Aparajito (1956)

APARAJITO [The Unvanquished]
Satyajit Ray
India. 1956. 113 min
Cast : Pinaki Sengupta, Kanu Banerjee, Karuna Banerjee, Smaran Ghosal

Introduction

A boy stands on the flat roof of a house in Varanasi and lets pigeons go into the white morning air while his father chants at the ghats below. The image comes early in Aparajito, and it holds much of what Satyajit Ray was after in 1956: a life caught between ritual below and the world beyond the parapet. The film is the second panel of the Apu Trilogy and picks up where Pather Panchali stopped, with a poor Brahmin family settling in the holy city in 1920 after leaving their ruined village. Ray uses the gap between the two films to change the emotional temperature. The first was about a childhood hemmed in by loss. This one is about a son who grows up and away.

Aparajito holds an odd place in film history. It remains the only sequel to have taken the grand prize at Venice, Berlin or Cannes, and its Golden Lion in 1957 told European audiences that a serious new cinema had arrived from India. At home the response was cooler. Ray recorded that the suburban audience was shocked by a portrait of mother and son so far from the conventional notion of mutual sweetness and devotion. That gap between local discomfort and foreign acclaim says something about the film. Ray took a much-loved coming-of-age novel and drew from it a study of ordinary cruelty, the kind that ambition inflicts on love. The title translates as The Unvanquished, and it points at survival rather than victory, at the forward motion of a young life that will not stop for the dead.

Background and Production

Ray had no sequel in mind while making Pather Panchali. The success of that film changed the calculation, and he went back to Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay for the last fifth of the Pather Panchali novel and the first third of its follow-up, also called Aparajito. He worked again with the collaborators who defined his early manner: Subrata Mitra on camera, Bansi Chandragupta on art direction, Dulal Dutta cutting, and Ravi Shankar on the score. Epic Films produced. Two boys carry Apu across the years the film covers, Pinaki Sengupta as the child in Varanasi and Smaran Ghosal as the adolescent in Calcutta, with Karuna Banerjee back as Sarbajaya and Kanu Banerjee as Harihar. The film opened on 11 October 1956.

The question of fidelity to the source is more tangled than the film's reputation suggests. Andrew Robinson, Ray's biographer, considers Aparajito the closest of the three films to its literary original. What Ray took from the novel included its most disturbing passage, Bandyopadhyay's admission that Apu's first reaction to his mother's death was a surge of release, a delight in the breaking of bonds, before regret arrived. Ray's wife Bijoya read the script and asked him whether people in the country would accept a son's relief at winning his freedom through his mother's death. Ray knew the risk and took it. Let's see what happens, he said, pointing out that Apu is later full of regret and that the death does eventually land on him as a blow.

One character did not survive the adaptation. The novel has a young woman named Leela whose understated attachment to Apu helps explain his drift towards Calcutta. Ray rejected two candidates for the part, found an actress he wanted, and then lost her when her fiance refused to let her act. He cut Leela from the script with reluctance, and said afterwards that without her the pull of the city might seem a bit abstract. Watching the finished film later, he found he did not miss her. Practical trouble shaped the look as well. Fear of monsoon rain forced Chandragupta to abandon an open-air courtyard and build the interior of a Benares house inside a Calcutta studio. Mitra argued that shadowless diffused skylight could not be simulated, lost the argument, and solved the problem by stretching framed white cloth over the set as a fake sky and bouncing studio lights off it. Bounce lighting became his signature.

Story

The film moves in two large parts. In the first, the family lives in Varanasi, where Harihar makes a modest living praying, singing and officiating along the Ganges until a fever kills him. Sarbajaya takes work as a maid, then leaves with Apu for the Bengal village of Mansapota, helped by a great uncle, Bhabataran. There the boy is apprenticed as a priest and pines for the local school. He gets his way, excels, impresses a visiting dignitary, and earns a scholarship to Calcutta. He goes, and works evenings at a printing press to keep himself. His visits home thin out. Sarbajaya falls ill and hides it from him so his studies are not disturbed. By the time he understands, she is dead. Bhabataran asks him to stay and perform the last rites; Apu says he will do them in Calcutta, and goes back.

