FIRST Day, FIRST Show

Pather Panchali is like a poem. So, how was the black and white narrative when it first arrived in a cinema hall in Calcutta?

Partha Mukherjee & Priyanka Mukherjee Hooghly (West Bengal)

August 26, 1955. This was a landmark day in the history of Indian neo-realist cinema. That evening, Pather Panchali, directed by Satyajit Ray, was released at Basusree Cinema in south Calcutta.

It's 54 years since then. Looking back, veteran cinematographer, Soumendu Roy, is flooded with nostalgia. He was then an assistant to Subrata Mitra, chief cinematographer of the film.

Roy recounted, "There was a surge of excitement in me since morning." When the time for the morning show drew close, he sprinted across the half-a-mile distance between the hall and his home. But, the scene at the hall was not encouraging. There were only a handful of people. "I looked around the hall to see if there were more people waiting to come in," he said. But, his expectations were shattered. Dejected, he went home. "I simply couldn't understand why people hadn't turned up to see the film. The disinterest baffled me."

Roy went back to the hall again for the noon show. This time, too, he saw only a few people trooping out of the hall, their faces shorn of any reaction. He decided to wait at the hall's balcony to gauge the response after the matinee show. And, this time he was surprised.

"I saw people coming out of the hall wiping their eyes moist with tears. Manikda (as Ray was called) came only in the evening. He was very excited. He was chewing a corner of his handkerchief while he held the other corner tightly in his fist," remembered Roy. After that evening, every show ran to full house.

In fact, Pather Panchali was released simultaneously at four halls in Calcutta - Basusree, Beena, Shree and Chhaya. After six weeks, it had to be pulled out of Basusree as the hall was booked for Insaniyat, a film by producer-director SS Vasan. In spite of his busy schedule, Vasan took time out to watch Pather Panchali. It's told that he was so charmed by the film that he visited Ray to greet him. Vasan apparently told Ray that he would have deferred the release of Insaniyat had he seen Ray's film before he signed the contract with the Basusree management. In Vasan's word, Ray had revolutionised the concept of film making in his maiden venture.

Before Pather Panchali, Indian cinema mostly revolved around historical or mythological characters or potboilers. That a film can portray the subtle nuances of life was foreign to filmmakers. Diptendra Kumar Sanyal alias Neelkantha, Bengali film critic, had once said, "Before Ray came, filmmakers in our country preferred to work as a mistry (mechanic). They could not raise themselves to the level of an artist. So, the art of filmmaking remained a mystery to them."

Ray showed that a film can depict life in the raw; that a film could be realistic and artistic too. He captured various shades and nuances of India's rustic life - innocence, hunger, angst and rancour. And sensitivity, beauty, melody. Ray changed the metaphors of cinema. The language Ray used was new to India.

For the first time, Indian cinema saw the use of stark reality shots - bloated body of a frog lying on its back, a dog drenched to the skin shivering in the rain, image of Ganesha that inspired fear (usually Goddess Kali was used as a symbol of destruction) as metaphors of a night lashed by gale and heavy showers. To depict the tranquility of a village, Ray used a water spider hopping across the still water of a pond.