Aparajito

Aparajito (1956)

অপরাজিত

Apu and his family have moved away from the country to live in the bustling holy city of Benares. As he progresses from wide-eyed child to intellectually curious teenager, eventually studying in Kolkata, we witness his academic and moral education, as well as the growing complexity of his relationship with his mother.

Date of release
1956-10-11
TMDB
7.8 / 10 (309)
Runtime
1h 50m
Genres
Drama
Director
Satyajit Ray
Collection
Apu Collection

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 1 · Nominations: 0. Including: Golden Lion

Aparajito is a 1956 Indian Bengali-language drama film written and directed by Satyajit Ray, and is the second part of The Apu Trilogy. It is an adaptation of the last part of Bibhutibhushan Bannerjee's novel Pather Panchali and the first part of his followup novel Aparajito. The film starts off where the previous film Pather Panchali (1955) ended, with Apu's family moving to Varanasi, and chronicles Apu's life from childhood to adolescence in college.

Production

Aparajito was based on the last fifth of the novel Pather Panchali and the first third of the novel Aparajito by Banerjee. The 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 next year.

The novel had a female character named Leela who influenced Apu's alienation from his mother when he was living in Calcutta. After rejecting two aspirants, Ray found one actress to portray the character, but the actress was not allowed to act in the film by her fiancé. Eventually, Ray reluctantly removed the character from the script.

Subrata Mitra, the cinematographer of The Apu Trilogy, made his first technical innovation with this film: the application of bounce lighting on large scale diffusers to match studio sets with location shooting. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Cinematographers:

The fear of monsoon rain had forced the art director, Bansi Chandragupta, to abandon the original plan to build the inner courtyard of a typical Benares house in the open and the set was built inside a studio in Calcutta. Mitra recalls arguing in vain with both Chandragupta and Ray about the impossibilities of simulating shadowless diffused skylight. But this led him to innovate what became subsequently his most important tool—bounce lighting.

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

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