmaker, Ritwik Ghatak, was born in Dhaka in 1925, and lived in East Bengal (present-day Bangladesh) throughout his adolescence.[1] [open notes in new window] The Bengal Famine of 1943-44, World War II and finally, the Partition of 1947 compelled Ghatak to

move to Calcutta[2] where he became actively involved in the Indian Peoples Theater Association (IPTA) and the Communist Party of India (CPI).[3] Formed in 1943, IPTA was the first organized national theater movement in India that developed and performed plays addressing social injustice and British imperialism. Ghatak began working with West Bengals IPTA wing in Calcutta in 1948, writing, directing and acting in his own plays, such as Jwala (Flame, 1951) and Dalil (Document, 1952). He acted in other plays, such as revivals of Bijan Bhattacharyas Nabanna (New Harvest, 1944) and Dinabandhu Mitras Neeldarpan (Indigo Mirror, 1860),and adaptations of Gogols The Government Inspectorand Gorkys The Lower Depths. [4] In 1951, Ghatak was commissioned by the Provincial Draft Preparatory Committee of IPTA to draft a document that would articulate the political and cultural ideology of IPTA in West Bengal. In his 1954 thesis On The Cultural Front, Ghatak outlined a cultural future (in ideological and organizational terms) for West Bengals IPTA in particular and the CPI in general.[5] In 1996, I edited this document. It had been stored in the Communist Party office in Calcutta until that year, when it was given to the Ritwik Memorial Trust, which has been systematically restoring Ghataks films and republishing his writings and screenplays over the last two decades. Because of many of the views Ghatak articulates in this document, and due to a smear campaign initiated against him by certain members of the CPI and documented in On The Cultural Front, he was forced to leave IPTA in 1954. He was removed from the membership rolls of the Communist Party in 1955. His dismissal letter is reprinted in On The Cultural Front. However, Ghatak has claimed that he willingly left IPTA and that he was never a CPI cardcarrying member. As early as 1944 with the initial staging of Nabanna, the Bengal IPTA members disagreed about the organizations political and cultural trajectory, which echoed dissension in the CPI at large.[6] Besides working with IPTA in the 1950s, Ghatak became active in filmmaking. Beginning in 1948, Ghatak and other aspiring Bengali filmmakers, like Mrinal Sen, began to meet to discuss films and filmmaking at a teashop in Calcutta called Paradise Cafe.[7] Ghatak led members of the group to organize a trade union for the underpaid studio workers and technicians in Calcutta.[8] One of Ghataks first intensive involvements with cinema was as an actor in Nemai Ghoshs 1950 Bengali film, Chinnamul (The Uprooted). This film is pivotal in the development of Bengali cinematic realism and relates the story of a group of farmers from East Bengal who are forced to migrate to Calcutta because of Partition. Supported by IPTA, Chinnamul used Calcuttas Sealdah railway station as a location and actual refugees as characters and extras. That station had political importance as a site where thousands of refugees entered the city during and after Partition. In 1952, a catalytic cinematic event for all of the emerging Bengali filmmakers, including Ghatak, Ray and Sen, occurred when the first International Film Festival was held in four Indian cities, including Calcutta. At this festival, Indian audiences first viewed Italian neo-realist films like De Sicas Bicycle Thieves and Japanese films such as Kurosawas Rashomon. Also in 1952, Ghatak produced and directed his first feature film entitled,Nagarik (The Citizen). He completed eight feature films and ten documentaries before his death in 1976. [9] In his films, Ghatak constructs detailed visual and aural commentaries of Bengal (located in northeast India) in the socially and politically tumultuous period from the late 1940s to the early 1970s. Twice during his lifetime Bengal was physically rent apartin 1947 by the Partition engendered by the departing British colonizers and in 1971 by the Bangladeshi War of Independence.[10] In his work, Ghatak critically addresses and questionsfrom the personal to the national levelthe identity of post-Independence Bengal. The formation of East Pakistan in 1947 and Bangladesh in 1971 motivated Ghatak to seek through his films the cultural identity of Bengal in the midst of these new political divisions and physical boundaries. Ghatak was an important actor in and commentator upon Bengali culture. His films represent an influential and decidedly unique viewpoint of post-Independence Bengal. Unique, because in his films he pointedly explored the fallout of the 1947 Partition of India on Bengali society, and influential, because his films set a standard for newly-emerging alternative or parallel cinema directors in contrast to those directors who opted for the hegemonic Bollywood or Bombay style(s) of Indian cinema.[11] The majority of Ghataks films are narratives that focus on the postIndependence Bengali family and community, with a sustained critique of the emerging petitebourgeoisie in Bengal, specifically in the urban environment of Calcutta. In this context, Ghatak utilizes a melodramatic style and mode novel to Indian cinema. His melodrama combines popular and classical idioms of performance from Bengal and India that are merged with Stanislavskian acting and Brechtian theatrical techniques.

In this paper, I will examine the relations between three interconnected elements in Ghataks film narratives: women landscape (exterior and interior) sound and music. In his films, Ghatak consistently layers these three components to convey both utopian and dystopian visions of Homeland in an independent Bengal. He employs Bengali folk music and frames Bengali landscapes to inform, both aurally and visually, his representations of Bengali women as symbolic images of the joy, sorrow and nostalgia that he associates with the birth of the Indian state. I will analyze scenes from two of Ghataks films,Meghe Dhaka Tara (A CloudCovered Star, 1960), andSubarnarekha (The Golden Line, 1962; also the name of a river in what is now Bangladesh) to illustrate this critical relationship between women, landscape, and sound and music which is fundamental to his construction of a resistant narrative of the new Indian nation.[12] First, some brief background information about the 1947 Partition of India and Ghataks melodramatic style is necessary in order to contextualize Ghataks representations of Woman and Homeland and begin to understand how these representations are linked together in his films Meghe Dhaka Tara and Subarnarekha. 1947: Partition of India In August 1947, after over a year of tortuous negotiations in the midst of communal (religious) riots and killings throughout India, leaders and representatives of the departing British colonial government, the predominantly Hindu Indian Congress Party and the Muslim League decided to divide India into the Indian Union, with a Hindu majority, and Pakistan, with a Muslim majority. Furthermore, Pakistan was composed of two geographically separate (more than 1,250 miles apart) and culturally, linguistically different parts: West Pakistan (now known as simply Pakistan) and East Pakistan (now known as Bangladesh). [See map.] Consequently, Bengal was also geographically and culturally divided into two parts: East Bengal became Pakistani East Bengal or East Pakistan and West Bengal became Indian West Bengal. [See map.] An estimated ten million people, primarily Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, were forced over the next months to abandon the homes that they had lived in for generations and to migrate. Muslims fled to West and East Pakistan, Hindus and Sikhs to India. Families were divided, friends and neighbors were left behind, and an immense mass confusion developed as to where to go and what to expect when they got there. All of these factors created tremendous tension which led to the religious hatred, riots and murders that ushered in Indias independence from Britain and the birth of Pakistan. Ghatak viewed the division of his native Bengal as mishandled and illconceived. Government officials, he believed, gave barely a thought to the devastating impact that such a division would (and did) have on millions of people. Ghatak spent his entire artistic life wrestling with the consequences of Partition: particularly the insecurity and anxiety engendered by the homelessness of the refugees of Bengal.[13] In his films, he tries to convey how Partition struck at the roots of Bengali culture. He seeks to express the nostalgia and yearning that many Bengalis have for their pre-Partition way of life.[14] Ghatak was outspoken concerning Indias Independence and Partition. In response to an interviewers question regarding what personal truth had inspired his films, stories and plays, Ghatak replied: Being a Bengali from East Bengal, I have seen the untold miseries inflicted on my people in the name of independencewhich is a fake and a sham. I have reacted violently towards this and I have tried to portray different aspects of this [in my films].[15] In another interview, Ghatak discussed the common thread of union in his films, Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960),Komal Gandhar (The Gandhar Sublime, 1961; in the Indian classical musical system, an E-flat or flatted third), and Subarnarekha (1962). He stated: Against my intention the films Meghe Dhaka Tara, Komal Gandhar, and Subarnarekhaformed my trilogy. When I started Meghe Dhaka Tara, I never spoke of political unification. Even now I dont think of it because history will not alter and I wont venture to do this impossible task. The cultural segregation caused by politics and economics was a thing to which I never reconciled myself as I always thought in terms of cultural integration. This very theme of cultural integration forms the theme in all three films.[16] In his films, Ghatak often situates his preoccupation with the union of East Pakistan and West

Bengal within the heart of Bengali society: the family. And through the post-Independence Bengali family, Ghatak expresses the radical transformations that occurred within Bengali culture. Ghataks families are often not the traditional extended Bengali family, but alternative, surrogate families, like the theatrical troupe in Komal Gandhar or the wandering group of misfits in Jukti Takko Ar Gappo(Arguments and a Story, 1974), who are displaced, urban, lower middle class refugees searching for a home. By utilizing a melodramatic style comprised of Bengali, Indian, European and Russian elements, Ghatak visually and aurally articulates a new Bengali homeland. Continued: Ghatak and Indian melodrama Indian melodrama: Ghataks melodramatic style Tracing the development of melodrama as a mode, genre and/or style in Indian, specifically Bengali, literature, theater and cinema is obviously beyond the scope of this paper.[17] [open notes in new window] Ghatak utilizes melodrama primarily as a style or mode rather than a coherently developed genre. He constructs his melodramatic style within the general Indian popular cinematic context of the 1940s and 1950s Hindi social films of directors like Guru Dutt and Raj Kapoor and the specific, regional context of 1950s and 1960s Bengali neo-realist art films of directors like Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen.[18] In an attempt to refine the definition of melodrama in relation to realism in the context of Indian cinema, the Indian film scholar Ravi Vasudevan explains: The conceptual separation of melodrama from realism which occurred through the formation of bourgeois canons of high art in late nineteenth century Europe and America was echoed in the discourses on popular commercial cinema of late 1940s and 1950s India. This strand of criticism, associated with the formation of the art cinema in Bengal, could not comprehend the peculiarities of a form (i.e., melodrama) which had its own complex mechanisms of articulation. In the process, the critics contributed to an obfuscating hierarchization of culture with which we are still contending.[19] Vausdevans observation is significant for Ghataks work because as a filmmaker who unabashedly employs a melodrama modality that combined maudlin and Marxist elements, Ghatak often stands in a cinematic space in between the popular cinema of Bombay and the art cinema of Bengal. The Indian cinema scholar Ashish Rajadhyaksha helps to further situate Ghataks films within melodrama in the Bengali cinematic context: In Bengal, where a cinema had developed which was economically strong but culturally subservient to the novel, melodrama acquired an oppositional force, e.g. in Baruas work which subverted the literary, and in the Kallol filmmakers where it later found new alignments with the IPTAs formal emphasis on the folk theatre.[20] For Rajadhyaksha, after the nihilistic love stories of Bengali-Hindi director and actor P.C. Barua in the 1930s-40s, and the socially conscious, folk-infused plots of the Kallol and IPTA filmmakers in the 1930s-50s, Ghataks narratives are a next step in the evolution of melodrama in Bengali cinema.[21] As we will see later, scholars who have written on Ghatak, like Geeta Kapur, the Indian cultural critic, and Kumar Shahani, an Indian filmmaker and former Ghatak student, perceive Ghataks films as daring to push the boundaries of melodramatic modality.[22] Throughout his essays and interviews, Ghatak discusses how he interweaves material from Indian mythology and Upanishadic, Marxist and Jungian philosophy into a melodramatic narrative form.[23] He deliberately uses coincidence and repetition to educate an audience and to express ideas. In Ghataks 1963 article, Film and I, he writes that melodrama is a much abused genre, from which a truly national cinema will emerge when truly serious and considerate artists bring the pressure of their entire intellect upon it.[24] In a 1974 interview, he states: I am not afraid of melodrama. To use melodrama is ones birthright, it is a form.[25] Ghatak largely developed his melodramatic style of cinema when he was a playwright, actor and director during the 1940s and 1950s in IPTA. The variety of both indigenous and foreign theatrical styles that IPTA incorporated such as the Bengali folk form, jatra, and Brechts epic form greatly contributed to the theatrical shape of Ghataks melodramatic style.[26] Ghataks

form greatly contributed to the theatrical shape of Ghataks melodramatic style.[26] Ghataks films are frequently characterized as epic; he often inverts and recontextualizes Indian traditions and myths.[27] He described Indians as an epic-minded people who liked to be told the same myths and legends again and again, and he viewed this epic attitude as a living tradition.[28] In the following sections on Meghe Dhaka Tara and Subarnarekha, I will give examples of Ghataks deconstruction of traditional mythologies surrounding the Bengali woman, and his insertion of reconstructed representations into a modern context to critique his present historical moment.[29] In the 1960s, Ghatak translated Brechts The Life of Galileo and Caucasian Chalk Circle from English to Bengali. In numerous essays and interviews, he discusses the impact on his work of Brechts epic approach, alienation effect and use of coincidence.[30] Ghatak draws upon the diverse theatrical traditions of IPTA, Brecht and Stanislavski, and the various cinematic visions of Eisenstein, Godard and Bunuel to come up with use own melodramatic vision.[31] The technical details of Ghataks melodramatic style include the following stylistic traits: frequent use of a wide angle lens, placement of the camera at very high, low and irregular angles, dramatic lighting composition, expressionistic acting style and experimentation with songs and sound effects. With this combination of cinematic devices, Ghatak creates a melodramatic post-Partition world in which he constructs his vision of Woman and Homeland in post-Independence Bengal. In cinema, the family, the home, with women mothers, wives, daughters and sisters as the key players is the primary site of domestic melodrama.[32] In Bengali culture, the home houses the heart of Bengali society: the family. And at the core of the Bengali family is ma, the mother.[33] Within the homes of Ghataks post-Independence Bengal lies the site of both ananda (joy) anddukkho (sorrow), emotions intensely expressed by his female characters, frequently through song. These songs and music distill the essence or rasa of the joy and sorrow that Ghataks characters experience, and the music track enables these emotions full force and weight to be communicated to the audience.[34] The ability of music and song to express powerful emotions beyond the visual dimension of a film, even beyond the film text itself, is particularly evident in Ghataks Meghe Dhaka Tara, andSubarnarekha.The film sound scholar Caryl Flinn relates in her book Strains of Utopia: Melodrama critics assert that the non-representational register (i.e., music) reveals elements which cannot be conveyed through representational means alone, a fundamental split that seems to guarantee the genres potentially subversive effects.[35] In these two films, Ghatak uses songs and music, from Bengali folksongs to a Nino Rota film score, and sound effects, such as Nitas sonically matched whiplash and Sitas amplified breathing, as a counterpoint to andcomment on the narrative action. Ghatak is one of the first Indian filmmakers to explore the power and diversity of a films non-representational register. In these two films, Ghatak specifically focuses on the interrelations betweeen his female characters, the Bengali landscape and Bengali music to visualize a new, often utopic and dystopic, Bengali homeland. In the remainder of this paper, employing theoretical concepts from Geeta Kapur, Kumar Shahani and Hamid Naficy, I will detail scenes from Meghe Dhaka Tara and Subarnarekha in order to illustrate this point. After providing a brief synopsis of Meghe Dhaka Tara, I will provide an analysis of the films primary female character, Nita, in the context of soundscape and landscape. Brief synopsis of Meghe Dhaka Tara Meghe Dhaka Tara is set in the late 1950s in Calcutta. The story revolves around a Bengali lower-middle class, refugee family who were victims of Partition and who are now struggling for survival in a bustee (slum) on the outskirts of the city. The eldest daughter, Nita ("Knowledge"), has given up her college studies in order to work. She is the breadwinner of the family. Her elder brother Shankar, who would normally be the head of the household, is eccentric and irresponsible. He spends his days singing, practicing scales and classical Indiankhayals,[36] and dreaming of becoming a great singer. Nitas old father teaches in a small school nearby and her mother maintains the house. Nitas selfish younger siblings, Gita and Montu, are still in school. In her bleak life, Nita has only one thing to look forward to: the return of Sanat, a young scientist she hopes one day to marry. Through many twists and turns of the plot, Nitas family becomes increasingly dependent on her earnings. Nitas father and Montu both have debilitating accidents and Shankar leaves home for Bombay to become a singing star. Sanat does return, but falls in love with and marries Nitas sister, Gita. The stresses and strains of Nitas life take their toll. She develops tuberculosis and, although she is desperately ill, continues to work to support her family. Shankar returns from