The subject under the chronicle is the price of growth. Aparajito treats education and ambition as forces that free and wound in the same movement. Every step Apu takes towards the world is a step away from the woman who made the world available to him, and Ray declines to pretend otherwise. The film is honest about the self-absorption of the young, the way hunger for knowledge dulls a boy to the loneliness he has left behind. Ray also has modernity in view. Apu's route from ghat to village to printing press is India's own route into a secular industrial century, and Ray watches it without mourning the old order or cheering the new.

Sarbajaya holds the two halves together, and her slow eclipse gives the film its ache. Her love is total and her reward is absence. Ray sets out that arithmetic and leaves it unresolved, which is the hardest thing the film does. Family here is stripped of the pieties that usually protect it. Devotion and abandonment turn out to wear the same face, and the film watches the resemblance without comment.

Direction and Craftsmanship

Ray directs with a patience that trusts the viewer to notice small things. The camera stays with a train seen in silhouette across a field, with pigeons breaking over the rooftops, with a mother at a threshold waiting for a son who does not come. Each of those images carries the emotional freight of the scene it sits in. Subrata Mitra's photography is central to the achievement. His bounce-lighting method, worked out under the pressure of shooting a Benares courtyard on a Calcutta stage, produced a soft even illumination that matched the shadowless glare of the real thing and gave the black-and-white images their particular tenderness. Light on stone steps, on water, on faces in half-shadow: the texture feels observed, closer to documentary than to the studio gloss of Indian cinema at the time.

The performances sit in the same register of restraint. Karuna Banerjee's Sarbajaya is the emotional anchor, and she registers grief through stillness and small adjustments of posture. Her waiting and her concealment of the illness carry more than any speech could. Smaran Ghosal, fourteen when he played the adolescent Apu, conveys the thoughtless energy of a boy pulling away from home without tipping into caricature. He made only one more film, Ray's documentary Rabindranath Tagore in 1961, in which he plays the young poet. Ravi Shankar's score supports these figures without crowding them, and Ray leans on natural sound: chanting at the ghats, the rush of a train, the ordinary noise of a village morning. Dulal Dutta's editing favours duration over pace, holding shots long enough for the viewer to feel the passage of time the story is really about.

The Cinema of Satyajit Ray

Aparajito sits at the centre of Ray's early period and helps define the humanism he became known for. He had trained his eye on commercial art and graphic design before turning to film, and he brought to cinema a draughtsman's attention to composition alongside a novelist's interest in interior life. The Apu Trilogy set the terms of his art: ordinary people in place of heroes, social pressure in place of melodrama, observation in place of judgement. Where much Indian cinema of the period ran on song and spectacle, Ray offered a quieter mode drawn from Italian neorealism and adapted to Bengali life. Robinson calls Aparajito the richest of the three films in its drawing of character.

This film, more than its predecessor, confirmed Ray as an author in the full sense. He scripted, cast and designed, and over the 35 films that followed he took on scoring, cinematography, art direction, editing and the design of his own credit titles and publicity. The trilogy gave India a body of work that could stand beside Kurosawa, De Sica and Renoir, the last of whom had encouraged Ray in Calcutta. Martin Scorsese, James Ivory, Abbas Kiarostami, Elia Kazan and Wes Anderson have all acknowledged its influence. Mrinal Sen called Aparajito one of the best Indian films he had seen.

Reception and Legacy

Reception split along national lines. In Bengal some viewers who had loved Pather Panchali found the treatment of the mother and son too severe. Abroad the verdict ran the other way, and the film collected eleven international awards. At Venice in 1957 it took the Golden Lion, the Cinema Nuovo Award and the FIPRESCI Critics Award, the first film to win all three. The jury member Penelope Houston broke protocol to tell Ray in person that she thought it was magnificent. The chairman Rene Clair was reluctant to hand over the top prize and told Houston he hoped Ray would go away and learn how to make films. Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood lost in the same competition. Years later a list of a hundred films admired by Kurosawa, compiled by his daughter, records him calling the jury's choice absolutely right, though he named Pather Panchali as the winner.

