Ghatak Full Movies

[Sherry Galeazzi]

RitabanGhatak, his son, is also a filmmaker[8] and is involved in the Ritwik Memorial Trust. He has restored Ritwik's Bagalar Banga Darshan, Ronger Golam and completed his unfinished documentary on Ramkinkar.

Ritaban has made a film titled Unfinished Ritwik. He is working on adapting Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay's novel Ichhamati. Ghatak's elder daughter Samhita, made a docufeature titled Nobo Nagarik. Ghatak's younger daughter died in 2009.[1]

In 1948, Ghatak wrote his first play Kalo sayar (The Dark Lake) and participated in a revival of the landmark play Nabanna.[9] Ghatak, who was a member of the Communist Party of India till he was expelled in 1955, was one of the main leaders behind the party's cultural wing, the Indian People's Theatre Association.[10] He was renowned for his partition trilogy Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-capped Star), 1960; Komal Gandhar (E Flat), 1961; and Subarnarekha (The Golden Thread), 1962.[10]

Ghatak entered the film industry with Nimai Ghosh's Chinnamul (1950) as actor and assistant director. Chinnamul was followed in two years by Ghatak's first completed film Nagarik (1952), both major breakthroughs for the Indian cinema.[11][12] Ghatak's early work sought theatrical and literary precedent in bringing together a documentary realism, a stylised performance often drawn from the folk theatre, and a Brechtian use of the filmic apparatus.

Ghatak moved briefly to Pune in 1966, where he taught at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). His students included film makers Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani, Adoor Gopalkrishnan, Saeed Akhtar Mirza, John Abraham. During his year at FTII, he was involved in the making of two student films: Fear and Rendezvous.[13]

Ghatak died on 6 February 1976.[14] At the time of his death, Ghatak's primary influence seemed to have been through former students. Although his stint teaching film at FTII was brief, one-time students Mani Kaul, John Abraham, and especially Kumar Shahani,[15] carried Ghatak's ideas and theories, which were elaborated upon in his book Cinema and I, into the mainstream of Indian art film. Cinema and I was called by Satyajit Ray as a book that covers all aspects of filmmaking. Other students of his at the FTII included Saeed Akhtar Mirza, Subhash Ghai and Adoor Gopalakrishnan.[16]While other filmmakers like Satyajit Ray succeeded in creating an audience outside India during their lifetime, Ghatak and his films were appreciated primarily within India. Satyajit Ray did what he could to promote his colleague, but Ray's generous praise did not translate into international fame for Ghatak. For example, Ghatak's Nagarik (1952) was perhaps the earliest example of a Bengali art film, preceding Ray's Pather Panchali by three years but was not released until after his death in 1977.[11][12] His first commercial release Ajantrik (1955) was one of the early Indian films to portray an inanimate object, an automobile, as a character in the story, many years before the Herbie films.[3] Ghatak's Bari Theke Paliye (1958) had a similar plot to Franois Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959), but Ghatak's film remained obscure while Truffaut's went on to become one of the more famous of the French New Wave. One of Ghatak's later films, Titash Ekti Nadir Naam (1973), is one of the early to be told in a hyperlink format, featuring multiple characters in a collection of interconnected stories, predating Robert Altman's Nashville (1975) by two years.

Ghatak's only major commercial success was Madhumati (1958), a Hindi film which he wrote the screenplay for. It was one of the early ones to deal with the theme of reincarnation and is believed to have been the source of inspiration for many later works dealing with reincarnation in Indian cinema, Indian television, and perhaps world cinema. It may have been the source of inspiration for the American film The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975) and the Hindi film Karz (1980), both of which dealt with reincarnation and have been influential in their respective cultures.[17] Karz in particular was remade several times: as the Kannada film Yuga Purusha (1989), the Tamil film Enakkul Oruvan (1984), and more recently the Bollywood Karzzzz (2008). Karz and The Reincarnation of Peter Proud may have inspired the American Chances Are (1989).[17] The most recent film to be directly inspired by Madhumati was the hit Bollywood film Om Shanti Om (2007), which led to the late Bimal Roy's daughter Rinki Bhattacharya accusing it of plagiarism and threatening legal action against its producers.[18][19]