Bombay, now an accomplished classical singer, to find Nita wasting away with a terminal illness. Shankar takes her to a sanatorium in the hills where she remains, uncertain whether she will live or die, and forgotten by her family. Nita as goddess: Durga/Uma/Gauri The two main female characters of Meghe Dhaka Taraand Subarnarekha Nita and Sita are not only emotionally and physically sacrificed by their families but are also symbolically sacrificed as goddesses. As symbolic goddesses, Nita and Sita represent the Motherland of Bengal and it is Bengali society who sacrifices Her with division and greed.[37] First, I will examine Ghataks portrayal of Nita, then his construction of Sita, as Woman, Goddess, and Bengal, the Motherland through the use of various songs and sound effects in the context of the Bengali landscape. The theoretical work of the Iranian and exilic film scholar Hamid Naficy elucidates what is at stake for Ghatak in these two films and as a filmmaker, particularly as an accented or exilic filmmaker. [38] Naficy defines accented filmmakers as situated but universal figures who work in the interstices of social formations and cinematic practices.[39] Characterizing Ghatak as an accented or exilic filmmaker is appropriate not only because he endured the trauma of the partition of his beloved Bengal, but also because the director cinematically commented on subsequent political and cultural fallout from that tragic separation throughout his career. Ghatak is interstitial because he had to struggle constantly to obtain funding and equipment to create the kind of films he wanted, largely outside of the Calcutta and Bombay film studio systems. And he is also interstitial because his films subject matter and style were often astride that of Indian popular cinema and Bengali art cinema. The stylistic components of accented cinema that I will focus on when detailing scenes with Nita and Sita fromMeghe Dhaka Tara and Subarnarekha are the open-form, natural exteriors and closed-form, claustrophobic interiors used in the mise-en-scene and setting, and the films way of eliciting dysphoric, euphoric, or nostalgic structures of feeling, specifically through song, music, and sound effects. These stylistic components shape Meghe Dhaka Tara and Subarnarekha, and resonate with the technical characteristics of Ghataks melodramatic style detailed above. In these two films, Ghatak emphasizes themes of home, homeland, displacement, rupture, utopia, dystopia, urban vs. rural, city vs. village, etc. In his work, Ghatak agonized over the fact that he and multitudes like him were compulsory exiles, refugees in their own homeland, due to the artificial, arbitrary division of Bengal into West Bengal and East Pakistan. Ghatak attempts to illustrate the end result of Partitions forced migration of millions as political, cultural, and geographical deterritorialization and stasis through depicting the entrapment of the female characters of Nita and Sita in their houses and in their fragmented homeland. In Meghe Dhaka Tara, the character Nita is actually the manifestation of multiple goddesses: Durga as Jagadhatri, the benevolent image of the eternal giver and universal sustainer, and Uma/Gauri, the Mother Goddess.[40] In her essay Myth and Ritual: Ghataks Meghe Dhaka Tara, Ira Bhaskar points out how Nita represents the benign manifestation of Durga: A prevalent story about the genesis of Durga is the concept of Havyagni (oblation to the sacrificial fire). In the ritual of the Havan (the act of consigning the mortal offering to the sacrificial flames) is symbolized the surrender of human desires and aspirations which are carried to the heavens with the smoke. It is believed that Durga was born out of this smoke as a transmutation of human desires, taking the form of Jagadhatari , the universal sustainer. One of the central images associated with Nita is the courtyard wherein are centered the ambitions of the rest of the family... These selfish ambitions pour into the courtyard, the symbolic yagna mandapa, from which manifests Nita in the role of the Provider and Creator.[41] The sight and sound of the fire that Nitas mother uses symbolically to sacrifice her daughter adds to the construction of the Jagadhatari image in the family courtyard. Traditionally, the courtyard of a Bengali or Indian home is the heart of the household. In Meghe Dhaka Tara, the courtyard is an oppressive, suffocating space, particularly for Nita. Significant here is Naficys articulation of the outside, external and domestic, internal spaces of accented cinema as feminized and his perception of all accented films as feminine texts. He explains: For the exiles, the house is a site of both deep harmony and hatred... Significantly, the discourse

of memory feminized the house as an enclosure of femininity and domesticity, associated with motherhood and reproduction. This is how many exiles feminize the homeland... In the accented cinema, the house is an intensely charged place and a signifying trope.[42] Throughout Meghe Dhaka Tara, the courtyard is an intensely charged place that does not signify Nitas potential motherhood. Rather it serves as the site of her tragic deterioration at the hands of her overly dependent family members. Ghatak often cuts or pans from the mother (as the destructive Kali and parasitic Chandi, both malevolent manifestations of Durga), surrounded by the smoke of the hearth, to Nita. With the exaggerated sound of boiling rice serving as the transition, the camera moves from the mother to medium close-ups of Nita as Jagadhatri, the nourishing force who has to be immolated. The pronounced sound of the boiling rice kettle that Nitas mother is always watching over accentuates her insatiable greed. Whenever the conversation in the courtyard turns to the possibility of Nita, the sole breadwinner of the family, getting married, the sound of the boiling kettle is amplified on the soundtrack, usually in conjunction with a close-up of Nitas mothers panic-stricken face. In his 1976 article, Nature, in the End, is Grandly Indifferent, Ghataks former student Kumar Shahani addresses the manifestation of what he calls the femininity principle in the Indian tradition in Meghe Dhaka Tara. Shahani believes that one of Ghataks greatest contributions to Indian films was reinvigorating and restoring this femininity principle to its pre-Brahmanical, agrarian roots. Shahani writes: The triangular division taken from Tantric abstraction is the key to the understanding of this complex film. The inverted triangle represents, in the Indian tradition, fertility and the femininity principle. The breaking up of society is visualized as a three-way division of womanhood. The three principle woman characters embody the traditional aspects of feminine power. The heroine, Nita, has the preserving and nurturing quality; her sister, Gita, is the sensual woman; their mother represents the cruel aspect. The incapacity for Nita to combine and contain all these qualities, to retain only the nurturing quality to the exclusion of others, is the source of her tragedy.[43] Nitas blind sustaining of her family at the cost of her health and life is also reflected in her representation as Uma. Ghatak states, Uma has been the archetype of all daughters and brides of all Bengali households for centuries.[44] Ghataks identification of Nita with Uma is ironic because her family sacrifices her wifehood and motherhood. Throughout Meghe Dhaka Taras soundtrack, Ghatak uses refrains from Bengali folk songs that lament Umas departure from her familial home to go to her husbands home.[45] One song, mourning Umas leaving, Ghatak uses extra-diegetically several times in Meghe Dhaka Tara, specifically when Nitas senile father casts her out of the family house when she is dying from tuberculosis. The lyrics go as follows: Come, my daughter Uma, to me. Let me garland you with flowers. You are the soul of my sad self, Mother, the deliverer. Let me bid you farewell now, my daughter! You are leaving my home desolate, for your husbands place. How do I endure your leaving, my daughter? Ghatak utilizes this traditional Bengali folk song to counterpoint Nitas reality; Nita is not the new bride heading for her husbands home: she is the sickly, unwed daughter who is being banished from her home because she has become a liability rather than an asset. She has been forced into exile. Mirroring her deteriorating condition, Nitas home has become claustrophobic and ill strangled by the fears and anxieties of her family. This song ironically comments on Nitas fate after she has been cast out of her familys house. For in her role as Uma and the consort of Shiva Lord of Destruction and Eternal Time who resides in the Himalayan mountains, Nita goes to a sanatorium in the Shillong hills of Bengal to die, as if in Shivas lap. In traditional Hindu mythology, the Himalayan mountains are the site of the happy reunion of Uma and her husband, Shiva[46]; but in Meghe Dhaka Tara, poignantly, a hill station in the mountains is where Nita is cast out to die alone. Thus, Ghatak inverts the traditional Hindu myth where Shiva and Uma share a joyous reunion in the Himalayas to emphasize the tragedy of Nitas impending death. While discussing the multi-faceted Bengali artist Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian cultural historian Geeta Kapur elaborates upon Ghataks reconstruction of Indian myths: But even fewer artists can achieve, simultaneously, the reconstruction of an archetype that turns

into a device to speak about the type within a class; to present the problem of a classconstructed psyche which so quickly appropriates mythic elements to serve vested interests. I am thinking of Ritwik Ghatak, for whom too [along with Ray] Tagore is a mentor. Certainly in the cinema only this one man, Ghatak, dares to put his stakes so high, and expectedly the cinematic means he uses are bold and hybrid: he does not subscribe to the sacred as such, nor to the revelatory. But nor does he rest content with doubt that declares itself proof of the rational, and an automatic representation, therefore, of the secular. He places rationality within a melodramatic genre and examines the status of doubt there, in that fraught schema, where tragedy is made to give itself over in favour of praxis. (My italics.)[47] Thus, Ghatak is making use of Indian myths and archetypes within a melodramatic context as an exercise in exploring the degradation of post-Independence Bengali society. Nita, Sita and Rabindra Sangeet In Meghe Dhaka Tara and Subarnarekha, Ghatak uses songs by Rabindranath Tagore (18611941), Bengals creative genius, who was a poet, playwright, novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, song composer (0f both lyrics and music), philosopher, teacher, and Nobel Prize winner. Tagore wrote over 2,000 songs, known asRabindra sangeet or Rabindra song, compositions that incorporated elements of Indian classical music and Bengali folk songs.[48][open notes in new window] In his biography of Tagore, Krishna Kripalani describes the impact of Tagores songs in Bengali culture: For each change of the season, each aspect of his countrys rich landscape, every undulation of the human heart, in sorrow or joy, has found its voice in some song of his.[49] His songs often celebrate Nature and the Divine, specifically in the physical and spiritual context of Bengal.[50] As previously mentioned, in his films Ghatak utilizes a variety of musical forms, both Indian and non-Indian, and commonly uses Tagores music. As Ghatak stated in an interview just before his death: I cannot speak without Tagore. That man has culled all of my feelings from long before my birth. He has understood what I am and he has put in all the words. I read him and I find that all has been said and I have nothing new to say.[51] Ghatak, like most Bengalis, considers Tagore as the embodiment of all that is great in Bengali culture, as the pinnacle of artistic expression in Bengal. When Ghatak uses a Tagore song in a film, it often evokes among Bengalis nostalgia and longing for an undivided, pre-Partition Bengal. Ghatak situates Tagore songs within the painful context of the struggle for survival of postIndependence Bengali families, and the songs serve to shape and give dimension to the characters of Nita and Sita. In both Meghe Dhaka Tara and Subarnarekha, Ghatak uses Tagore songs at climatic moments to express the joy and sorrow of the post-Independence Bengali woman, who must bear the burden of rebuilding the family in the aftermath of Partition. Nitas Rabindra Sangeet The only time that Nita sings in the film is just before her sister Gitas wedding to her [Nitas] former suitor, Sanat, and before her brother Shankars departure to Bombay to launch his singing career. Traditionally, Shankar as the eldest son should have assumed responsibility for the household when his father became incapacitated, but that burden fell to Nita. In the dark and flimsy thatched hut, Nita and Shankar sit feeling melancholy as they look at a photograph of themselves as children in the hills. The sounds of muted raindrops and frogs croaking drift in from the outside. The claustrophobic interior reflects the suffocation of Nita as her tuberculosis advances. Her home crumbles around her as she herself withers away. Throughout the scene, the heads and profiles of Nita and Shankar are strongly lit from the front and back, often against almost total blackness, giving the composition a disembodied feel. Shankar declares that he is leaving their home in protest against her suffering and smothering at the hands of the family. She asks him to teach her a Tagore song, as she will be expected to sing at Gitas wedding. As Shankar starts the song and Nita joins in, the camera slowly dollies at a low angle away from them, to a long shot of the pair from across the stifling, dim room. The chasm widens between brother and sister as they sing. The song is about a visitation by God:

