Pather Panchali

Pather Panchali (1955)

পথের পাঁচালী

Impoverished priest Harihar Ray, dreaming of a better life for himself and his family, leaves his rural Bengal village in search of work. Alone, his wife, Sarbojaya, looks after her rebellious daughter, Durga, and her young son, Apu, as well as Harihar's elderly aunt Indir. The children enjoy the small pleasures of their difficult life, while their parents suffer the daily indignities heaped upon them.

Date of release
1955-08-26
TMDB
7.8 / 10 (518)
Runtime
2h 5m
Genres
Drama, History
Director
Satyajit Ray
Collection
Apu Collection

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Box office: $21M
  • Budget: ₹150K
  • Based on: Pather Panchali
  • Awards: 5 · Nominations: 1. Including: National Film Award for Best Bengali Feature Film; Bodil Award for Best American Film; BAFTA Award for Best Film; National Board of Review Award for Best Foreign Language Film

Pather Panchali is a 1955 Indian drama film written and directed by Satyajit Ray in his directorial debut. It is an adaptation of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay's 1929 Bengali novel of the same name. The film stars Subir Banerjee, Kanu Banerjee, Karuna Banerjee, Uma Dasgupta, and Chunibala Devi in leading roles. As the first instalment of The Apu Trilogy, the film depicts the childhood hardships of the protagonist Apu and his elder sister Durga amid the harsh realities of rural poverty. The film is widely acclaimed as a classic of Indian cinema and is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential films in the history of cinema.

Production

Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay's novel Pather Panchali is a classic bildungsroman (a type of coming-of-age story) in the canon of Bengali literature. It first appeared as a serial in a Calcutta periodical in 1928, and was published as a book the following year. The novel depicts a poor family's struggle to survive in their rural ancestral home and the upbringing of Apu, the son of the family.

Satyajit Ray (2 May 1921 – 23 April 1992), working as a graphic designer for Signet Press, created the illustrations for an abridged edition of the book in 1944. At that time, Ray read the unabridged novel; Signet's owner D. K. Gupta told Ray that the abridged version would make a great film.

The Bengali word path literally means path, and pather means "of the path". Panchali is a type of narrative folk song that used to be performed in Bengal and was the forerunner of another type of folk performance, the jatra. English translations of the Bengali title include Song of the Little Road, The Lament of the Path, Song of the Road, and Song of the Open Road.

Pather Panchali did not have a script; it was made from Ray's drawings and notes. Ray completed the first draft of the notes during his sea voyage to and from London in 1950. Before principal photography began, he created a storyboard dealing with details and continuity. Years later, he donated those drawings and notes to Cinémathèque Française.

In Apur Panchali (the Bengali translation of My Years with Apu: A Memoir, 1994), Ray wrote that he had omitted many of the novel's characters and that he had rearranged some of its sequences to make the narrative better as cinema. Changes include Indir's death, which occurs early in the novel at a village shrine in the presence of adults, while in the film Apu and Durga find her corpse in the open.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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