In New York, Bosley Crowther had called Pather Panchali so amateurish that it would barely pass for a rough cut in Hollywood. Aparajito changed his mind. Writing in the Times in April 1959, he said Ray's camera catches beauty in so many things, from the softness of a mother's sad expression to the silhouette of a distant train, that innuendos take up the slack of drama. Roger Ebert later placed the trilogy among his hundred great movies and wrote that the relationship between Apu and his mother observes truths that must exist in all cultures. James Berardinelli called the film a nearly flawless continuation of the journey begun in the first.

Further honours followed at San Francisco, where Ray took the Golden Gate awards for Best Picture and Best Director in 1958, at Berlin, where the film won the Selznick Golden Laurel, and in Denmark, where it took the Bodil for Best Non-European Film in 1967. Karuna Banerjee was nominated for Best Foreign Actress at the 1959 British Academy Film Awards, where the film was also up for Best Film. Being asked at Venice whether he intended a trilogy is what prompted Ray to complete the story with Apur Sansar in 1959. The Sight and Sound critics' poll of 1992 placed the trilogy at number 88 and Aparajito on its own at number 127. The Academy Film Archive preserved all three films in 1996. The original negatives had been badly damaged by a fire in London in 1993, and in 2013 the Criterion Collection and the Academy Film Archive began a restoration, with the physical work carried out at L'Immagine Ritrovata in Bologna.

Commentary

What gives Aparajito its hold is Ray's willingness to be truthful about a feeling most films hide. The love a parent gives is rarely repaid in kind, and a child's growth is often experienced by the parent as loss. Ray builds the film around that fact and refuses the reconciliation a lesser storyteller would supply. Apu does not come home in time. He does not learn his lesson before it is too late. He feels, as his mother's death recedes, a confusion of grief and freedom that the film reports without excusing it or condemning it. This is what unsettled Bengali audiences in 1956, and it is what keeps the film alive for viewers coming to it now.

The reservation is structural. Aparajito is lopsided, and the second half is thinner than the first. Varanasi is dense with observed life, the ghats and the courtyard and Nanda Babu upstairs, while Calcutta arrives as a printing press, a hostel room and a set of examinations. Ray himself put a finger on the cause. Cutting Leela left Apu's attraction to the city with nothing behind it except ambition, and ambition on its own is a weak motor for a character. Sarbajaya is fully realised and Apu, in the stretch where the film most needs him, is closer to a function than a person. The compression of several years into a short passage does not help. The film is powerful where it watches a woman being left, and much less certain about the boy doing the leaving.

Read across the decades, Aparajito works as a private story and a national one at once. Apu's passage from the temple steps of Varanasi to the presses of Calcutta runs parallel to India's movement out of an older order, and Ray records the shift without nostalgia and without applause. He watches, and in watching finds the general inside the particular, which is why the film travels so easily to audiences who share none of its specifics. A mother waits. A son leaves. Time does its ordinary work. That such plain material yields a film of this depth is the mark of a director who understood that large feelings live in small gestures, and the boy releasing his pigeons into the Varanasi light is still one of the images the medium is measured by.

Awards & Honours

• Won: Golden Lion, Venice Film Festival (1957)
• Won: Cinema Nuovo Award, Venice Film Festival (1957)
• Won: FIPRESCI Critics Award, Venice Film Festival (1957)
• Won: Golden Gate Award for Best Picture and Best Director, San Francisco International Film Festival (1958)
• Won: Critics Award, San Francisco International Film Festival (1958)
• Won: Selznick Golden Laurel for Best Film, Berlin International Film Festival
• Won: FIPRESCI Award, British Film Institute Awards, London Film Festival
• Won: Bodil Award for Best Non-European Film, Denmark (1967)
• Nominated: Best Film, British Academy Film Awards (1959)
• Nominated: Best Foreign Actress (Karuna Banerjee), British Academy Film Awards (1959)

Reference

• Aparajito, Wikipedia
• Bosley Crowther, 'The Screen: Aparajito; Indian Movie Continues Pather Panchali Story', The New York Times, 29 April 1959
• Roger Ebert, 'The Apu Trilogy', Great Movies, rogerebert.com, 4 March 2001
• James Berardinelli, 'Aparajito (The Unvanquished)', ReelViews
• 'The Restoration', Janus Films, on the Apu Trilogy restoration
• Subrata Mitra, Internet Encyclopedia of Cinematographers
• Aparajito (1956), IMDb

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