I didnt realize that You had come to my room, the night when my doors broke down in the raging storm. Darkness had encompassed everything, my oil lamp blew out. I stretched out my hand to the sky, though I knew not towards whom. I lay forlorn in the darkness thinking the storm a dream, ignorant that the storm was actually a symbol of Your victory flag. Opening my eyes in the morning I am amazed to behold You, standing [there], filling the room, [filling] my hearts void. Because Nita sings this song at a critical moment in the narrative, when her family is abandoning her and she is becoming increasingly sick, the song appears to be a metaphor for her coming death. This Tagore piece also portends of the sequence to come where Nitas ailing father orders her to leave the house in the middle of the night when a storm is raging outside. By the end of the song, the camera has dollied back to the pair; in the remaining shots they are now separately framed. The singular composition of the last few shots of the scene signal Nitas isolation and estrangement from even Shankar. The climatic shot is a low angle, medium closeup of Nitas frightened face. Her eyes widen as she clutches her neck with her hands and silently gasps for air, while the faint sound of a whiplash comes up on the soundtrack. A cut follows to Nita alone in the blackness, collapsed in a heap on the floor. Her sobs meld into a solitary sarod strain on the soundtrack. Thus, the sound of the whiplash undercuts the deliverance that the Tagore song promises. Salvation and redemption are not in Nitas future not even as a symbolic goddess. Ghatak utilizes the extra-diegetic sound of the whip to represent the weight of social and historical forces bearing down upon Nita, as an individual and as symbolic Motherland, and, by extension, to convey an awareness of these forces to his audience. Ashish Rajadhyaksha has remarked when analyzing Meghe Dhaka Tara, In the film, there is a constant attempt to bring out the romantic through various conventions and violently negate them, reverse them into an indictment of the romantic sensibility.[52] The specific romantic sensibility that Ghatak is critiquing here has its modern origins in the socalled Bengali renaissance of the 19th century, the cultural era from which Tagore emerged.[53]In this scene, Ghatak politically activates Rabindra sangeet, pushing it beyond its romantic borders to shed light on the social realities of the present. The sacrifice of Nita The penultimate scene of Meghe Dhaka Tara focuses on Nita and takes place in a sanatorium among the Shillong hills of Bengal. In the previous scene, Nita was trapped in a decrepit hut; now she resides in a hospital for the sick and dying in the middle of ostensibly boundless nature. However, the spatial significance of the Shillong hills as the site of Nitas demise is that here nature is not represented as idyllic and timeless, but is suffocating, indifferent and indicative of Nitas mortality. Shankar (Nitas brother who has become a well-known classical Indian singer) is visiting her and they are sitting outside on a vast lawn surrounded by the hills. Nita is framed against the encircling landscape, which reinforces the feminization of the space. However, Nita is not immortalized as a goddess in this space, but is pictured as small, insignificant as a human who will suffer an agonizing death. Ghatak undermines any, in Naficys words, nostalgic longing to the homelands natural landscape, for Nita is now hostage to this land, held in permanent exile.[54][open notes in new window] Shankar relates news of the antics of Gitas (Nitas younger sisters) new son (a motherhood Nita will never experience), when suddenly she gets up, grabs his shirt and frantically cries, Brother, you know I really want to live. I love so much to be alive. Brother, tell me once that I will live. Brother, I want to go home. I want to live! These last three words are amplified and reverberated on the soundtrack and joined with a droning sound and a whip cracking (two reoccurring sound effects that are always matched with Nita) as the camera pans in dizzying 180 degree panoramic shots of the surrounding hills of Bengal. Nitas violent cry, her unrelenting affirmation of life, counterpoints the claustrophobic confinement in which she will spend her final days. In juxtaposition to Ghataks expansive and fluid camerawork, Nitas entrapment in this natural space conveys stasis and rigidity. The immense landscape appears to collapse around her as she gasps and struggles to find her voice on the soundtrack for her visual image is now absent and we are left with the sound of her

disembodied utterances. Yet Nita, as diseased Woman, fallen Goddess and dystopian Bengal (i.e., Motherland), is determined to live on even as she is dying. Ultimately, however, Meghe Dhaka Taraillustrates Ghataks skepticism about the future of the Bengali family and the Bengali homeland. After the following description of Subarnarekhas narrative, I will examine the character Sita, as woman and as mythological goddess, shaped by music and landscape. Brief synopsis of Subarnarekha: Subarnarekha begins in a setting similar to that of Meghe Dhaka Tara: a lower middle-class family living in a busteeon the outskirts of Calcutta immediately following Partition. This bustee is a camp, called New Life Colony, for refugees from East Bengal. The narrative ofSubarnarekha focuses on Sita, whose mother and father were killed during Partition, and who is being raised by her elder brother, Ishwar. Ishwar has also taken in a poor, low-caste boy named Abhiram. They move to the Bengali countryside for a fresh start when Ishwar gets a job as an assistant manager in an iron foundry. Sita spends her life caring for her unmarried brother, until she grows into a young woman and falls in love with Abhiram. Ishwar is determined to find a proper high-caste Hindu husband for Sita and demands that she never see Abhiram again. Ishwar proceeds to arrange Sitas marriage, yet Sita, resolved to marry Abhiram, escapes with him to Calcutta on her wedding night. Once again living in a bustee, the newly married couple has a child, Binu, and Abhiram finds work as a bus driver. One day, he accidentally runs over a child and an angry mob kills him. Sita is forced to earn money for her and Binu. She begins to sing for paying customers, and thus unwittingly becomes a prostitute. One night, Ishwar, on a business trip to Calcutta, visits Sita in a drunken stupor to avail himself of her services, not realizing that this prostitute is his sister. In shock at seeing her brother in these circumstances, Sita kills herself. At the conclusion of the film, Binu is placed in the care of Ishwar, who although devastated, attempts to move on for the sake of his nephew. Sita as goddess: Sita/Sati/Radha Through song, Ghatak portrays Sita as both mother and loveras the goddess Sita and the mythical lover of Krishna, Radha.[55] One day, in Chhatimpur in the Bengali countryside, Sita, as a young girl, is idly walking along an abandoned airstrip singing a Bengali folk song when she encounters Ishwars senile old boss. He asks Sita her name and then proceeds to tell her the story of her birth and death. The old man tells Sita how her mythical namesake was found as a baby in the furrow of a field by King Janak and how she returned to her mother, Earth, when scorned by her husband, Rama, who believed that she had cheated on him with the evil demon, Ravana. Ghatak reworks this mythological tale in Subarnarekha to climax with the female character Sitas committing suicide with a kitchen knife in response to the horror of seeing her brother, Ishwar (God in Hindi), at her doorstep to solicit her services as a prostitute. In this film, yet another layer to the reconstruction of the goddess archetype in the character of Sita can be found in the Puranic tale of Sati, another manifestation of the goddess Durga, who burns herself through the fire of her concentration (yogagni) in order to satisfy the ethics of good womanhood (satidharma) because her father, Daksha, while under the influence of a magic garland had engaged in unseemly sexual behavior towards her.[56] Daksha is greatly opposed to Satis marriage to the god, Shiva. In Subarnarekha, Ishwar represents Daksha, for he is a surrogate father to Sita. As a symbolic father, Ishwar, like Daksha has an incestuous attachment to Sita (Sati) and an intense dislike for her husband Abhiram (Shiva). As Sati immolates herself, similarly Sita sacrifices herself when confronted with the shame of the sexual advances of her drunken brother Ishwar. Sita as a young woman continually sings melancholyKrishna kirtan (songs in praise of Lord Krishna) while sitting among the hills and by the river, Subarnarekha. The spaciousness of Sitas homescape as an adolescent contrasts with her claustrophobic confines in Calcutta as a young adult. Sitas rootedness to the surrounding geography of her youth is illustrated in her song and in Ghataks framing of her in the rocky, riverine landscape. In one scene Sita is sitting on a sandbank and there is a close-up of sand sifting through her hands. The sifting sand symbolizes the time passed since Sita has last seen Abhiram, and evokes the image of Sita as one with the earth, her symbolic mother. Ghatak then pulls back to a medium close-up and then a long shot of Sita so that we see her on the sandbank by the river with the hills in the background. She begins to sing the following Krishna kirtan :

See the dawn is coming. The people wake up. The breeze wakes up. The birds wake up. The sky appears. Oh Shyam [Krishna, the Dark One], why do you still lie asleep? Where were you, awake all night? See the dawn is breaking. Ghatak frames Sita as part of the surrounding expanse of landscape and nature while she sings this song of longing so as to identify Sita, as Sita her namesake, with her mother, Earth, and to depict Sita, as Radha, singing her song of love in separation to Abhiram, as Krishna. Ghataks use of a wide angle lens serves to fuse together the vast, open vista and the image of Sita as iconic motherland. The use of a Krishna kirtan, which portrays the Krishna/Radha dilemma of love in separation, is also a metaphor for the division of Bengal and the nostalgia and longing that geographical separation has engendered. Ghataks constant use of Krishna kirtan throughoutSubarnarekha serves to permeate the film with a feel of yearning for a united Bengal. Sitas Rabindra Sangeet Sitas growth as a woman is told through song, particularly a song by Tagore. The song personifies Sita and follows her lifes trajectory. As a small girl, Sita sings the song, which describes and revels in the surrounding nature of the rural Bengal landscape. After she runs away to marry Abhiram against Ishwars wishes, her brother is so haunted by the song that he attempts to hang himself. As a wife and mother, Sita sings this same song from her childhood to her son, Binu. And after her death, Binu suddenly breaks into the song, offering a glimmer of hope at the conclusion of the film. Ghatak uses the song to illustrate the innocence and openness of the world of Sita and Binu as children and to serve as a counterpoint to the degradation and boundedness of the environment of Sita and Ishwar as adults. The song goes: The sun and shade play hide and seek over the paddy field today; someone has floated rafts of white clouds on the blue sky. Today the bumblebees forgot to draw nectar from the flowers; instead they gleefully flit around in the [morning] light. Today the birds swarm the riverbed, no one knows why. We will not go home today, we will stay out and absorb nature as much as we can.... The day will be spent (idly), only by playing the flute. In the final shot sequence of Subarnarekha, Sitas son, Binu, is sitting at a train station with Sitas brother, Ishwar. Binu is starring blankly into space while remembering how Sita, now dead, used to sing this Tagore song from her childhood to him, as the song slowly comes up on the soundtrack. In close-up, Binu begins singing the song, which greatly surprises and saddens Ishwar. Here, Ghatak interweaves history, memory and nature. ThisRabindra sangeet represents Sitas voice as it echoes across the riverine countryside, like Nitas voice resonates against the Shillong hills at the end of Meghe Dhaka Tara. The feminized homeland remains, but the women endure only as fractured, disembodied memories. In the next and final scene, Binu and Ishwar are seen in a wide angle, long shot, trudging along the banks of the Subarnarekha river in West Bengal, surrounded by hills and trees. Binu leads the dazed, plodding Ishwar by the hand and incites him to move along into the seemingly endless, daunting landscape. The pair is attempting to go home. It is a home they will now have to recreate after Sitas suicide. The films opening classical Indian raga and womens chorus rise up on the soundtrack to join with the sound of rushing water and Binus childish voice. The womens chorus fades to a single, female voice as the final shot reveals the Bengali inscription, Victory to man, to this new born child, ever-living. Thus, Ghatak leaves us with the sound and image of children as the only hope for the survival of post-Independence Bengal. The sacrifice of Sita At the end of Subarnarekha, Sita is truly in exile. She now resides alone in a rented room with her son because she has had to flee her home in the countryside due to her brothers irrational jealousy towards her husband, Abhiram, and now the husband is dead. While Sitas youth was spent in the idyllic open structures of home (that) emphasize continuity, her adulthood devolves

in the urban slums of Calcutta those paranoid structures of exile (that) underscore rupture.[57] In the sequence where Sita commits suicide, Ghataks ingenious employment of sound is fully realized. Sitas sacrificial final scene is related entirely through song, sound effects and silence. It has no dialogue. When the completely inebriated Ishwar arrives at Sitas house, he has no idea that Sita is the prostitute whom he is visiting. Ishwar is not only drunk but also almost blind because earlier in a bar he dropped his glasses and stepped on them. He is literally and symbolically visionless. His inability to see beyond Abhirams lower caste status has propelled Sita into these dire circumstances. In order to maintain his position in his job and society, Ishwar has renounced Sita, his only family member. Exiting a taxi, Ishwar stumbles towards Sitas house; a point of view shot illustrates his blurry and distorted vision. As Ishwar stands weaving back and forth on the threshold of the door to Sitas suffocatingly small, dark room, the faint strains of Nino Rotas La Dolce Vita[58] theme are heard as we see an out-of-focus long shot of Sita. In his article, Sound in Cinema, Ghatak states: There are times when a tune used in a film by someone else is used to make an observation, the way I myself have done. The music that accompanies the scene of orgy at the end of La Dolce Vita, where Fellini lashes out at the whole of Western civilization, is known asPatricia. I sought to make a similar statement in my Subarnarekha about my own land, this Bengal, so sparkling with intellect. So I have used the same music in the bar scene [and in Sitas suicide scene], to make a suggestion. Was I influenced? Not at all. The music merely helped me say a lot of things.[59] Helped me say a lot of things for Ghatak refers to his commentary on the senselessness of the dissolution of post-Independence Bengali culture and society. As Kumar Shahani has explained while discussing Ghataks evolution of an epic cinematic form: In Subarnarekha, the dramatic element disintegrates, its cliches are turned against itself; the traumatic prostitution of our culture is exemplified as Sanskrit becomes part of La Dolce Vita in one of the worlds poorest cities. We are made to face our self-destructive incestuous longings which are otherwise so delicately camouflaged by both our sophisticated and vulgar filmmakers.[60] The Rota theme becomes a loud drone as Ghatak cuts to a medium close-up of Ishwar drenched in sweat. The drone fades into the sound of Sitas rapid, terrified breathing. There is a cut to a blurred close-up of Sitas petrified face and frozen doe-like eyes. Visually and aurally the feeling of Sitas claustrophobia and confinement is accelerated. In the final seconds of the scene, Ghatak constructs a powerful montage of sound and visuals. With Sitas exaggerated breathing serving as an audio transition, Ghatak cuts to a large kitchen knife, then to an extreme close-up of Sitas unblinking eye filling the frame. Her body is now completely fragmented; her identity reduced to an omniscient eye, in contrast to Ishwars physical and metaphorical blindness. Sita is trapped, inert with fear; her goddess stature diminished to a distorted and disembodied representation. Then there is a very quick cut to Sitas picking up the knife accompanied by the fleeting sound of a knife being sharpened. We hear a crash of cymbals and a dull thud as a cut to a confused, reeling Ishwar reveals a few bloodstains on his white kurta. With the drone of strings, more blood spurts on to Ishwars clothes. We see the table with Sitas tambora (a traditional Indian string instrument) on it shaking, joined by the sound of Sitas bangles and body in her death throes. The camera swiftly pans around the room and lands upon a shot of Ishwars face reflected in a small mirror on a bed also on the bed are a comb, some hair clips, and Sitas arm and hand, her fingers clutching, desperately clawing, the white sheet as she dies. Then there is a cut to a close-up of Ishwars blood-spattered face followed by the first in-focus shot of Sitas face as a death masque and absolute silence. The sonic and visual impact of Sitas self-sacrifice is shocking. The dramatic construction of the scene underscores the epic tragedy of Sitas death the sacrifice of Bengal caused by the decadence of Ishwar, the excesses of Bengali society. Conclusion In Ritwik Ghataks Meghe Dhaka Tara andSubarnarekha, representations of Woman and Homeland are inextricably intertwined in setting, sound, and song. Mixing and layering traditions with innovations infused with socio-historical observations and critiques, Ghatak creates a cinema that offers a complex vision of post-Independence Bengal, where both dystopian and utopian futures are envisioned for his Bengali homeland. Hamid Naficy has observed:

