Apur Sansar (1959)

APUR SANSAR [The World of Apu]
Satyajit Ray
India. 1959. 107 min
Cast : Soumitra Chatterjee, Sarmila Tagore, Alok Chakravarty, Swapan Mukherjee

Introduction

Apur Sansar opened on 1 May 1959. It closes the story Satyajit Ray had begun with Pather Panchali in 1955 and continued with Aparajito in 1956, and it takes its material from the second half of Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay's novel Aparajito. Apu is now an unemployed graduate in a rented room in Tala, in north Calcutta, living on private tuition and writing a novel nobody has asked him for. The film carries him through a marriage he did not seek and a death he cannot absorb, and then through the years he spends away from the son whose birth caused it. He comes back at the end.

Ray had not planned a trilogy. Aparajito took the Golden Lion at Venice in 1957, and at a press conference there he was asked whether a third Apu film was coming. He said yes, and by his own account surprised himself in saying it. Apur Sansar is the film that answer obliged him to make.

What it is about is what a person owes to a life he did not choose. It also introduced two performers who would hold the front rank of Bengali cinema for the next four decades. Soumitra Chatterjee was twenty-three and had been working as a radio announcer. Sharmila Tagore was thirteen.

Background and Production

In My Years with Apu, Ray wrote that after three consecutive failures at the box office he badly needed a film that would satisfy the critics and the public at once. The prizes abroad had not sold tickets in Bengal. Apur Sansar was made by a director who needed a hit.

Soumitra Chatterjee had auditioned for Ray once before. He read for the adolescent Apu in Aparajito, alongside the Bengali stage veteran Sisir Bhaduri, and Ray thought him right in the face and too old for the part. Two years later Ray remembered him. Chatterjee was invited to watch the shooting of Jalsaghar and learned of his casting only as he was leaving, when Ray called him over and introduced him to Chhabi Biswas with the words: "This is Soumitra Chattopadhyay; he's playing Apu in my next film Apur Sansar". Chatterjee doubted his own looks on camera and was unsure he wanted the career at all. On 9 August 1958 his first shot was passed in a single take, and he dated his conviction that he had found his work to that day.

Aparna was harder to cast. Ray advertised in a Calcutta daily for photographs of girls between fifteen and seventeen, received over a thousand replies and called none of them in. He then heard of a girl who had danced in a recital at the Children's Little Theatre in Kolkata. Sharmila Tagore, a relative of Rabindranath Tagore, auditioned and was taken. She was thirteen, two years below the youngest age the advertisement had specified. She disappears from the film well before it ends, and the second half runs on her absence.

Ray produced through Satyajit Ray Productions and shot through 1958 with the unit he had by then worked with on four features. Subrata Mitra photographed, Dulal Dutta cut, Bansi Chandragupta designed the sets and Ravi Shankar wrote the score. Ray wrote the screenplay himself. He wrote every screenplay he ever directed.

Story

Calcutta, the early 1930s. Apurba Kumar Roy lives in a rented room above the railway line in Tala. He cannot afford to study past the intermediate level, though his teacher presses him to, and he keeps himself on private tuition while writing a semi-autobiographical novel he hopes to publish. His schoolfriend Pulu arrives and takes him to Khulna for the wedding of Pulu's cousin Aparna. On the day, the bridegroom is found to have a serious mental illness. Aparna's mother stops the marriage. Her husband and the other villagers object, holding to the belief that a bride who misses her auspicious hour must stay unmarried for life. Pulu and the villagers ask Apu to take the groom's place. He refuses, and then agrees.

Apu brings Aparna back to the room in Calcutta and Pulu finds him a clerk's job. The marriage turns into a good one, to Apu's surprise as much as anyone's. Then, tragedy strikes. Aparna goes to her parents' house for the birth and dies there. The child, Kajal, lives. Apu holds him responsible. He leaves the boy with Aparna's parents and goes. He wanders for years, working at one point at a coal mine, and throws the manuscript of his novel away on a hillside. Pulu comes back from abroad, finds Kajal neglected and goes looking for Apu. Apu returns. The boy has never seen him, will not have him as a father and takes him as a friend instead. They leave for Calcutta with Kajal on Apu's shoulders.

