They have a daughter, Durga, and a son, Apurba (“Apu”). His wife, Sarbajaya (Karuna Banerjee), struggles to make ends meet with the meager income obtained by the not-very-practical Hori. But he has dreams of someday becoming a famous writer. The father, Harihar (aka “Hori”) Roy (Kanu Banerjee), is a Brahman who makes his living by conducting religious rituals. The story covers the experiences of an impoverished family of four living in a small Indian town. But although Ray engaged in experimentation during the filming of Pather Panchali, the film was carefully planned and staged in order to achieve its extraordinarily effective visual and emotional effects. I mention all this planning, because when Pather Panchali appeared to Western audiences, it was initially compared to Italian Neorealism films, a documentary-style film genre that was thought to be captured-life in the raw. Together the three films on this subject are known as the Apu Trilogy. Ray’s first feature covers the first part of that novel, and two of his subsequent films, Aparajito (1956) and Apur Sansar ( The World of Apu, 1959) completed the account. For a number of years during this period, he thought about making a film based on Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhya’s famous semi-autobiographical Bengali novel, Pather Panchali (“The Song of the Little Road”, 1929). In his twenties (during the 1940s), Ray worked professionally as a graphic designer, but he developed a passion for films and set his sights on eventually becoming a filmmaker. He came from a cultured Bengali family, and Ray early on showed talents in graphic design, calligraphy, musical composition, and writing. In Ray’s case he had been thinking about and planning how he would make that first film for many years before he started it. In all cases, though, these first-time directors were originally avid and thoughtful students of film, and they were very well cultured in cinema technique before they shot their first scenes. It is interesting that a number of outstanding filmmakers, including Jean Vigo, Orson Welles, Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, and Terrence Malick, hit their highest levels with their first film outings. One of the greatest of all filmmakers, Satyajit Ray, debuted with a first feature, Pather Panchali (1955), that was so good it ranks as one of the finest films ever made.
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