But exile must not be thought of as a generalized condition of alienation and difference, or as one of the items on the diversity-chic menu. All displaced people do not experience exile equally or uniformly. Exile discourse thrives on detail, specificity and locality. There is a there there in exile.[61] As an exilic filmmaker, Ghatak attempts to portray the ambivalence and contradictions of Bengali society in post-Partition Bengal. And as a refugee, Ghatak is compelled in his work to interrogate and continually reassess Bengals cultural memory, identity, and history. In his 1970s essay, Society, Our Traditions, Filmmaking and My Effort, Ghatak states: Childs play with film is no longer fitting. The huge formative nation-building role of films in this country will be here soon.[62] In his films, Ghatak not only constructs varying visions of his Bengali homeland, but also consciously attempts to activate films political and cultural role in newly independent India. Endnotes 1. This article is part of a chapter in my forthcoming dissertation on the films of Ritwik Ghatak for the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. I would like to thank the editors at Jump Cut for their invaluable comments that have enhanced this article and my work in general. I would like to particularly thank Jyotiki Virdi for her assistance and persistence. [return to essay] 2. To avoid reader confusion, I must note here the West Bengal Governments passage of a constitutional amendment declaring from January 1, 2001, the beginning of the new millennium, that Calcutta was officially renamed Kolkata. A variety of reasons for the name change were given, ranging from the argument that the new name would reflect the pronunciation of the citys name in Bengali and would protect the states linguistic identity, to the contention that the new name suggests a compromise between acknowledging the citys colonial past and the need to restore its threatened identity as a Bengali city. For more on the history of the citys name, see Krishna Dutta, Calcutta: A Cultural and Literary History (Northampton: Interlink Books, 2003), pp. 1-4. Given the historical context I am discussing, I will use Calcutta throughout this paper. 3. For more on IPTA, see Rustom Bharucha, Rehearsals of Revolution: The Political Theater of Bengal (Honolulu: The University of Hawaii Press, 1983); Eugene Van Erven, The Playful Revolution: Theatre and Liberation in Asia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); and particularly, Sudhi Pradhan, Marxist Cultural Movement in India: Chronicles and Documents, Vols. I-III (Calcutta: Santi Pradhan, 1979-1985), and IPTA, 50th Anniversary Volume of IPTA (Calcutta: 1993). For more on this period of Ghataks artistic life see: Atnu Pal, ed. Ritwik Kumar Ghatak (Calcutta: Ritwik Memorial Trust 1988), specifically Ghataks lengthy interview in Bengali with Probir Sen, 14-48. This interview has been recently translated into English in Sandipan Bhattacharya and Sibaditya Dasgupta, eds., Ritwik Ghatak: Face to Face (Calcutta: Cinecentral, 2003). In addition to his engagement with theater in the late 1940s, Ghatak began writing short stories, which are collected inBengali in Ritwik Ghataker Golpo (Calcutta: Ritwik Memorial Trust, 1987), and translated into English by Rani Ray in a collection entitled Ritwik Ghatak: Stories (New Delhi: Srishti Publishers, 2001). 4. Bijan Bhattacharyas Nabanna is about the millions of peasants who died during the Bengal famine of 1943-1944. The inflationary market for rice, heavily demanded by Indias army during World War II, led grain merchants and moneylenders in Calcutta to buy up peasant stocks that should have been kept in villages for food and seed. Bijan Bhattacharya was an actor, writer and founding member of IPTA, who starred in many of Ghataks films and was a lifelong friend. Dinabandhu MitrasNeeldarpan is about the plight of a Bengali landlords family and its tenants at the hands of the British indigo planters in the late 19th century. Both plays were social-political landmarks in both Bengali and Indian theater. 5. On The Cultural Front: A Thesis Submitted by Ritwik Ghatak to the Communist Party of India in 1954 (Calcutta: Ritwik Memorial Trust, 2000. 6. See Crisis in Bengal IPTA, in Sudhi Pradhan, ed., Marxist Cultural Movement in India, Vol. 1 (Calcutta: Santi Pradhan, 1979), pp. 324-332. The history of the CPI is also fractious, with a split of the party in 1964 into the CPI and the CPI (Marxist), and the splintering in 1969 of the

CPI(M) into the CPI(M) and CPI(Marxist-Leninist). See The Communist Party, in Sumanta Banerjee, Indias Simmering Revolution: The Naxalite Uprising (London: Zed Books, 1984), pp. 58-81. 7. See Paradise Caf in Mrinal Sen, Montage: Life. Politics. Cinema.(Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2002), pp. 105-109. In 1947, Chidananda Das Gupta (the noted Indian film critic) and Satyajit Ray (Indias first internationally recognized filmmaker) formed the Calcutta Film Society, which for the first time introduced many novice Bengali filmmakers, such as Ghatak and Sen, to European and Soviet films. 8. See Sen, Montage, pp. 106-108 and Ritwik Ghatak, Cinema and I(Calcutta; Ritwik Memorial Trust, 1987), p. 110 for details of Ghataks union activities. 9. For more details of Ghataks life and work in English, including a comprehensive filmography, see Rows and Rows of Fences: Ghatak on Cinema (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2000). Some of the essays and interviews included in this collection were originally in English, and some have been translated into English from Bengali. Much of the material from Cinema and I has been reprinted in Rows and Rows of Fences. 10. The Partition of India in 1947 is commonly referred to as simply Partition". It should be noted that in addition to the 1947 Partition and the Bangladeshi War of Independences 1971 partition of East Pakistan and West Pakistan into Bangladesh and Pakistan, Bengal suffered another wrenching partition in the twentieth century Lord Curzons 1905 partition of Bengal (then a British province) into East Bengal and West Bengal. Britain reunified Bengal in 1911, but the provinces of Bihar and Orissa were created out of Bengali land and the central governments capital was moved from Calcutta to Delhi, to be renamed New Delhi. For more on the 1905 division of Bengal see, Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal: 1903-1908 (New Delhi: Peoples Publishing House, 1973). For more on the 1971 division of East Pakistan and West Pakistan, see Richard Sisson and Leo E. Rose, War and Secession: Pakistan, India, and the Creation of Bangladesh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 11. Ghatak instructed alternative directors such as John Abraham, Mani Kaul, and Kumar Shahani during his brief but influential time as an instructor and Vice-Principal at the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune from 1964-1965. Beginning in the early 1960s, Ghatak suffered from alcoholism and mental illness. He was hospitalized for the first time in late 1965. For the rest of his life he was in and out of mental hospitals and psychiatric treatment. 12. From 1992-1997, I resided in Calcutta for extended periods of time for language study and dissertation fieldwork. During my various stays, I saw Meghe Dhaka Tara and Subarnarekha, which are in black and white, multiple times in 35 mm. For this paper I worked from excellent, unsubtitled video copies. To assist in translating the films dialogue and songs, I have copies of Ghataks subtitling spotting sheets (pages that correlate the dialogue with the footage of the film) that are in Bengali and English. The Ritwik Memorial Trust recently reprinted the complete film script of Meghe Dhaka Tara in Bengali, which I am also utilizing. In 2002, the British Film Institute came out with a finely restored Meghe Dhaka Tara on video and DVD. 13. In Bengali, several words exist that have the connotation of refugee: chinnamul or uprooted; bastuchara or displaced person;sharanarthi or refugee; and, udvastu or homeless person. In the beginning of his article, Remembered Villages: Representation of Hindu-Bengali Memories in the Aftermath of Partition, Economic and Political Weekly (August 10, 1996), pp. 2143-2151, Dipesh Chakrabarty does an excellent job of detailing the significance of udvastu as one who has been placed outside of his ancestral, foundational home. 14. To illustrate the intense love and attachment that Bengalis had for pre-Partition Bengal, the subsequent tremendous sense of loss and nostalgia they experienced for their ancestral homes and motherland as a result of Partition, and Ghataks ability to tap into those emotions, I offer the following quote: There was a wound in the heart of my father, a raw wound. Many physicians were consultedto no effect; consequently, the wound did not heal. He carried this wound with him until the eve of his death. Toward the end of his life, he used to sit quietly. He saw Ritwiks Meghe Dhaka Tara ten times,Subarnarekha eight times and until the end of his life he carried with him Ritwiks Titas Ekti Nadir Nam. [A River Called Titas]... Father had no further opportunities to go to Bangladesh [formerly East Bengal]. This sorrow of not being able to return ate into him for

the rest of his life. Father intentionally built his house close to the border [between West Bengal and Bangladesh]. He used to say that if I inhaled [the air] here, I would be able to smell the earth of Satkhira, Bagura and Jessore. And just to be able to smell this earth, Father would repeatedly watch [Ritwiks] Meghe Dhaka Tara, Subarnarekha and Komal Gandhar. From Loken Rays, Madhokhane bera (A Fence in Between), inPratidin, (September 1997). See also, Ranabir Samaddar, ed. Reflections on Partition in the East (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Pvt Ltd, 1997) and Chakrabarty, Remembered Villages: Representation of Hindu-Bengali Memories in the Aftermath of Partition. It is important to emphasize here that in his films, Ghatak does not often directly address the plight of Bengali Muslims in post-Partition Bengal. The narratives and main characters of his films primarily focus on Bengali Hindus. In his Remembered Villages, Chakrabarty succinctly articulates this fundamental problem in the history of modern Bengali nationality, the fact that the nationalist construction of home was a Hindu home. p. 2150. 15. Ghatak, Rows and Rows of Fences, p. 92. 16. From an interview with Ghatak in Chitrabikshan Annual, (1975), as reprinted and translated in Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Amrit Gangar, eds., Ghatak: Arguments and Stories (Bombay: Screen Unit, 1987), p. 92. Also found in Bhattacharya and Dasgupta, eds., Ritwik Ghatak: Face to Face , p. 67. 17. For a collection of articles on melodrama in Asian cinema, see Wimal Dissanayake, ed. Melodrama and Asian Cinema (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993); for work on melodrama in 1940s and 1950s Hindi/Bombay film, see Ravi Vasudevan, The Melodramatic Mode and the Commercial Hindi Cinema: Notes on Film History, Narrative and Performance in the 1950s, Screen, vol. 30, no. 3 (Summer 1989), pp. 29-50; as well as his Addressing the Spectator of a Third World National Cinema: The Bombay Social Film of the 1940s and 1950s, Screen, vol. 36, no.4 (Winter 1995), pp. 305-324. Also see Ravi Vasudevan, ed., Making Meaning in Indian Cinema (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), particularly the section entitled The 1950s: Melodrama and the Paradigms of Cinematic Modernity, pp. 99142. E. Ann Kaplan, in her essay Melodrama, Cinema and Trauma,Screen, vol. 42, no. 2 (Summer 2001), pp. 201-205, urges film scholars to examine the relationship between melodrama and cultural or historical trauma, which I explore in my dissertation on Ghataks work. [Go to page 2 of essay] 18. The even larger Indian cinematic context includes other regional cinemas, such as Madrasi (now called Chennai) or Tamil film of south India. Stephen Hughes and Sara Dickey have conducted work in this area. For more on Satyajit Ray, see Satyajit Ray, Our Films, Their Films(Calcutta: Orient Longman Limited, 1976), Andrew Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), and Darius Cooper, The Cinema of Satyajit Ray: Between Tradition and Modernity (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For more on Mrinal Sen, see John W. Hood, Chasing the Truth: The Films of Mrinal Sen (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1993), Deepankar Mukhopadhayay, The Maverick Maestro: Mrinal Sen (New Delhi: Indus, 1995), Sumita S. Chakravarty, ed., The Enemy Within: The Films of Mrinal Sen (Wiltshire, England: Flicks Books, 2000), and Mrinal Sen,Montage: Life. Politics. Cinema, 2002. 19. Vasudevan, Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities: The Hindi Social Film of the 1950s as Popular Culture, in Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, pp. 99-121. One of the main critiques of popular Indian commercial cinema that Vasudevan is referring to emanates from members of the Calcutta Film Society, particularly the writings of film critic Chidananda Das Gupta. 20. Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen, eds., Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 147. Rajadhyakshas Ritwik Ghatak: A Return to the Epic (Bombay: Screen Unit, 1982) is one of the first and few books in English to analyze Ghataks films. 21. In 1950s and 1960s Bengali commercial cinema, the melodramatic films of the star duo Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen also greatly added to the genres popularity. See Moinak Biswas The Couple and Their Spaces: Harano Sur as Melodrama Now, in Vasudevan, Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, pp. 122-142.

22. See Kapurs Articulating the Self into History: Ritwik Ghataks Jukti Takko Ar Gappo, in her insightful and engaging collection, When Was Modernism: Essays in Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2000), pp. 181-200, and Shahanis various articles on Ghatak collected in Rajadhyaksha and Gangar, eds., Ghatak: Arguments and Stories, 1987. Additional compelling readings of Ghatak's films include Raymond Bellour's meticulous formalist analysis of Meghe Dhaka Tara, entitled "The Film We Accompany," and Moinak Biswas' examination of several of Ghatak's films in "Her Mother's Son: Kinship and History in Ritwik Ghatak". Both of these essays are inRouge, (2004) at http://www.rouge.com.au/index.html. 23. The Upanishads are philosophical and mystical texts of India, believed to have been composed from around 700 B.C.E. onwards. From Carl Jung, Ghatak derived the idea of the archetype. As Pravina Cooper has observed: The individual, Ghatak felt, needed archetypes or collective frameworks by which his unconscious could project into the conscious., p. 99, in Ritwik Ghatak between the Messianic and the Material, Asian Cinema, vol. 10, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 1999), pp. 96-106. 24. Ghatak, Rows and Rows of Fences, p. 8. 25. In Bhattacharya and Dasgupta, eds., Ritwik Ghatak, Face to Face, pp. 76-88. 26. The Bengali folk dramatic form known as jatra (literally going or journey), combines acting, songs, music, and dance, and is characterized by a stylized delivery and exaggerated gestures and oration. Scholars believe jatra to have originated in the 16th century with the Krishna Jatra of Chaitanya and his devotees. After World War I, nationalistic and patriotic themes were incorporated into jatra. Mukanda Das (1878-1934) and his troupe, the Swadeshi Jatra Party, performed jatras about colonial exploitation, the nationalist struggle, and the oppression of the feudal and caste system. See jatra athttp://banglapedia.com. 27. See Rajadhyaksha, Ritwik Ghatak: A Return to the Epic. For a good review of this book, see Jasodhara Bagchi, A Statement of Bias,Journal of Arts and Ideas, no. 3 (April-June 1983), pp. 51-62. For more on myth, archetype and ritual in Ghataks films see, Ira Bhaskar, Myth and Ritual: Ghataks Meghe Dhaka Tara, Journal of Arts and Ideas, no. 3 (April-June 1983), pp. 4350. In Genres in Indian Cinema, Sanjeev Prakash describes Ghataks use of myth and metaphor as ultrareal, Journal of Arts and Ideas, no. 9 (Oct.-Dec. 1984), pp. 23-33. 28. Ghatak, Rows and Rows of Fences, pp. 21-22. 29. Significant to Ghataks use of tradition or the traditional in the context of the modern or modernity is Geeta Kapurs contextulization of the terms in Detours from the Contemporary (inWhen Was Modernism: Essays in Contemporary Cultural Practice in India, p. 267): The persistence of the terms tradition and modernity as they figure in third-world debates are best appreciated if we see them as notations within the cultural polemic of decolonization. They may be used in all earnestness as essential categories and real options, but in fact they are largely pragmatic features of nation-building and mark the double (or multiple) register of a persuasive nationalist discourse. Sufficiently historicized, both tradition and modernity can notate a radical purpose in the cultural politics of the third world. Certainly the term tradition as we use it in the present equation for India and the third world is not what is given or received as a disinterested civilizational legacy, if ever there should be such a thing. This tradition is what is invented in the course of a struggle. It marks off the territories/identities of a named people. In this sense it is a signifier drawing energy from an imaginary resource the ideal tradition. Yet it always remains, by virtue of its strongly ideological import, an ambivalent and often culpable sign in need of constant historical interpretation so that we know which way it is pointing. 30. Ghatak references Brecht throughout Rows and Rows of Fences, especially pp. 22 and 34, and Ritwik Ghatak: Face to Face, particularly pp. 13 and 105. 31. Throughout the essays and interviews in Rows and Rows of Fences, Ghatak discusses the impact of these theatrical and cinematic forms and styles on his work. Eisensteins Battleship Potemkin and BunuelsNazarin were two of Ghataks favorite films. 32. See Christine Gledhills excellent anthology, Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Womans Film (London: British Film Institute, 1987). 33. The worship of Ma, the Mother Goddess (in the form of Durga), is a daily practice for many Bengalis. The Durga-Puja festival is the most important Hindu religious festival in Bengal.