The film is about what a person owes to a life he did not author. Apu begins believing that a life can be composed the way a novel is composed, and the plot of his own is handed to him by a village superstition and a stranger's illness. The marriage that follows is better than anything he had designed. When it ends he throws the manuscript away, which is the nearest thing to a suicide the film permits him. The other inheritance is his father's. Harihar in Pather Panchali was a man of unfinished projects who left his family exposed, and Apu's flight from Kajal repeats the pattern from the other side. Nothing in the ending promises that Apu will be a good father to the boy. It says only that the repetition has been broken once.

Direction and Craftsmanship

The married stretch is built almost entirely out of domestic incident. Aparna pins up a note reminding Apu to cut down on cigarettes. The two stand at the window of the room while a train goes past on the line below. Nothing in the dialogue announces that this is love. The accumulation is the announcement. When the death comes Ray does not film it. Pulu brings the news on open ground, Apu strikes him, and the camera stays with Apu rather than following the information back to a deathbed. There are no last words. The film asks its audience to supply what it declines to show.

Subrata Mitra was twenty-seven when shooting started and had photographed four features, all of them for Ray, having never touched a movie camera before Pather Panchali. His method here came out of a problem he had solved two years earlier. Bansi Chandragupta had been forced to build the inner courtyard of a Benares house inside a Calcutta studio for Aparajito, because of the monsoon, and Mitra could not see how to fake shadowless daylight over it. He stretched painted white cloth above the set and bounced the studio lamps off it. Ray later noted that Sven Nykvist claimed the invention of bounced light in American Cinematographer around the time of Through a Glass Darkly, and observed that his own unit had been using it since 1954. In Apur Sansar the technique gives the Tala room a flat grey daylight and gives the Khulna river sequences a brightness that the rest of the film never recovers.

Dulal Dutta holds shots long enough for behaviour to register and cuts hard at the point of loss. Ravi Shankar's score is used sparingly, and the trains do much of the work that music would otherwise do. Chatterjee moves from a loose and talkative buoyancy in the first half to something closed and slow in the second, and the change arrives without a scene that announces it. Sharmila Tagore, at thirteen, plays stillness. She is given very little to say.

The Cinema of Satyajit Ray

Apur Sansar ends the project that made Ray's name outside India and begins the partnership that carried the rest of his working life. Chatterjee acted for Ray fourteen times in all, counting this one, in films that include Abhijan, Charulata, Aranyer Din Ratri, Asani Sanket and Ghare Baire, and in the two Feluda films, Sonar Kella and Joi Baba Phelunath. Mitra stayed with Ray until Nayak in 1966. He then went to work for James Ivory.

The concerns of the later films are already legible here. Households under economic pressure, and people caught between an inherited order and one that is modernising around them. Ray worked against the dominant idiom of Indian commercial cinema, which ran on song and heightened incident, and took his bearings instead from Jean Renoir and from Italian neorealism. Mitra had met Renoir on the set of The River. Both men treated the photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson as a model for the use of available light. None of that makes the trilogy an imitation. Its patience, and its treatment of grief as an ordinary condition rather than a crisis, did not come from Europe.

Reception and Legacy

The reviews abroad were strong. Bosley Crowther wrote in the New York Times that "An impressive capstone is put not only upon a touching human drama but also upon the development of a genuine artist's skill". Variety found that "Wit, tenderness and intrinsic human revelations illuminate this unusual film". Roger Ebert took the trilogy into his Great Movies series on 4 March 2001 and wrote that "What we sense all through The Apu Trilogy is a different kind of life than we are used to".

In India the film took the President's Gold Medal for the All India Best Feature Film at the seventh National Film Awards, presented at Vigyan Bhavan in New Delhi on 1 May 1960 by the Vice-President, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. No President's Silver Medal was given for a Bengali film that year at all, only a certificate of merit. The British Film Institute gave Ray the Sutherland Trophy in 1960, an award then made to the most original and imaginative film introduced at the National Film Theatre during the year, and the Edinburgh International Film Festival gave the film a Diploma of Merit the same year. In the United States the National Board of Review named it the best foreign film of 1960. A nomination for Best Film followed at the British Academy awards in 1962. India entered it in the foreign-language category at the thirty-second Academy Awards, where it did not reach the final list.

