Word: pather
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...creaking, out-of-date movie camera. With a few of his actor-friends, Satyajit Ray left Calcutta one Sunday for an isolated village to the north. In that village, without building a single set or even clearing the yard, where much of the action takes place, he began filming Pather Panchali ("Song of the Road"). It was the first time he had ever operated a camera...
...expenses began to pile up after a year of shooting, Satyajit Ray persuaded the West Bengali government to sponsor his project, as a sort of regional advertising. A year and a half later, on a budget that never reached $ 40,000, Pather Panchali was ready to show. In international film festivals from Cannes to San Francisco, it has since won five grand prizes...
Perhaps the West Bengali government was surprised--even disappointed--when they first viewed the movie. They saw not a fast-moving, glossy travelogue, but a naturalistic essay, viewing life as a lament of the path. Pather Panchali focuses on a rural Brahman family whose house is falling down. The gate is off its hinges, the yard full of rubbish, and the shutters loose...
...When Pather Panchali leans towards the neo-realist, its most striking scenes show Auntie's hollow, shrewd, dying face; it pictures her eating wet meal with long, bony fingers, wiping dirt off her crackled skin, hobbling pitifully around the yard. At intervals she has snarling verbal bouts with Mother, who, though warm-hearted, is not the ideal of the Ladie's Home Journal. In fact, Mother often wishes Old Auntie would drop dead...
...would be impossible to capture Pather Panchali in a glib formula. Five human beings, from young Apu to Old Auntie, each sings his or her own eloquent "lament of the path." But the film is never depressing, for however great the sorrows, they face the path resolutely...