34. For examinations of the relationship between music and image in film (although primarily Hollywood film), see James Buhler, Caryl Flinn, and David Neumeyer, eds., Music and Cinema (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), Caryl Flinn, Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), Kathryn Kalinak, Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), and Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). 35. Caryl Flinn, Strains of Utopia, p. 133. 36. A khayal combines the classicism of dhrupada (where the lyrics are lofty and are strictly developed without flippant embellishments) and the romanticism of thumri (light songs influenced by Urdu-Persian poetry and sung in Hindi). Khayals may be in praise of gods or royal patrons; they may center on divine or human love; and they may be devotional, philosophical or seasonal. For more on khayals, see Sumati Mutatkar, Aspects of Indian Music (New Delhi: Sangeet Natak Akademi, 1987): 84-89. 37. For more on this trope in Bengali thought, see The Moment of Departure: Culture and Power in the Thought of Bankimchandra, in Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (Tokyo: Zed Books Ltd., 1986), particularly, pp. 79-81. For more on this trope in Indian film in general, see Rosie Thomas, Sanctity and Scandal: The Mythologization of Mother India,Quarterly Review of Film and Video 11 (1989), pp. 11-30. 38. Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 10. Also see Hamid Naficy, ed., home, exile, homeland: film, media, and the politics of place (London: Routledge, 1999). 39. Naficy, An Accented Cinema, p. 10. 40. For more on Durga see Dulal Chaudhuri, Goddess Durga: The Great Mother (Calcutta: Mrimol Publishers, 1984). The identification of Nita with Durga/Jagadhatari is clear in the film. Ghatak attests to this identification in numerous essays and interviews. See specifically, Haimanti Banerjee, Ritwik Kumar Ghatak: A Monograph (Pune: National Film Archive of India, 1985), pp. 56-57. For more on Uma, see Narendra Bhattacharyya, The Indian Mother Goddess (New Delhi: Manohar, 1977), pp. 62-63. 41. Ira Bhaskar, Myth and Ritual: Ghataks Meghe Dhaka Tara,Journal of Arts and Ideas (AprilJune 1983), pp. 43-50. 42. Naficy, An Accented Cinema, p. 169. Earlier in this chapter, Naficy states: The space that exile creates in the accented cinema is gendered, but not in the binary fashion of the classical (i.e., Hollywood) cinema. And if gender is coded dyadically, the poles may be reversed. For example, the outside, public spaces of the homelands nature and landscape are largely represented as feminine and maternal. The inside, enclosed spacesparticularly those in the domestic sphereare also predominantly coded as feminine. In that sense, all accented films, regardless of the genre of their directors or protagonists, are feminine texts. These films destabilize the traditional binary schema gender and spatiality because, in the liminality of deterritorialization, the boundaries of gender, genre, and sexuality are blurred and continually negotiated. (pp. 154-155). 43. Gangar and Rajadhyaksha, eds., Ghatak: Arguments and Stories, pp. 51-52. 44. Ghatak, Rows and Rows of Fences, p. 6. 45. These songs are called vijaya songs and express a mothers sorrow at the departure of her daughter for the home of her husband. In vijayasongs, the goddess Durga/Uma is represented as a typical young Bengali bride. Vijaya songs are usually sung at Umas departure on the tenth and concluding day of Durga Puja which occurs during the month of Asvin in September/October. For more on Kali and Uma in the devotional poetry of Bengal, see Rachel McDermotts nuanced research and translation work in her Mother of My Heart, Daughter of My Dreams (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Also see Sumanta Banerjee, Marginalization of Womens Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Bengal, in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, eds., Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1990), pp. 132-134. 46. I must point out here that the mighty Shiva of Aryan mythology is often depicted as a

corpulent and indolent hemp-smoker in Bengali folklore, thus adding another layer of meaning to Nitas banishment and symbolic return to Shiva. See, Ibid, p. 133. 47. Geeta Kapur, Revelation and Doubt: Sant Tukaram and Devi , in Tejaswini Niranjana, P. Sudhir, and Vivek Dhareshwar, eds.,Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1993), p. 42-43. Also found in When Was Modernism. [Go to page three of essay] 48. For more on Rabindra Sangeet, see Jayasri Banerjee, ed., The Music of Bengal: Essays in Contemporary Perspective (Bombay: Indian Musicological Society, 1988), pp. 81-92; also, Sumati Mutatkar, ed.,Aspects of Indian Music: A Collection of Essays (New Delhi: Sangeet Natak Akademi, 1987), pp. 127-131; and, Sukumar Ray, Music of Eastern India (Calcutta, Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyay Publishers, 1973), pp. 161-188. 49. Krishna Kripalani, Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography (Calcutta: Visva-Bharati Publishers, 1980). 50. For more on the major themes of Tagores songs, see Banerjee, ed.,The Music of Bengal, pp. 81-92; Mutatkar, ed., Aspects of Indian Music, p. 129; Ray, Music of Eastern India, pp. 168-175. 51. From a 1976 interview with Ghatak entitled, I Am Only Recording the Great Changes, reprinted and translated in Sibaditya Dasgupta and Sandipan Bhattacharya, eds., Ritwik Ghatak: Face to Face, p. 110. 52. Rajadhyaksha, A Return to the Epic, p. 75. 53. For a short but informative piece on the Bengal Renaissance, see Sumit Sarkars Calcutta and the Bengal Renaissance, in Sukanta Chaudhuri, ed. Calcutta: The Living City, Volume I: The Past (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 95-105. [Go to page 4 of essay] 54. Naficy, An Accented Cinema, p. 5. 55. For more on Radha, see Edward C. Dimock, Jr., The Place of the Hidden Moon (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966). 56. In her dense and provocative piece, Moving Devi, Gayatri Spivak recounts the various deaths of Sati, in Cultural Critique, vol. 47 (Winter 2001), pp. 120-163. The Puranas are epic, mythological and devotional texts sacred to Hinduism and are believed to have originated during the first millennium C.E. 57.An Accented Cinema, p. 188. 58. For a relevant interview with Nino Rota, see Lilianna Betti, Fellini(Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1979), pp. 154-164. 59. Ghatak, Rows and Rows of Fences, p. 76. 60. Gangar and Rajadhyaksha, eds., Ghatak: Arguments and Stories, p. 62. 61.Naficy, home, exile, homeland, p. 4. 62. The piece is in a collection of Bengali essays on film by Ghatak, entitled, Chalachitra, Manush, Ebong Aro Kichu [Cinema, Man, and Something More], (Calcutta: Sandhan Samabayhi Prakashani, 1975), pp. 3-10. http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc47.2005/ghatak/index.html thursday, august 7, 2008 Remembering Ritwik Ghatak: 32 years after his death

Ritwik Ghatak was once diagnosed as a patient suffering from duel personality. This was the time when he was frequently been admitted to hospitals as a result of his relentless drinking and eccentric lifestyle. An utterly shattered man, he passed away on 6 February 1976 at the age of 51. His admirers recall that he looked thirty years older than his actual age. They also speak about his strange nature to allow mean and vicious people to hurt him repeatedly and to hurt those who loved him the most and tried to help him. In his swansong film Jukti Takko Aar Gappo made in 1974, Ritwik in a honest way tried to portrait himself through the protagonist Neelkantha Bagchi, the name suggesting the Hindu god Shiva, who according to Hindu legend had acquired the name neelkantha or blue throat after swallowed all the poisons of the world during the churning of the ocean. Similar to Ritwik, Neelkantha was also a middle class leftist intellectual but unorthodox, battered and isolated by the mainstream left and the society in general. His demeanor alienated him from his family and friends but by the sparkling insights, high optimism for life and honesty to the core, Neelkantha in many ways resembles Ritwik. Coming from an educated Bengali feudal family, Ritwik was the product of the generation of forties. The era, marked by events like the World War, the 1943 Bengal famine ensuing to a death toll of nearly five million people, Independence and partition of India. It was also the age of the rising trend of communism. Like many educated youth of his time, Ritwik soon connected himself with the ideology of Marxism. He became associated with IPTA (Indian People's Theater Association), the cultural wing of Communist Party of India (CPI). IPTA had played a seminal roll in the cultural scene of India by churning out fresh concepts on artistic and cultural standards. Whole flocks of artists and performers who will later dominate the Indian cultural milieu developed their artistic credo through IPTA. Ritwik was no exception.

You are always a partisan, for or against. His engagement with IPTA was not only as a playwright, actor and director but also as a cultural theorist. In 1954, he drafted his thesis On the Cultural Front outlining the cultural agenda of IPTA and the Communist Party in general articulating its ideological, political and organizational programme. Ritwiks views were not taken well by the party leadership and he was labeled as a Trotskyite. His separation from the communist party and IPTA in 1955 was a consequence of this dispute. Ritwik later documented his observations on IPTA in his film Komal Gandhar. However, one of his fellow traveller, the folk singer and composer Hemanga Biswas later wrote in his reminiscence that, "Ritwik made an error in understanding the peoples theater movement because he did not get into it through any peoples movement. His misconception was reflected in the film Komal Gandhar where conflict between leaders, cell meeting and so on became his main concern, whereas the main point, the peoples movement, was left touched." Ritwik in the later days has always admitted that he was never hesitant about his commitment for the oppressed masses and was always an engaged artist. He believed that, showing extreme antipathy against the evils and deeply caring the finer elements of the society is the responsibility of every artists of all ages. In his later life he tried to amalgamate Marxism with the ideas of the psychoanalyst, CG Jung because he felt that there is no inherent contradiction between Marx and Jung. On the contrary, one is compensating the other.

After his departure from IPTA, his eagerness to reach out to the people brought him into film making. He considered cinema as the most dynamic and powerful medium of communicating and influencing people. However, in a 1973 interview he had characteristically remarked, If tomorrow or ten years later, a new medium arrives which is more powerful than cinema, I will kick out cinema and embrace the new medium. It is understandable that Ritwik was too much concerned to reach out to the people, as he believed that people are the last word of all form of arts. His first directorial debut was the unfinished film Bedeni. In 1952 at the age of 27, he directed Nagarik, a film depicting the stark reality of a middle class refugee familys struggle for existence and hope. Mostly IPTA people were involved in making the film in a cooperative venture with a shoestring budget. The film never released in his lifetime. AfterNagarik until his death, Ritwik completed seven more feature films and ten documentaries. With the exception of the 1960 release Meghe Dhaka Tara all his other films were commercial disasters. The majority of Ritwiks films are narratives, focused on the post-Independence, post-partition Bengali life. He had deeply sensed the pain of the partition catastrophe and leaving aside Ajantrik, and Titash Ekti Nadir Nam, most of his cinema tried to accentuate this scar. The partition of India affected ten million people who were forced to leave their ancestral homeland and migrate to unknown places. Families were divided; relatives, friends and neighbors were left behind. Insecurity, anxiety and extreme suffering of the displaced people led to religious hatred, distrust and a break down of basic human values. The traumatic consequence of partition which he had considered as the most tragic incidence of the nations history had left a profound effect on his creative thinking. He tried to express through his films how the partition has struck the very roots of Bengali society and culture. In his own words: Being a Bengali from East Bengal, I have seen the untold miseries inflicted on my people in the name of independencewhich is a fake and a sham. I have reacted violently towards this and I have tried to portray different aspects of this. All through his creative life, Ritwik remained nostalgic and highly emotional about his pre partition days. But his romantic longing for the conceptual motherland was devastated when he went to film Titas Ekti Nadir Naam in Bangladesh (East Bengal was transformed into East Pakistan after partition and later in 1971 liberated as the independent nation Bangladesh). He realized that the Bengal of his dream, the two Bengals together were thirty years out of date. He was madly excited about rediscovering his lost roots, to embrace his beloved motherland but shocked to find that: "My childhood and my early youth were spent in East Bengal. The memories of those days, the nostalgia maddened me and drew me towards Titash, to make a film on it...when I was making the film, it occurred to me that nothing of the past survives today, nothing can survive. History is ruthless. No, it is all lost. Nothing remains." Ritwiks niece Mahasweta Devi, in an essay had criticized this outlook. She considered that Ritwik lacked a sense of history. According to her, in his entire life Ritwik had an infantile stubbornness to disprove the reality around him and had a natural characteristic of endless romanticism. His childhood was spent in a sheltered atmosphere of a feudal landlord family and therefore he had never experienced the anguish of the toiling and oppressed around him. Even in the days of his childhood, the condition of the nation and its people were not so glittery, as he had perceived it to be. Anarchy, starkness and uprooted conditions did not spark off immediately after independence or the partition. In the contrary, according to Mahasweta, the disaster was the obvious historical development in the way the nation was going through. If Ritwik was capable of sensibly reading history and not living in his nostalgic world he would have realized this truth long before.

Commercial failure, lack of proper recognition and always short of money was slowly destroying the man. Ritwiks descend to alcoholism began after Komal Gandhar was withdrawn from the theaters only a week after its release. The film was allegedly thwarted by his former comrades who could not stomach a renegades version of the IPTA movement! His most demanding film Subarnarekha was released in 1962 and was running in packed houses but without any explanation the film was abruptly withdrawn from the theaters by the distributor. Shocked and frustrated, Ritwik soon became irreversibly alcoholic, starting with branded liquor and ultimately settling down with the country version of it. In a Jukti Takko Aar Gappo scene, the protagonist Neelkantha Bagchi was offered a glass of imported liquor by the commercially successful writer Satyajit Bose the phonetic resemblance of the name clearly indicating a contemporary former communist writer. Neelkantha refused the glass and bantered, All my body hair will fall if I drink it. Ritwiks utter economic needs compelled him to join the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune as Vice Principal in 1965. He spent eighteen months there and established himself as an excellent teacher but his outspokenness and uncompromising nature was totally inapt for an administrative governmental post. Soon he resigned and returned to Kolkata leaving behind his notable students Kumar Shahani, Mani Kaul, Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Sayeed Mirza. Even in his worst physical, mental and economic conditions Ritwik continued to dream of being a peoples artist and was astonishingly optimistic with full of new ideas. The way he completed his last two films, struggling with the grave health conditions is simply unbelievable. After a continuous seventeen days outdoor shoot for Titash Ekti Nadir Nam he ultimately collapsed by a near-fatal attack of phthisis and was evacuated by a helicopter straight into a hospital where he had to spend several months under treatment. While filming and acting in the main role ofJukti Takko Aar Gappo, he was vomiting blood in regular intervals. All these examples are the evidence of his commitment and sincerity towards his work. It is appropriate to recall the observation of the eminent poet and journalist Samar Sen on Ritwik: "Quite a few artists are lingering around by virtue of progressiveness. Ritwik, keeping in mind many of his weaknesses, was in no way a spurious progressive." Internet resources: Kinship and History in Ritwik Ghatak : Moinak Biswas Ritwik Ghatak : Megan Carrigy Woman and homeland in Ritwik Ghataks films : Erin O'Donnell The relentless tragedy of Ritwik : Partha Chatterjee http://www.wordsfromsolitude.blogspot.in/2008/08/remembering-ritwik-ghatak-32-years.html

The Film We Accompany Raymond Bellour

ROUGE

From the beginning, there is the way that the first shot of a tree takes its time, all the time in the world. Two films open similarly on an apparently interminable shot of a tree: Otar Iosselianis And Then There Was Light (Et la lumire fut, 1989), where we follow an immense freshly-felled trunk pulled through the forest, and Manoel de Oliveiras No, or the Vainglory of Command (1990), where the tree fills the screen before the camera almost regretfully tears itself away. It has become necessary today for an image if it is to remain an image to consist or resist as image.

