Unicaus NEWS
With a seminar, an exhibition, a dialog, the thirty first KIFF is paying its tribute to one of many best Bengali filmmakers of all time, Ritwik Ghatak, as a part of his centenary celebrations in 2025.
On Tuesday (November 11), a large viewers at Sisir Mancha, adjoining the West Bengal Film Centre in Kolkata’s Nandan, witnessed a panel dialogue on ‘Ritwik Ghatak Centenary and Beyond’ by famend movie personalities like Mr. Chattopadhyay, who can be Ghatak’s grandchild, filmmakers Supriyo Sen and Ashoke Vishwanathan, and former director-in-charge of the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute Amaresh Chakrabarti. The session was being moderated by filmmaker Sekhar Das.
“What struck me after I was in my teenagers, at an age after I began turning into extra conscious of the historical past of the subcontinent, is that the cinema of the 50s and 60s in Bengal had no indicators of the Partition. That was just some many years since one of many largest human displacements in trendy historical past… [Ghatak] was the one who proved there wasn’t a whole denial of what we had gone by as a race,” Mr. Chattopadhyay mentioned.
He mentioned that the reminiscences and historical past of the Partition must be handed on to future generations by Ghatak’s movies and that his filmography had ‘sensitised’ Mr. Chattopadhyay to his personal Bengali identification.
Ritwik Ghatak, who was thought-about a part of the ‘nice trinity’ of Bengali cinema alongside Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen, was identified greatest for iconic movies that depicted the ache of displacement and social catastrophes in the course of the Bengal partition, like Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960) and Subarnarekha (1965). He was additionally a professor of movie course and, briefly, vice-principal, on the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), mentoring college students like Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani and Adoor Gopalakrishnan who went to turn into well-known filmmakers in their very own proper.
“My reference to Ghatak is thru the reminiscences of Partition. On one hand, there was the romantic nostalgia of the landscapes left behind, then again, it was a time of violence and bloodshed. I’ve not discovered the tales of our huge, displaced group anyplace else in cinema besides in Ritwik Ghatak’s movies,” Mr. Sen mentioned, in the course of the centenary speak on Tuesday (November 11).
Filmmaker and critic Mr. Vishwanathan, additionally an alumnus of FTII, highlighted Ghatak’s departure from the types of Hollywood and neo-realism and mentioned the auteur didn’t carry the burden of influences, however as an alternative paved his personal path along with his cinematography, sound design, music, and enhancing.
“Ghatak is the one filmmaker in India who didn’t have pre-determined cinematic influences… [Like in his film Jukti Takko Aar Gappo,] he had disbursed with the so-called narrative. There are narrative patches, however even these will depart you dissatisfied in the event you’re searching for some semblance of a narrative… He doesn’t observe the dictums that Hollywood has give you. He gives, like [Japanese filmmaker Kenzi Mizoguchi], another system of filmmaking,” Mr. Vishwanathan mentioned in the course of the panel dialogue on Tuesday (November 11).
He highlighted that the auteur very prominently represented Dalit society and identification in his movies.
Former director-in-charge of the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, Amaresh Chakrabarti, recalled Ghatak’s affiliation with the Indian People Theatre’s Association and the Communist Party of India on the time, in addition to Ghatak’s tutorial essay titled ‘On the Cultural Front’ in 1954 on what the social gathering’s cultural stance must be.
“If we revisit the essay we’ll see that Ghatak had mentioned even then, that theatre can’t exist in an insular setting based mostly on the exclusion of issues termed bourgeoisie, and that theatre calls for open-mindedness. [He had proposed] analyzing tradition, being open to engaged on Indian epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata. These concepts weren’t nicely acquired on the time,” he mentioned.
As a part of the centenary tribute, the thirty first KIFF organised screenings of six of Ghatak’s movies in the course of the competition between November 6 and November 13, together with an exhibition of his memorabilia at Nandan, the panel dialogue as we speak, and the Ritwik Ghatak Memorial Conversation between filmmakers Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Anup Singh, scheduled for November 12.
