The Criterion Collection posts a YouTube series made up of short, informative, celebratory videos called Three Reasons, which lay out, you guessed it, the three best reasons to explore a classic piece of cinema in their collection.
In the spirit of stealing from the best, I’m going to pilfer that premise and present to you, THREE REASONS to purchase tickets to the Marie Dressler Foundation Vintage Film Festival’s showing of Satyajit Ray’s seminal humanist masterpiece Pather Panchali, showing at 9:00am on Saturday, October 18th at The Capitol Theatre in Port Hope!
1) West Bengal Filmmaking Pioneers!
On the first day of shooting, director Satyajit Ray had never directed a scene and his cinematographer Subrata Mitra had never rolled a frame of motion picture film. And yet, Ray went on to become one of India’s most prolific filmmakers, completing The Apu Trilogy (1955-1959), which begins with Pather Panchali and continues with the films Aparjito and Apur Sansar, as well as lauded works The Music Room (1958), The Big City (1963), and the Goopy-Bagha Trilogy (1969-1992).
Subrata Mitra went on to work with Ray for most of his career; but in cinematography circles he is known best for his pioneering use of bounce lighting: the process of diffusing light sources for film by bouncing them off of large surfaces or through soft fabrics. Mitra’s naturalist work has had an incalculable effect on modern filmmaking. Compare, for example, scenes taking place in the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars and in The Empire Strikes Back: those in the first film look like you’re in the studio; those in the second, which use bounce and integrated lighting, look like you’re in an actual spaceship.
2) You’ve seen bits of Apu in some of your favourites and didn’t even know it!
Pather Panchali tells the story of a poor Bengali family, left to live in their rural village by their patriarch, and the trials and tribulations they experience in his absence.
This is echoed most recently in Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited (2007), when the three brothers are kicked off the titular train and end up attempting to save the life of a village boy, caught up in the current of a rushing Indian river. Anderson even cribs some of the music Ravi Shankar wrote for a Ray production to score the scene.
And, perhaps most famously, Apu Ray, the lead character of the Apu Trilogy, was the name inspiration for Springfield’s understandably retired Kwik-E-Mart clerk Apu Nahasapeemapetilon on The Simpsons.
3) Saved from a Fiery Grave!
The original negatives for all three Apu films were severely damaged in a tragic fire at the Henderson Film Lab in London in 1993. However, the director of the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles, in an act of foresight and faith, had the damaged materials shipped to America to be permanently archived. Twenty years later, this allowed an intrepid team of Los Angeles film restorationists, along with The Criterion Collection, to repair huge pieces of the original film and utilize them in the creation of the immaculate digital restoration we’re presenting at the Festival this year.