But the first shot of the tree in Ritwik Ghataks The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara, 1960) is not truly bound to such resistance. If for us the shot carries this resistance, it seems to come from beyond itself, beyond the inside of an order of which it is a part, an order proper to the organic power of a cinema that for convenience sake can be called classical, but that everything draws towards the harsh regime of modern ruptures. This shot is a landmark: it will serve the films action, its story, and be taken up in its development; it will return several times, under varied forms, in scenes arranged in relation to each other. And yet this shot endures, is amplified, composed, as much inside itself as in relation to the following shot, with the result that an extreme tension is born, inducing emotion, an emotion rarely attained to this degree, depending primarily on the pure force of each instant and the distinctly singular disequilibrium it provokes, which will travel and accumulate from one end of the film to the other. The tree that one sees, whose mass fills almost the entire frame, comprises an infinity of trees. Their trunks are arranged in an oblique gradation where the eye loses itself before returning to the leafy mass cut off short on the right but perfectly framed on the left, the sky demarcating in the top of the frame a great hole of white light, a vanishing point which follows the tree's descending curve. A woman moves forward, appearing very slowly beneath the tree, on the right. She is Nita (Supriya Choudhury), the heroine, the cloud-capped star, in her white sari, as if drawn by the mans song that has very quickly replaced, in this shot, the melody from the credits. Nita comes forward, passing along the bottom of the frame, gradually growing larger in the static image, as she almost reaches centre frame. One suddenly hears a train noise mixing with the song. It is then that the cut intervenes, the dynamic cut which defines Ghataks art. Nita is reframed in a very tight shot, her back turned wholly to the right, the mass of her black hair cutting off the lower part of the white sari and filling up the edge of the frame like the tree did in the previous shot. On the left, in the depth of field, Shankar (Anil Chatterjee) is sitting on the ground, close to the river which fills the top of the image, bordered on the other bank by the oncoming train moving at a slight angle. Nita, watching her brother, turns halfway back towards us, by a strange sweep of the head, smiling, complicit, indulgent. She is fully in profile, then turns, returning to her first position, and exits on the left with a steady motion during which Shankar sings and the train continues to advance. After the train disappears, but is still heard, the third shot arrives: Shankar, now suddenly in close-up, seen diagonally from the back but from the opposite side, closing off the left edge of the frame, starts up his melody that he accompanies with arm movements directed towards the river. He sings like this for a while before stopping suddenly, now in profile, passing his hands over his face in a strange gesture, the scene ending as he stands up.

From the beginning everything here plays on the near and the far, the too near and the too far, and the passages and leaps from one to the other. There are leaps from wide shot to close up (from 1 to 2, 2 to 3), according to unexpected axes, unsuspected portions of space to cross. There are contrasts, by way of these leaps, between open spaces and spaces that are crammed (right to the extreme edges of the frame) by the mass of objects and bodies. Add to this the oblique angles of trees, river banks, the train (the oblique angles of the riverbank and train are exaggerated in shot 3) which seem to tilt under the tension between modes of space, empty and full. Add to this the song, its upward surges, its well-held range, its falls and sudden rises, and this train noise which cuts across the song, doubling it and harshening its rhythm. Add Shankars spasmodic gestures, as well as the slow variation of Nitas movements. Then you have an image of the way in which, in three very simple shots, Ghatak establishes in his film a modulation fed by collisions and conflicts here still contained, inducing a

formal disequilibrium at each instant, like an echo of the historical and personal disequilibrium which creates the pathetic basis of all his films: the partition of Bengal. Ghatak, who died an alcoholic in 1976, was born in 1925 in Dacca, East Bengal (now Dhaka, Bangladesh), and partition made him a refugee. All of his films (eight features in twenty years) bear the mark of exile from which he formed (according to Charles Tesson, one of the first critics in France to discover Ghatak) a mise en scne programme founded on loss, shock and separation: in short, the unacceptable. Nitas family lives on the outskirts of Calcutta in the 1950s, prey to a scission which will make each member of the family unit, with excessive aptness, the defeated actor of a lost anthropological unity.

There is the film we see. The film we retell, talk about. Then the film we critique, the film we analyse. These come afterwards. But there is also the film we accompany. A movement of speech, address, and perhaps exchange, whose reality is destined to disappear. The after-films are in suspense. The somewhat manic intensity and effort required for this work is always worth it, since it is a question of seeing precisely how the film works to the end. This is the basis of the teaching situation, of seminars, of so many lectures. This is the film that, despite the artifice of rewriting, I would like to refind. Just as it took place in a two hour seminar after a conference on emotion on the 8th of February 1992 at the Maison de limage in Aix-enProvence, each attendee having seen the film on the previous day, thus avoiding, as must be undertaken here, having to recount the plot.

The next scene is mundane. We will move on soon to some strong scenes, but it is necessary at the outset to situate things in their narrative context, if only to grasp how, in the most banal scenes, those that serve to present the characters to us or to introduce conflicts with their local, social and historical dimension, everything is carried (sometimes lightly but effectively) by what I have called disequilibrium. We pass, by way of a dissolve from Shankar standing up, to the village grocer. A magical force of passages when it is not only space and time changing, but bodies colliding. Resting on the counter of his shop amid planks striated by lines of light (two of them converging in an angle on his head), filmed at mid-shoulder, at a slight low-angle, his gaze fixed offscreen, the grocer challenges Nita. Tell your father you owe us for two months. It is getting difficult. The demand forces Nita to turn and she comes forward, all of this in the reverse field. Everything in this shot is harmonised according to a very confident arrangement of diverse, unstable elements: the accentuated low-angle (one of the most consistent ways Ghatak has of situating his art from the outset beyond, or within, normal vision); the two dark horizontal masses, above and below, sloping down, surrounding the two characters, Nita especially, positioned against the white mass of the rest of the dcor and the sky which is isolated in the middle of the frame; the slant of a pole crossing this white area, connecting the black areas; the line of light, partial and parallel, from the shop roof, which goes from the grocers head to bounce off the right edge of the frame. Next the camera is very close to the ground to capture the mass of the lower part of Nitas body which has entered the frame from the left (the shock and mystery of the cut as source of emotion: never, in a Ghatak film, can you tell on what part of the body the cut, the transition, will focus; here it is on the lower rather than the expected top half but there is also a narrative explanation for this, which this initially groundless emotion prepares). In the distance, on the right, in the very open space of the shot (this is a totally realist cinema, vibrating with the everyday), a huge tapering shadow falls on the ground like a kind of threat bursting loose. It is at the moment when Nita, moving forward, seems buried

in her own shadow, the points joining up in the middle of the dark mass, that the small event takes place: her sandal breaks and comes undone. Here we have another rhyme, following that of the tree, which runs right through the film, this time serving to situate the drama: poverty, of which Nita will bear the cost. Without insisting too much on the rhymes and reprises (analysis does this a lot), they are no less guarantors of the narrative (classical, but also modern), so they will inevitably be encountered. Next we see the lower body again, now bathed in the great slant of shadow, with just a little light on the left, next the hand which takes off the sandal, the camera rising up the length of the body, the bust and the head, her face pensive in the light. The camera moves with Nita who walks on down the street, now seen from behind, following the line of another mass of shadow on the right. Shankar arrives along the same slant at the grocer's: playing with shaving soap he begs a favour and turns towards us, pretending to lather his face, a wild look in his eye. Towards us but never at us. Here we have one of the most acute forces in the film (we will see the excessive degree to which it is taken): always tending towards a look-into-the-camera which never quite takes place, playing (as here) at the limit of this contact in the game internal to the frame, or, especially, opening out to the limitlessness of the off-frame.

After the brother and sister, who are the soul of this story, and in relation to them, it remains (for the film) to present the four other members of the family, in the house which is the organic setting, from where all departures and returns take place. A heterogeneous space (at least for a foreign spectator); it is not easy to orient oneself in this series of rooms arranged around a central courtyard, a wide alley leading as far as the gate. Passing abruptly from one fragment of the set to another as required by events as well as affects, Ghatak finds the material to accentuate, through the greatest realism, the emotional insecurity which is the mark of his cinema.

The Father and Mother They appear together in a shot (we have dissolved to this from the image of Shankar) to match the madness which binds them. In this fallen petitbourgeois family, now impoverished (due again to the partition of Bengal), the father (Bijon Bhattacharya) gives the impression of being a cultured man, nostalgic, old and young at the same time; the mother (Gita De) is a woman exhausted by misfortune, by domestic labour, and by a secret rivalry with Nita, the cherished child of the father, the eldest daughter whose salary (she teaches classes whilst continuing her studies) provides the minimum income indispensable to the whole family. This is the subject of the brusque exchange between the father and mother, in this shot which immediately shows them at each other's throats. The father on the left, in profile, the dominant presence; the mother, on the right, in the background, on the edge of the frame (as so often in Ghataks shots, thereby preserving a vibrant offframe where bodies always seem ready to disappear, all the better to return from somewhere else). The couple are corralled by the rectangle of light traced in the background of the image by the door that their bodies cover and uncover, following the movements of an erratic dialogue which brings them together physically little by little, in the central mass of the shot. Bodies in solidarity, alone and in despair. And the surprise comes from the fathers departure: instead of leaving by the door visible in the background as expected, it is towards us that he suddenly turns, his gaze held high (filmed from a slightly low-angle) in order to see Nita arriving at the front of the house. He moves towards her through a facing door, which nothing had led us to expect was there.

The Two Sisters Without any transition we turn (from outside, where the father leaves with a group of students) to Gita (Gita Ghatak), the younger (and coquettish) sister. An image that is at once dense and profound and, above all, paradoxical. Against a background of thatched wall, the face is seen in a left-sided profile, a fragment of it visible in extreme close-up whereas the entire right side seems to look at us from inside a mirror in which the young woman brushes her hair as she sings. A way of once again playing with the lookinto-the-camera while evading it, as permitted by the movements of combing and singing: they explain this false mobile gaze which appears, illusorily, to fix us. And this time the surprise effect in the space comes from the fact that the shot, which we assumed was situated, say, in the intimacy of a room, takes place in the yard of the house we discover this when the shot changes (to a much wider shot), and Gita (with a skittish air) holds out a letter to Nita that she takes to her room to read.

The Letter, The Cloud-Capped Star, The Brother and Sister This moment of letter-reading (Nita seen diagonally from behind, a tight shot, right side of the frame against a lattice window which comments on the prohibition destined to devour her) is the occasion for the first expressive musical upsurge of this film in which music is the centre (or a centre), telling us as it does of Shankars artistic vocation, a film which, little by little, and in every way possible, becomes impregnated with music. By adding the second brother to his script, a change from the novella which served as his source, Ghatak found one more reason to transform, by taking it to the extreme, the tradition in which he inscribed himself: Indian melodrama although almost all Indian films were then melodramas where music is always so present.

Such moments, which fix and isolate the musical modulation, sometimes, as here, on a very joyful, ecstatic mode, more often in a hard, almost unbearable way, such moments touch on what the film holds most deeply within itself. In a sense, it is simply a question of a use of music (sometimes traversed by sounds which give it an edge and dramatise it) that seems to intervene, as happens in so many films, in order to underline the inner emotional state of a character, more or less reworking one of the scores themes. But the most troubling thing, once again, is the way the event is cut up. In a shot without music or song (there are, if you pay attention, relatively few such shots, above all in shots, like here, almost completely without dialogue), we see the mother pass through the yard and the young brother operating the water pump. And suddenly, as soon as we reach Nita, the music swells, saturating the entire space, elaborating the dominant theme (let us call it the cloud-capped star theme introduced during the credits) with a mixture of swarming sounds and shrills which will last, like this, for a little longer than a shot, becoming the measure of this moment. There is therefore in Ghatak a musical expressionism (in its nature always difficult to qualify, but whose global feeling here ecstatic joy is each time very clear), added to the image expressionism, doubling, penetrating, intensifying it, all the more so as it seems autonomous, attached to its own line. This very direct way of creating permits him to express through sound what is happening in the image but which it cannot give us sufficiently, since the image is never purely inner enough, finding itself by nature (in all realist cinema) always too close to the surface of things, bodies and faces, and therefore lacking, except through words, the ability to tell us what a character feels at the most inner point of himself, including his conscious experience of it. Thus the musical modulation, which, thanks to its seeming arbitrariness, becomes an over-motivation, suddenly permits the interior to be re-projected onto the exterior, onto the body of the image, allowing this

body, which is (not only but above all) the characters body, to become more present, more active, more pregnant, the space of an enduring instant.

But this is only possible in proportion to the intensity of the image itself. This intensity reaches an extreme point in this static shot which seems to vibrate; Nita carefully moving away, folding her letter, until she finds herself again in a very tight shot, almost directly from behind, right up against the lattice window. So that she can all the better turn towards us, the camera having regained this closeness, as if borne by the modulation, with an ineffably beautiful movement of the upper half of the body, which reveals her ecstatic face and lets the spectator believe that he is seen, looked at, by this womans eyes and smile. In the same way that, from the back, Nita seemed to look out the window to the external world, here, fixing us, she regards the off-frame in itself, the off-frame of the desire of which we, spectators, become the intercessors, the desire addressed to the still unknown amorous object of the letter.

And it is then that Ghatak cuts, as if to withdraw this too extreme gaze, and to permit him to return to the narrative he had suspended. But in the cut itself, and since it lasts into the very beginning of the next shot which frames her in a half-length portrait, the gaze persists a moment, miraculous for having been thereby preserved and as if intensified by this variation of the distance through which it comes to us, even though the bodys turning motion has finished and Nita now faces us. It is in this distance that the gaze subsides, at the same time as the music transforms itself. Nita lowers her eyes, reopens and reads the letter, the stacatto-like modulation gives way to a more harmonious and fluid tempo, closer to the narrative flow, evocative of a general emotion of the scene as much or more than the internal vibrations of the character.

