![]() At times, Shankar’s music is the very voice of India’s sorrow. The simple, subsistence way of life is represented with honesty and dignity. The music by Indian sitarist and composer, Ravi Shankar, who was born to a Bengali Brahmin family, adds an authentic tone to the world of village life Ray recreates with a powerful sensuous immediacy that is almost tactile. But he takes great pains to make this an authentic Bengalese work of art. Ray, formerly an illustrator, has explained that he went into filmmaking after seeing Da Sica’s classical work of Neo Realism, Ladri di Biciclette ( Bicycle Thieves). At the same time, he deepens the humanism of his story by portraying vivid portraits of poverty-stricken people. He pushed the boundaries of Neo Realism by focusing on the economic struggles of the lower class, the dispossessed, rather than the working-class characters depicted in the Italian school. The Criterion Collection describes the film in a low-key way as “a depiction of rural Bengali life in a style inspired by Italian Neo Realism.” As in Neo Realist films, Ray’s debut movie was shot mostly with available natural light and on-location. The difference for the Indian master filmmaker is that many of his later movies, especially Jalsaghar ( The Music Room), Devi ( The Goddess) and Charulata ( The Lonely Wife) are just as artistically expressive as Pather Panchali ( Song of the Little Road), whereas Welles’s later films probably never reached the level of artistic excellence achieved in Citizen Kane. Instead of a screenplay, the film was shot from the director’s notes on the novel upon which the story is based, and from his drawings in the storyboard. As an independent filmmaker, Ray achieved a huge breakthrough with very limited resources. ![]() The fact that this was Satyajit Ray’s first ever film, probably makes it the most significant debut feature since Citizen Kane itself. Pather Panchali ( Song of the Little Road) is, for me, the most compelling and moving depiction of poverty I’ve seen on the Big Screen.
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