Satyajit Ray had no experience directing when he began work on this film. His cinematographer had taken still photos but never shot a film. Most of his performers had never acted before. Ray and his wife sold many of their valuable art works, and had to sell all rights to the film to the West Bengal government in order to get sufficient funds to finish the picture. It took them over five years from the first footage taken to the last. Nonetheless, his first work was an overwhelming critical success.
Almost overnight, Ray became and remained India’s most celebrated filmmaker. After Pather Panchali was released outside India, his reputation as a quality director enabled him to quit his former job as a commercial art executive and focus all his energies on film work. However, Ray occupies a unique position as a westernized liberal intellectual, equally despised and revered at home and sometimes even criticized abroad for his unique and, in some ways, simplistic approach to filmmaking. His unique gift is the way the carefully constructed details of daily life, his skill at working with and obtaining exemplary performances from his actors, and his humanitarian views of moral complexity suffuse his films. He is an extremely adept visual artist. Whatever he lacked in terms of technique was more than made up for by the richness of his designs, his egalitarian and clear-sighted observations of the human condition in his home country, and his use of symbols to carry his narratives.
For years India had ranked as one of the three major filmmaking countries along with Japan and the United States. However, unlike the constant exchange of ideas and techniques between Japan and the U.S., moviemaking in India followed a rigid formula of songs, dances, social custom, and stereotypes. Heroes and villains were unambiguous. The plots were crude, the acting was bad, and neither the audiences nor the critics cared about the limitations of their highly successful but insular world.
Satyajit Ray was born into a liberal brand of Hinduism that rejected the caste system. Both his Father and grandfather were writers and artists and his Mother was a noted amateur singer. He learned music art and literature so thoroughly at home that he excelled at all three despite his focus on other areas as a student. He quickly established himself as a premier commercial artist and rose to the position of senior art director for a British-run ad agency. He had long studied Western filmmaking techniques and used his comfortable existence to begin writing scripts for a movie of his own. When he saw De Sica’s Bicycle Thief in England, he embraced the value of untrained actors and naturalistic settings for his films. By his own admission, his first efforts were a disaster.
Pather Panchali was created as much from his drawings as from his script. He concentrated on a carefully developed series of visual clues to tie the rambling narrative together. The movie sings in the brilliance of Ravi Shankar’s music, in the play of water in streams and rain and pots and ritual acts, and in the myriad daily dramas of teachers, performers, relatives, and children both as observers and as the center of an outside perspective. In that he begins and ends with full respect for daily life, his intellectualized artifice retains all the natural truth inherent in the tragicomic human condition.