(Let us be clear. It is not always easy to distinguish what I call the expressive modulation from other modes of musical intervention, rich and diverse as they are, passing without discontinuity from one regime to another by means of the least variations of action, bodily moods and movements, and also shot changes and distances, in short the entire work of figuration. Thus there are many intermediary moments and modes. But that does not prevent us from positing the following: there are especially clear oppositions which the music works with, precisely, as an image itself, a second image.

There is in The Cloud-Capped Star's music or rather its soundtrack a mixture of popular themes, ragas, reworked by the films composer Jyotirindra Moitra, that is at once subtle and stripped-bare. But it is clear that their strongest effects depend above all on the sound mix which is constructed as much with natural sounds as with those sounds created directly by Ghatak himself with the aid of objects or instruments here is how Bhaskar Chandavarkar describes Ghataks drunken irruption in a recording studio in Poona, inventing reserves of unusual sounds for a forthcoming film: He breathed into an Indian flute to obtain a sharp sound like a shrill whistle, tapped on three different tablas with sticks, struck a Burmese gong, and so on, during one of his good moods.)

In this shot, before Nita moves again, a single element breaks the equilibrium of lines: a framed photo stands at an angle blocking Nitas body. This photo strikes her on the hip as she moves forward reading the letter, she seems to smile at her own action and whatever the photo awakens in her, then repositions it so that we can no longer see it, except some vague reflections of her body in the now barely askew glass of the frame. For the moment we will pass over this photo which prepares us for Shankars arrival, and will serve during the remainder of the film as a fixation-point for the excessive desire of sister for brother: these are the two children (or adolescents) that we have glimpsed in the photo, the brother and sister captured (as Nita will explain to her fianc) in a kind of primal scene, an ideal time, in the hills. The film will later evoke the negative version of this scene in Nitas mortal destiny.

In the following shot Nita, lying on her bed, her body inclined towards us, shot from a low-angle (here we see the ceiling clearly, as in a Welles shot), reads the letter. Then Shankar arrives in the background, opening the double doors (in which our gaze is swallowed up), pausing on the threshold, as if to indicate the extent to which every variation of an event is due to a variation of space, diverse distances implicated in the space of the frame. He rushes to his sister and snatches the letter from her. The shock reverberates through the following shot: this time the angle is high, after an elliptical cut in the movement and time of the action, and we see four arms above heads fighting over the letter, in a struggle resembling a lovers' game, the camera suddenly very volatile, vibrating to the rhythm of this game which underlines a constant fluttering of shadows and lights. A very Cassavetian shot, before the camera becomes fixed in one of those positions Ghatak is fond of, in order to mark the circulation and blockage of energy between characters: Nita and Shankar are back to back, she hides her face in her hands, he reads the letter with his arms raised above his head. He reads out the love letter: I didnt appreciate your worth. I thought you were like the others. But now I see you in the clouds, perhaps a cloudcapped star veiled by circumstances, your aura dimmed. When Nita turns around and grabs back the letter, she returns to her original position, and Shankar is then, like her, turned at an angle towards us. A variation of the preceding moment, sustaining the tension of the dialogue in which the films theme is made clear. The brother replies to his sister who is indignant at seeing her personal life interfered with: If youre a "person" then Ill be a genius one day.

The end of the scene is significant in transforming this conflict of destiny into spatial terms, without it being possible to say that one signifies or even expresses the other. It can simply be said that a tension between open and closed space corresponds to a psychic tension, accentuated by the fact that we never know from what point in the depth of the frame a character who exits will reappear. A whole game is thus played on both sides of the frame with Shankar finally sitting, Nita disappearing from the frame and returning, alternately obstructing and uncovering with her body the deep space of the door through which she will finally leave.

The Mother, The Children It is on a request for money (to Nita) that the scene with Shankar ends, and it is on the demands of Gita (who wants a sari) and of Mantu (Dwiju Bhawal) (the younger brother, first seen just before the scene with the letter he wants football boots) that this penultimate scene of character introductions opens. A scene in one shot, where the space is stratified according to the

tensions of the dialogue. At the beginning, the mother is initially on the right, her frightened face turned half towards us, half towards Gita who faces us (in a crowded shot). After a camera movement which finds Mantu on her left, the two children address their mother (who crosses the frame towards the left, her body suddenly blocking our vision); they speak, and deliberate, as if talking to themselves as much as each other. An effect of social bondage and an effect of solitude traverse the scene, returning the spectator to his own isolated body.

The essential thing here is the mothers movement within this very enclosed frame. Then a second camera movement opens up a rectangular hole of blinding white light on the left side of the frame. This is a movement without any autonomy, without a proper dynamic of its own, placed after a declaration by Mantu (this is a relatively rare phenomenon, as Ghatak's camera movements are usually tied purely to body movements, according to a tactile expressionism). The mother is now in the foreground on the extreme left (as she was at the beginning on the right), united with the depth of field. And suddenly, Mantu and Gita, like us divining Nita bathed in light (she has just been payed), hurl themselves towards her in a kind of animal race, making their initial passage to the foreground a shock directed at the spectator as they move away, and their advance towards the background of the frame a physical dialogue between shadow and light. But, disequilibrium on disequilibrium, at the very moment where the scene might establish itself, allowing us to see what is happening, the mothers head comes towards the centre of the frame again, in an extreme close-up highlighting her eyes full of anguish, eyes which could also be looking at us since their gaze is so completely internal.

There are thus constantly frightening close-ups (arising under diverse pretexts, but also almost without reason) of this extraordinary character of the mother, coming suddenly to situate herself at the most acute point of the image, underlining the torture which obliges the body (face, gaze) to maintain itself in the space which she fails to master.

The Fianc We are now at the beginning of a scene in which the final character of the drama appears. In a (pronounced) high angle shot Gita and Nita sit on a bench, Mantu standing in front of them: they speak about Sanat (Niranjan Ray), the fathers ex-student, whom Mantu thinks he sees. The following shot shows us Sanat, diagonally, very tight, who reacts to Mantu calling him (everything here creates a loss of spacial orientation, of a sense of distance); he turns and comes towards us on the right, his glasses crossed for an instant by two reflections, piercing the shadow. A miniscule but vivid initiation to the tension being set up before the following shot re-establishes the perturbed proportion of distances by showing us Sanat coming towards the group of brother and sisters.

(The Tree Again. Before moving on, to show how the rhyme insists, how it is worked through, by way of an extreme example, a second tree scene. Extreme because the scene will return seven times, in forms so diverse that they show at once the narrative insistence, the desire for symbolic centring, and an incredible capacity for invention

of forms and a volatile dispersion of the image-material. The art of difference-in-repetition here reaches one of its highest expressions. This example brings us closest to the opening scene. Nita and Shankar again: he sits singing under the same tree, as she arrives, again, out of the background of this tree made of many trees. But it is now decentred, and we initially perceive the branches of the tree under which Shankar sings. The encounter takes place in one shot, Nita moves forward and stops in front of her brother, left of screen. No train this time, only the song. So it is a quiet scene, presented in three shots: him, her, him again. But something troubling sets in, primarily at the level of the gaze: Shankar looks at his sister head on, whereas she clearly looks at him on her left (the right of the frame), at the very instant where we tend to believe she has arrived at least on the median line of the gaze [the trajectory of her movement towards Shankar? Recollection of the previous scene where, for us, she was so definitely on the right?]. And the trouble increases when, turning her eyes from the other side, Nita makes for the tree on her right in order to leave the frame: since we do not see her passing into the reverse field, we are immediately back to Shankar in a tighter shot, and cannot discern exactly the portion of space in which she appeared-disappeared. The minicollisions of a variation, bearers of a modulation of the gaze-space).

The Outing (We are now close to a third of the way through the film.) For Nitas birthday, the father and Shankar take her on an outing.

Two forces mark this scene, underlining the fragility of a moment of happiness. Firstly the oblique effects which occur throughout the general shots and landscape shots (roads, fields, etc.) are brought together from the outset, appearing to gush forth from what is at first a closed shot (the bus filling the frame, the father, daughter and brother alighting from it), thereby serving all the more to liberate space, extending it, dilating it. These are shots which, although oriented towards an action, the outing, decompose time, by the force of sparingly used hiatuses between frames and the disorientation which is produced, as well as by the disequilibrious perspectives accumulated within each frame. To the point where each shot, without being subjective, seems to respond to a particular gaze (Ghataks, or the three associated characters').

Then, contrasting with these first shots and resembling their internal laceration, there is the series of shots associating the three characters standing still in the landscape, first together (in a crowded shot), then each one isolated (in close-up). Everything serves to highlight the impossibility of harmoniously inhabiting this tight space together. A bit like Eisenstein (one of Ghataks models), but the montage here remains narrative; without any symbolic aim, or nameable meaning, the expressivity flowing always into 'impressivity', into an intensity of impression. In the crowded shot of the three together, the back of each is turned to the others, so that we can hardly

believe in the possibility of exchange between them, even as they speak. In the close-ups, they are framed, shown in such a way (Nita against the land, the two men against the sky) that we lose the sense of the global space, of a natural relation between bodies which impose themselves each time through a sudden appearance, as if via a collision provoked by the apparition which precedes and follows it. Hence the motion of Nitas head turning, twice, without us truly knowing from what anterior point of space this movement comes. There are enough shots and reprises of shots, as in classical scenes graded by a succession of shot/reverse-shot, for us to feel that we are in a definable space. Yet this space floats: thanks to the precariousness, to the tension internal to each shot, the space is submitted to a kind of force (in the sense in which we say: force of compulsion), a force which each time seems to render it autonomous. We never know where the point-of-view is held even though we sense its pressure. Each body is ceaselessly repositioned relative to the other bodies according to axes of the gaze which isolate as much as they bind. Axes containing no escape routes, bearers of an inexpressible energy: the kind that bodies possess when they are at once in solidarity and alone. The pure work ofdcoupage accomplishes here what the music so often helps bring about: making the affects circulate (even if here the unobtrusive music runs underneath the spoken word in conventional continuity).

Sanat becomes more of a presence at Nitas house, despite the increasingly strange behaviour of her father and mother. The latter seems to want to push Gita towards Sanat, who shows himself susceptible to her charms. Like Nita, Sanat pursues his studies in a very precarious financial condition. Everything is against the possibility of their marrying in the near future.

(Tree 3. Sanat and Nita sit by the riverbank, close to the trees that we sense without seeing them. Nine shots. Insistent oblique angles. Almost exclusively shot in close-up [animated on him, painful-ecstatic on her], except the first and last shots where we discover some branches of Shankars tree, and through which the train passes again. And especially, at the start, a gentle reprise of the musical emanation linked to the letterreading).

One evening, the father, while drunk, falls on the railway tracks and badly injures himself. Nita feels obliged to abandon her studies and work in the city.

(Tree 4. Shankars tree [could it be any other?] is now almost unrecognisable. In a very wide shot Shankar sings and sinks into a reverie; it is from the extreme edge of the image, on the right, that the friend whom Nita has just met in town will appear [return of Tree 1]. Shankar runs towards the person he believes is his sister: a brusque encounter, under branches that enclose the image, a low-angle shot, as if to highlight their mutual fear, then the friends smile, and lastly Shankar's laughter, alone again.

A dissolve isolates Shankar now in a wider shot, the camera following him with a lateral movement as he walks singing, right to left, developing the theme modulated at the beginning of the segment, as in Tree 1 and Tree 2).

Sanat reproaches Nita for always sacrificing herself and offers to work in order to be able to marry her; Nita cannot abandon her family and wants to postpone the event. They argue about Shankar whom Sanat believes is exploiting Nita. But Nita blindly defends her brother. She believes in his vocation, despite the objections everyone makes to him, and they remain as close as ever, despite the tensions. Mantu decides to work in a factory, a downward step for this middle class family. One afternoon, when Nita leaves to teach, Gita charms Sanat and takes him out walking. She sings for him, presses him to take up a job and to choose a wife. Nita, returning, notices and avoids them.

(Tree 5. The force of this scene is to repeat the first shot of the film, that of Nita walking, but this time compacted: Nita emerges from the mass of branches which saturate the frame, and the song we hear [offscreen at first] is Gitas, sitting with Sanat close to Shankars tree. Everything occurs in a single shot, the camera moving with Nita, marking her pause, in order to see them, before setting off again, condensing [in its very variation] the first two shots of Tree 1 and the first shot of Tree 2. And the fragment which follows, between Sanat and Gita, substitutes for Tree 3 between Sanat and Nita, all the while incorporating the playful mistake of Tree 4 between Shankar and Nitas friend).

Nita learns from Mantu that Sanat has found work. Disturbed, she visits him in his new apartment. We are now two thirds of the way through the film.

The Most Beautiful Shot It is the shot where, leaving her fiances house (he is already practically living with her sister), Nita descends the stairs by which she earlier arrived. Everything serves to prepare this shot, from the moment of Nitas arrival, finding Sanat transformed when he opens the door to her: now elegant, wearing fancy slippers and a white scarf, a cigarette in his mouth, and behind his glasses a weak and distracted gaze. Everything begins with this descriptive movement, borne by the music which accelerates and rushes headlong towards her, this brutal advance towards Sanats face, this descent down the length of his body all the way to his feet. What is powerful here is the gap between the always slightly excessive slowness of Nitas body, as well as her gaze, and the violence of this movement. One cannot attribute the cameras trajectory to her actual physical gaze (all the more as the movement commences from a frame where you first see Nitas head from the back in close-up, a frame which is therefore not directly subjective). And yet it is from her implied gaze that this trajectory is born, thus from a movement in her that is both external and internal and which finds itself thereby suddenly expressed, as it is also by

the music, carried by an arbitrary vibrato close in its principle to the moment of modulation during the letter-reading, but this time much harder. The music, accompanying Nitas walk in a conventional manner until then, stops whilst she knocks on the door; all the better to begin again in its naked violence, and endure, like this, until the two bodies advance into the room we see only the lower bodies, the feet and calves stressing Nitas floating sari, a choice which emphasises the effect of diluting the gaze, relating it to the mass of bodies in movement. The look lost, to the point of horror: that is what this scene is about. In an astonishing manner, a dissolve separates Sanat's and Nita's entry into the room and the close-up where he tips a cigarette into an ashtray, near a vulgar object (a kind of little vase with a caricature of a naked female body), before the camera travels up again to his face to refind the frame (this time tighter) which revealed him at the open door. An ascent which therefore completes the previous descent, thereby putting Nitas gaze back into play a gaze already seemingly dismantled by the transitional dissolve and passing the gaze to Sanat in order to give its effect to the following shot, which paradoxically he does not see. In this shot, seen by no one (except us), but heard by both characters, a hand (Gitas) emerges from behind a mass of curtain accompanied by the rattling of a bracelet (modulated five times like a fragment of music). This occurs twice before the hand disappears; during one such moment the camera, returning to Sanat, slowly pans across to his face, now alerted, passing back again to the curtain, finishing up on Nita, sitting, seen in a half-length portrait (a little sculpted elephant on her right), her gaze lowered, now internal, seeing only the void invading her, but doubtless having heard this rattling twice. Thus everything happens here via this presence/elision of the gaze between the lovers which is spread over the ensemble of shots. A gaze that is of course assumed but then disqualified, and above all rendered opaque by the sound which makes it pass into the entirety of the frame and the body, specifically Nitas body which rises and leaves without seeing anything, the inner eye fixed leftwards towards the edge of the image. Then comes the most beautiful shot. Nita found again by the camera at the extreme right edge of the frame, outside on the stairs, in a very flattened shot, strongly marked by a powerful low-angle. Nita descends the stairs until she envelopes us in extreme close-up, the camera moving only the little it takes to allow her face to be framed in an intolerable, static image, in a moment of pure affection: the immobile face, the eyes always raised, one hand convulsively grasping the throat, the entire dcor as if effaced, the sombre mass of wall becoming pure expressive ground and giving its violence to the circle of white light which is very quickly formed and purified at the left of the face, appearing to be (for we spectators) the blind vanishing point of a gaze which no longer sees anything. From the shot's opening, the modulation begins again, punctuating the descent, step by step, then installing itself on the stricken face: very punchy shrill notes, punctuated by lacerations, like a whipping sound hissing through the air and striking a body. This continues almost to the end of the shot, dissolving to give way an intense instant of emotion, which depends on the encounter-sliding between what is beyond time and time regained to a softer variation of the theme which guarantees the transition between the end of this shot and the beginning of the next. A transition which maintains its cruelty right through the passage to the shot of dark angular masses of roofs and shadows in the courtyard of the house, seeming to impose themselves like blotches on Nitas face as, little by little, her eyes close. But there are, of course, many most beautiful shots.