Its standing rose steadily. Sight and Sound placed the film forty-second in the 1982 critics' poll, ranked the trilogy eighty-eighth in 1992, put the film ninety-third on the combined critics' and directors' list in 2002, and had it at 235 in the 2012 top 250. Time carried the trilogy in its All-Time 100 in 2005, and the film critics of the New York Times included the film in their thousand best in 2002. Not everyone in India was pleased. Speaking in the Rajya Sabha in 1980, the actress Nargis attacked Ray as a peddler of India's poverty and named the Apu films, arguing that they showed one corner of Bengal and were admired in the West because the West preferred to see India abject.

Gregory Nava reproduced the closing image in My Family in 1995. Two characters discuss the film in Paul Auster's novel Man in the Dark, published in 2008. The film's survival was not assured. In July 1993 a nitrate fire at Henderson's Film Laboratories in London reached the vaults and destroyed more than twenty-five original negatives, the Apu Trilogy negatives among them. What could be identified as Ray material went to the Academy Film Archive, where it was judged unprintable and sat for twenty years. The Academy preserved the trilogy in 1996 from other elements. In 2013 the Criterion Collection and the Academy Film Archive opened the cans again, sent what survived to L'Immagine Ritrovata in Bologna, and put close to a thousand hours of hand work into it, rebuilding perforations and lifting melted tape and glue off the stock. Fine-grain masters and duplicate negatives held by Janus Films, the Academy, the Harvard Film Archive and the British Film Institute filled the gaps. The 4K restoration reached cinemas in 2015.

Commentary

The last movement is the film's best argument. Apu has thrown away his novel and left his child, and he walks back to a boy who does not know his face, and the boy throws a stone at him. Nothing is forgiven on screen. The two set off with the son on the father's shoulders and the film stops. Ray gives no assurance that Apu will hold to it. What he gives is smaller and harder to dismiss: a man may fail badly and still be allowed to start. The refusal to sweeten the return is what makes it credible, because the film has been exact about how far he fell.

There is a reservation to enter, and it concerns Aparna. She is the centre of gravity and she is barely written. What she wants, what she made of a marriage she was pushed into, what she made of a husband acquired by accident, are matters the film touches once, in the letter she writes to her mother, and then leaves alone. Her function is to be loved and to die. That the loss registers as hard as it does is a tribute to Sharmila Tagore and to Ray's economy. The economy is also a convenience. A film that gave Aparna an interior would have had to slow down and complicate its own second half, and Ray took the faster road.

A second objection is structural. The marriage arrives through a superstition the film presents and never examines, and the reconciliation arrives through Pulu, who finds Kajal neglected and goes to fetch Apu out of a coal mine. At the two decisive points of his life Apu is moved by somebody else. That may be the point, since this is a film about a man who does not author his own plot. It is also convenient dramaturgy. The two are hard to tell apart from the outside.

What has not dated is the plainness. The film asks for attention and very little else, and it repays the attention without flattery and without gloom. More than sixty years on it still works on audiences with no stake in Bengal or in the marriage customs that set the story going. Ray ends the trilogy with a man walking away with a child on his back. For a work of this size that is a modest close, and it is the right one.

Awards & Honours

• Won, President's Gold Medal for the All India Best Feature Film, 7th National Film Awards, India, presented 1 May 1960
• Won, Sutherland Trophy, British Film Institute, London, 1960
• Won, Diploma of Merit, Edinburgh International Film Festival, 1960
• Won, Best Foreign Film, National Board of Review, United States, 1960
• Nominated, Best Film, British Academy Film Awards, 1962
• Submitted as India's entry for Best Foreign Language Film, 32nd Academy Awards; not selected as a nominee

Reference

• The World of Apu, Wikipedia
• 7th National Film Awards, Wikipedia
• Subrata Mitra, Wikipedia
• Sutherland Trophy, Wikipedia
• Soumitra Chatterjee filmography, Wikipedia
• Apur Sansar (The World of Apu), satyajitray.org
• Restoring The Apu Trilogy, The Criterion Collection
• The Restoration, Janus Films
• The Apu Trilogy, Roger Ebert, rogerebert.com, 4 March 2001
• The Apu Trilogy: Apur Sansar (The World of Apu), The Athena Cinema, quoting Bosley Crowther in the New York Times and Variety
• The World of Apu, IMDb

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