By: Yildiz Subuk, Staff Writer
“What interests me is density, how much can you tell, how telling can you make your images.” — Satyajit Ray
Satyajit Ray was a Bengali filmmaker, composer, and writer from Calcutta (now known as Kolkata, India). During the early 1950s, Ray was an advertiser interested in telling stories that mattered to him. He had no funding for a film, so he managed to borrow a 16mm camera, gather a crew of amateur actors, and began filming in a village near Calcutta, called Boral. The village was rich with nature, from large fields with the occasional train passing in the background, to illustrious forests and serene ponds, all of which evoke an emotionally-dense reaction just through images. This film would eventually be released as Pather Panchali in 1955, his first feature and the first installment of The Apu Trilogy.
A bildungsroman (which translates to “novel of education/formation” in German) isn’t just a coming-of-age story, but often depicts the psychological changes and influence of society on character during different transitional periods of their lives. According to film critic Terrence Rafferty, The Apu Trilogy is akin to a bildungsroman. It shows the formative years of a young boy living in a village, near the beginning of an industrial era in India, and his transition into an adulthood that extends into fatherhood.
The trilogy begins with the film Pather Panchali, which tracks Apu’s adolescence. A young boy caught up in various adventures, Apu is filled with a burning childlike curiosity. He is deeply shaped by the women in his life (mother, grandmother, and sister). Through the perspective of this curious boy, the audience is exposed to village life in India, filled with hardships and struggles, but also a community with complex bonds and multidimensional love between family members.
In the second film, Aparajito, Apu is now a teenager, eager to unlock his potential as an academic. His family has moved to the village, and Apu has slowly realized the world is full of loss, and requires a sense of reconciliation and growing spirituality to keep moving forward. Aparajito continues Apu’s story by showing the same boy grown up and transformed by the trauma he faced in the previous film. With Apur Sansar, the third film, Apu is now a grown man who grapples with career choices, love, and fatherhood. Each film shows Apu at a transformative state in his life. A sense of home and existential meaning shifts during each installment of the trilogy, as we see Apu experience heartbreak and loss, but find ways to push forward.
This trilogy explores the complexity of what seems to be a simple story of a working class man. Ray’s films feel wholly unique, not just due to their locations and images, but the approach as well. Visually poetic, each film is composed of almost an overwhelming amount of beautiful shots, capturing characters in different atmospheres and locations. Ray had no access to studios, or even a proper film crew, so he made do with what he had at his disposal. He asked individuals he came across to act in his film. Instead of relying on artificial lighting, he used natural light to his advantage by shooting in interiors that allowed sunlight to a certain extent, or shooting in different parts of the day in different weather conditions. These strategies resulted in atmospherically rich shots, invoking the beauty of natural landscapes.
Ray’s approach has had such a tremendous effect on numerous filmmakers, from Wes Anderson to Martin Scorcese. Despite his brilliance, his films were not seen by a large Indian audience at the time, due to them being in Bengali (a language not spoken commonly by many Indians at the time). But, in retrospect, his films have stood against the test of time, as Ray received an honorary academy award in 1992 for his work as a filmmaker. With The Apu Trilogy, we are shown shots that tell a story, a portrayal of everyday life, with no words needed for explanations. They’re made by a filmmaker whose approach proves that a film’s timelessness can be found in more than just a large budget and studio.