Mother starts raising Gita's possible marriage. Father is violently against the idea. Mother responds that Nita is crucial to their survival. Gita announces to

Nita that she will marry Sanat. The initial preparations begin. Nita goes along with the plans, offering her jewels. Shankar announces to Nita that he has just found work in a music school. He is happy to leave the house where he has lived as a parasite, and asks her to resume her studies. The Brother and Sister (Again)

There is an excessive moment in this scene of Shankars departure. Nita asks her brother to teach her a Tagore song, and they sing together, as they did as children. The camera isolates Nita in extreme close-up, her head leaning backwards, almost horizontally, in a painful ecstasy. Their song continues for a moment through a medium-close up of Shankar, when suddenly a noise of laceration (identical to that accompanying the shot on the stairs), followed by a musical vibration which serves as its amplification, comes to merge with their song. The surprising thing here is that, from the moment the noise appears, Shankar turns brusquely towards the off-screen as if he hears it, as if he had heard this noise with us, this modulation which comes twice more over a new close-up of Nitas face (the image used on the films poster): from a slight low-angle, the eyes raised towards another off-screen area, her hair haloed with light, her head topped with two white marks which violently sparkle in the dark background of the shot (two of the lattice window's multiple apertures, as we discover later). So Shankar hears, like the spectator, in the real world of the shot, where it would be audible (visible?) beyond the frame, the effect which is meant to translate the inner state of Nita that is materialised in the following shot, where she collapses in tears. An emotion is thus liberated, carried by this type of sound hallucination which is the counterpart of the hallucinated close-ups which incarnate Nitas exalted suffering (in a single blow two loves and two abandonments, those of the brother and the lover, are linked by the identical nature of their effects).

Nita, feverish, takes a day off. She learns that Mantu has suffered a serious accident at the factory. At his side, at the hospital, she falls ill. An X-ray is recommended. The father asks the doctor to verify Nitas state of health. Nita goes to see Gita and Sanat, whose work bores him. She finally plucks up the courage to ask Sanat for the money to pay for Mantu's required blood transfusion. Sanat agrees. Gita kicks up a fuss. Nita, coughing, discovers with horror that she is spitting blood. She moves to another part of the house without saying anything. Her mother criticises her behaviour, and reveals what she has heard about Shankars newfound celebrity. Close to the tree, Sanat meets Nita on her way to work. He wants to turn over a new leaf and return to his studies. She avoides such talk by declaring that, for her, all is lost.

(Tree 6. This is the torturous reprise of Tree 3. A long scene [17 shots, amongst the films most beautiful]. For the first time, Nita arrives from the left, shot in low-angle under fully framed trees; Sanat faces her. A dissolve divides up their dialogue, during which the train once again passes, very violently, as if between them, against them.

Under the train, with it, a reprise of the musical modulation that accompanied the letter. At the end, during the last shot, when Nita rises and Sanat looks at her so intensely as she moves away, we have the impression that he can hear with us, as previously Shankar could at the time of his departure, the shrills and whiplashes which again lend rhythm to Nitas disappearance, as they did in the stair scene.)

Gita, seeking attention, feigns illness. Nita at work, ill. Mantu, now better, returns to the house he will receive substantial compensation for his accident. The father's mental state continues to deteriorate. Shankar returns, famous, having made his fortune in Bombay. He signs autographs and is welcomed as saviour of the family.

(Tree 7. This takes place in two shots accompanied by ample camera movements, as Shankar sings and retraces, from right to left, the entire path he has walked [Tree 4], that Nita featured in [Trees 1, 2, 5] and that her friend reprised [Tree 4]. But it is hard to recognise, or only via uncertain indications that exacerbate the disequilibrium, the cut-up fragments of space that are here finally united in one block).

The Handkerchief There is a rhyme of rare violence in this scene, in which the entire narrative is summarised: the bloodstained handkerchief as Shankar arrives in his sisters room, hoping to cheer her up as he had done with the letter. This rhyme is carried by an unique moment: leaving the arguing brother and sister, Shankar moves close to Nita sheltering on her bed, the camera following the handkerchief that falls to the ground right of frame. A musical fracas pierced by a singing voice rises up and underlines the shock of the passage from shot to shot that we do not see, so improbable is it and therefore accentuated-diverted, but that we feel as a commotion equal to that of Shankars fright: we are now at a very high angle above him, upright, his head on the top edge of the frame, his arms open above the bloodied handkerchief, the hands which fall trembling in an axis 180 degrees opposed to that of the previous shot.

Such shocks, in the last part of the film, condense and accumulate so powerfully that it becomes impossible even to evoke them all. As if the most violently affected elements, hitherto distributed through the course of the narrative in which they are woven (we have dwelt on too few examples) without disrupting a tight network of strong points, spinning themselves out and accentuating each other, now suddenly collide in a sort of crescendo, a choir-like effect touching at once all the family members finally gathered in a single, violently discontinuous flow, in order to prepare the final outcome, sealing Nitas destiny.

These are firstly the close-ups of Nita, after the discovery of the handkerchief: the first especially where, lying on her back, the eye we see in profile seems to bulge; the last where she talks about rediscovering childhood, a life without responsibilities. Then there are, in the courtyard of the house where Shankar announces that Nita is in a state of advanced tuberculosis, that he will pay for her treatment and that he will return later that night, two shots especially, which bring the colour of eternity to the drama: the father rising up out of the shadows, his finger pointing, crying out: I accuse!; and Mantu, in close-up, against a background of white sky, his head inclined like one of Pasolinis youths, or an image of Falconetti in Dreyers Joan of Arc, ever so slowly lowering his eyes in an unconscious gesture. There are, immediately after, during the stormy night which will for the first time allow the forces of nature to participate in the drama, the parents faces, their haggard and fixed eyes, traversed by water and light; Nitas face in extreme close-up, first asleep, then as if roused by her fathers gaze (whose place she physically takes in the frame), smiling with a kind of radiant madness fanned by the lightning flashes, and finding beside her the mad father who caresses her face, notifying her that he has packed her bag and calling on her, in a delirium of love and recognition, to leave the house. Then finally Nita, her eyes shining in the shadow, her meagre bundle under her arm, a white and now ghostly figure advancing into the night under the storm (there are overwhelming passages here from extreme close-up to long shot), running into Shankar who has returned for her, dropping the fetish-photo whose glass breaks on the ground (cloud-capped star, starlit glass); and Shankar announcing that he has reserved a place for her in a sanatorium on the hills of Shillong, the hills of their childhood.

The Hills Then what happens is this. At the word hills, Nita, who looks off-screen with an absent air, turns towards her brother and with a brusque, animal movement (where the shot shifts and allows her to recapture the frame) walks towards us until she is in close-up, her eyes slightly raised to avoid looking directly into the camera, and sees the hills.

It is an absolutely powerful moment. The cinema here recognises itself in its ever-tested limit, so difficult to attain, between interior and exterior, realist image and mental image, perception and hallucination. Without forgetting what the image always owes to narrative. There are firstly static shots, trees, gulfs, roads, rocks, then, set off by a series of dissolves, long circular movements on other similar motifs of nature, suddenly rising up in their elementary forms against an open sky. These shots have at least three values. They are the internal images that Nita conjures up of her beloved landscape. They also sketch the implied trajectory of her voyage to the sanatorium. Finally they stand for the image of Shankar that we discover immediately after, in the penultimate sequence, visiting his sister. But, above all, these shots hold out to the spectator the combined energy of these three forces, in an undecidability between objectivity and subjectivity/ies that the entire film has never ceased constructing, in particular via the hyper-modulated effects of music and sound which the film at this point no longer needs, since this emotional violence has passed into the image itself: the leap that it then produces, and that the music can, with its simple and nostalgic power, simply accompany.

The Letter (Again) What can you say about this ending, this final dialogue on the hills between brother and sister? Simply this. The effects of nearness and distance, of obliqueness and frontality, of rupture and inversion in the expected axes, and of body position (as much at the level of each body in the frame space as at the level of the relation between bodies): all this is a part of what cinema can produce most strongly and personally in the emotion tied to the appearance of figures. But it is sound, or rather the way in which sound strikes the image and penetrates it, which once again creates the most acute singularity of affective violence. When Shankar approaches Nita sitting on a rock re-reading Sanats letter, in the shot that has been for some seconds without music, a sonorous, musical vibration rises up, tracing the desire internal to this proximity of two bodies. It is no longer Nita alone whom the modulation delineates in order to express the variation of her internal states, as we have seen so often (and as so many other moments attest); neither is it that sonic torture which Shankar heard (as in his departure scene, where it marked their excessive intimacy as brother and sister as much as the way this intimacy took form, since their shared childhood, within music). It is a matter of something that is more simple and simply more: the vibration which arises from the rapprochement of two bodies in the same space, at the moment when the desire in the letter expresses Nita's lost desire for the man she did not know how to love in opposition to her brother (and her entire family). Above all, the vibration translates her impotent desire to love herself (a cloud-capped star), as her brother, thanks to her, was able to do (the only other example of modulation deux as strong as this is significantly situated, as we have seen, upon Nita and Sanat, during their last meeting by the tree).

It is this ravaged, dual, dissociated identity which bursts apart at the end of the sequence, beginning with Nitas cry, with her words screamed first alone then in her brothers arms: 'I wanted to live! Tell me just once that Ill live ... I want to live'. These words, mixed with the affectionate nickname that Shankar intones (Cookie! Cookie!) invade nature and remake, through shots more or less identical to those of the outward journey, Shankars entire return journey, punctuated by moments of this shot of impossible (and silent, the voices having becoming autonomous) embrace which persists, against all reason, between brother and sister, crossing hills and valleys, culminating in the endless moaning of Nitas voice over the unfolding landscape.

The Sandal This is an art of looping, of rhymes which accentuate the affects that they mark out without restricting their reach: pure affirmation. Shankar arrives at the grocer's, as Nita did before at the beginning of the second sequence, which ended (as we perhaps recall) with Shankars arrival, faced with this same grocer who now asks him for news of his sister. But, above all, there is the sandal. In the street, Shankar suddenly sees a young woman passing whom we recognise: it is Nitas friend that she met in the city, when she took her decision to abandon her studies and work. A friend whose movements and bearing are very similar to Nitas. She is also the girl Shankar mistook for his sister in the fourth tree sequence. At the moment when Shankar rushed towards her calling out (Cookie! Cookie!), when the frame changed suddenly from a wide shot to a crowded shot and the bodies almost collided, Shankar recognised his mistake, which made Nitas friend smile. There was even a brief moment of very intense sound-music (like bells) to punctuate the event.

She now passes in the street in this shot where Shankar watches her. Everything happens, as so often in Ghatak, so that the gaze becomes more and less than the gaze, so that it occurs via the body and the entire space. This means that the camera, leaving Shankar, follows the young woman, then frames the lower half of her body to isolate the motion which makes her stop to bring her hand down to her broken sandal (as Nita, leaving the grocer's, previously did), here according to a (frontal) axis which has nothing to do with Shankars (lateral) gaze, while nonetheless remaining dependent on it. Wherein the extreme violence of the single exchange of looks which one feels more than one sees: Shankars head, in close up, from the back, the young woman in the depth of field who lifts her head, and Shankar who lowers his, since this vision is too close to that of his sister to be bearable. This does not stop the young woman, shown again in a tight shot, from fixing him with a stare before turning her head, smiling, and leaving, seen from behind (by the camera). For Shankar no longer sees anything, even if the alternation of the last four shots (her/him/her/him) carries the mark of the gaze beyond itself, according to the line of the event. Shankar is alone, twice against the sky, in a tighter and tighter close-up, eyes open as if turned inwards, towards the immaterial off-screen, before collapsing in tears and burying his eyes in his hands in order to see nothing more (this last time he is not looking at us, even though he is so close to us). A scene during which the music, until now dominated by a singing voice, becomes more and more present as the film goes on, doubled by a vibration which reaches a crescendo, the final modulation.

This modulation, as we have seen, and often said, is so diverse that one cannot reduce it. It marries, more or less, the line, the lines of the drama, detaches itself often, sometimes barely, from the myriad forms of instruments, voices and orchestration, making this film an almost uninterrupted score, where each movement of the image (and there are so many) relentlessly captures bodily life, finds itself at once innervated and summoned by its double of sound and melody. But being mainly centred, despite everything, on Nita, everything which touches her and moves her, passing especially through her from Sanat to Shankar (from whom it comes to her), before finally fixing on him after the visit to Nita who is marked for death, this modulation tends thus towards a centre: it is the vibration of too much love devoted to the impossible. Or this could also be called: incest, which is not perhaps the same in this other culture, but which here depends (as in our culture) on the promised and deferred jouissance that creates bodies in torment. Ghatak, assuming, through Shankar, in the light of this risk, his artistic vocation, thus tells us in the rawest fashion how to comprehend the energy and the essence of his cinema haunted by music. A cinema that he wished could be popular, even if he was only able, like all the greats, to give it the most aristocratic form and force possible.

This is doubtless what Serge Daney had in mind when he encouraged me to rework my analysis in this somewhat different form, describing The Cloud-Capped Star as one of the five or six greatest melodramas in cinema history. I would like to thank Emmanuelle Ferrari and Nicole Brenez, who organised this seminar, and Aline Horrisberger, who taped it. Adriano Apr, who lent me the video. And Charles Tesson, for his assistance.

This piece first appeared in another version, with a commentary on the absence of complementary images, in Trafic no. 4, Autumn 1992. Raymond Bellour has kindly authorised this specially reissued version, complete with frame reproductions from the film. http://www.rouge.com.au/3/film.html