Ghatak's work as a director influenced many later Indian filmmakers, including those from the Bengali film industry and elsewhere. Ghatak is said to have influences on Kumar Shahani, Mani Kaul, Ketan Mehta, and Adoor Gopalakrishnan. For example, Mira Nair has cited Ghatak as well as Ray as the reasons she became a filmmaker.[20] Ghatak's influence as a director began to spread beyond India much later; beginning in the 1990s, a project to restore Ghatak's films was undertaken, and international exhibitions (and subsequent DVD releases) have belatedly generated an increasingly global audience. In a critics' poll of all-time greatest films conducted by the Asian film magazine Cinemaya in 1998, Subarnarekha was ranked at No. 11.[21] In the 2002 Sight & Sound critics' and directors' poll for all-time greatest films, Meghe Dhaka Tara was ranked at No. 231 and Komal Gandhar at No. 346.[22] In 2007, A River Named Titas topped the list of 10 best Bangladeshi films, as chosen in the audience and critics' polls conducted by the British Film Institute.[23]Russia-born German actress Elena Kazan once said Ghatak's Jukti Takko Gappo has the most profound influence on her view about world cinema.[24]

Bangladeshi filmmaker Shahnewaz Kakoli said she has been greatly influenced by Ritwik Ghatak's films and regarded Ghatak as her idol. She said "like all Bengalis, I too have grown up watching movies of Satyajit Ray and Ghatak, though I like Ghatak more and I idolize him. I am greatly inspired by him and consequently my movie 'Uttarer Sur' (Northern Symphony) too is influenced by Ghatak."[25]

Ghatak was a theorist as well. His views and commentaries on films have been parts of scholarly studies and researches. As a filmmaker, his main concentration was on men and life, especially the day-to-day struggle of ordinary people. He could never accept the partition of Bengal of 1947 which divided Bengal into two countries. In almost all his films, he dealt with this theme.[26]

Far from the PYIFF, New Yorkers too will get a chance to be marked by Ghatak's work, this time in a rather more comprehensive fashion. From November 1st to 6th, Lincoln Center will pay extended tribute to the great director with all but one of his eight feature films. As evidenced by such examples as PYIFF's program, Ghatak was very much a central figure of the broader Indian cinema of the period, his thumbprint left on a whole generation of colleagues and protgs a massive one. With the series at Lincoln Center, the programmers are clearly looking to reassert Ghatak as the major world artist he was.

Born in what is East Bengal (now Bangladesh) in 1925, as a young man Ghatak and his middle-class family were forced to flee famine and the partition of Bengal in the 1940s, settling in Calcutta. This seismic life event forever marked Ghatak as an artist. As one of the great refugee filmmakers, his work is characterized by stories of division across borders, displaced peoples, unending struggles to lay roots in new places. These were scars that cut so deep as to affect and warp, in Ghatak's life and that of his characters, all aspects of life. Beyond this obvious thematic connection, this trauma had a more subtle effect on Ghatak's thinking.

Looking over his body of work as a whole again, it is clear that the prevailing idea in all of Ghatak's movies is the impenetrability of other worlds. His are characters trapped at the margins of geographical, social, or psychic borders that themselves prove insurmountable. Staring out over the limits of their lives, these people, like Ghatak, are defeated by the sheer force required to cross these boundaries. Indeed, at times his work seems almost comically overripe in its melodramatic bleakness, his female protagonists robbed of their agency and cast aside by the capricious whims of fate (and, as drama, by their maker). But these women, crushed under the weight of all this, also occupy brief moments in which they stand and ponder at these metaphysical outskirts. Time and again, Ghatak lets us slip into the pockets of meditation alongside his protagonists; dwarfed by the physical world (a particularly colossal tree plays such a role in The Cloud-Capped Star) and pushed into the far edges of the ever-shifting frame, they reclaim these moments of thought, almost conscious of the outsize mechanisms of fate and melodrama to which they are cruelly subject.

But to blow away these cobwebs all you need is to plunge for any length of time into Ghatak's enigmatic floating worlds. These movies are, as seen before you on-screen, a continuously unfolding series of sublime momentary revelations that, through their spontaneity and starkness, belie the miserabilist nature of his plots and stress the ambiguous beauty of these flashes of terror or clarity. One such moment, which I think is worth detailing as a final way to introduce Ghatak's cinema, comes in Subarnarekha. The heroine, Sita (Madhabi Mukherjee), is greeted by a hysterical group of friends and neighbors outside her home in the slums of Calcutta. At this point, she has, like many Ghatakian heroines, sacrificed everything in pursuit of an ideal. Her romance with her adopted brother Abhiram (Satindra Bhattacharya), who is not only a relation but of a lower caste and therefore verboten, led to their arrival in the slums and their ostracization from Sita's older brother Ishwar (Abhi Bhattacharya). To the sound of voices outside speaking vaguely about some kind of accident, she approaches the edge of the house and looks out at their faces. Suddenly the fragments of speech she heard coalesce into a clear story: Abhiram was lynched by an angry crowd after killing a young girl with his bus.

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