While unlikely to delight filmgoers whose appetites rarely sway them from the superhero buffet, Pather Panchali (which translates to Song of the Little Road) is unquestionably worth all this effort. “This fills a much needed, non-western gap.” “Ray is the least known and least respected icon of the golden age of arthouse cinema,” he said.
APUR PANCHALI FULL MOVIE MOVIE
(And there was no shortage of boldfaced names in attendance to pay their respects, like Wes Anderson, Jim Jarmusch, Laurie Anderson, Joel Coen, Ken Burns, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach.) It was also a nice bonus to feel the rumbling subway at MoMA’s subterranean screening facilities while watching a movie that has a recurring motif of distant trains.Īt a post-screening reception, Becker explained how the Apu trilogy has long been something of a holy grail for him. It led to a showing at Cannes, where Ray won an award for Best Human Document, and it was the first Indian film to make a major impact on the arthouse circuit.įor this new, risen-from-the-ashes version to screen at MoMA certainly had special resonance. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time to get the subtitles burned-in, but the screening still went over gangbusters. He brought the reels to the airport and fell asleep, slumped over the desk at the terminal. To hear his son tell it, Ray didn’t sleep for 10 days while finishing the film for his deadline. John Huston, who was in India scouting for The Man Who Would Be King (a film he didn’t shoot for another two decades), checked in on Ray’s development and wired back to the MoMA that programming Pather Panchali was a wise decision. There would be textiles, ornamental displays, concerts (Ali Akbar Khan), dance (Shanta Rao), and Wheeler decided, after seeing some initial shots that young Calcutta ad man Satyajit Ray had tested, that he would save room on the programme if Ray could deliver his film on time.
APUR PANCHALI FULL MOVIE SERIES
In 1954, curator Monroe Wheeler was planning a series for the following year called Living Arts of India. The Museum of Modern Art weighs heavily in Apu’s origin story. It’s quite in line with the bittersweet, neo-realistic story of its multi-generational Bengali family, always scraping by with some picked fruit from a neighbour’s garden or, in one scene, trading prized brass serving ware for pots of rice. Then, home releases via the Criterion Collection.įirst-time film-maker Ray, working with a mostly untested crew, had to partially self-finance the project, selling his collection of books while his wife pawned her jewellery.
(I recall my one home viewing of Pather Panchali on a VHS so washed-out you could barely read the translated text.) Janus Films will distribute theatrical runs of all three movies at Film Forum in New York, followed by a national release at your finer art houses. The result: gorgeous 4K digital prints with new subtitles.
As Becker put it, “No one else wanted to risk being the ones that destroyed this relic.” Only one lab, in Bologna, Italy, would attempt the rehydration process.
The technology now exists to restore and scan the original materials, even if they would “literally crumble in the can if you shook them too hard”. But as Peter Becker, CEO of the Criterion Collection put it, “Sometimes not throwing something away is the most heroic thing you can do.” There has never been a decent DVD version, let alone Blu-ray, of the Apu trilogy. A fire destroyed the stock, and it looked like we would be left with nothing but those beat-up copies forever. Ray’s negatives were sent to a lab in London, and then, tragedy. After he was given an honorary lifetime achievement award at the 1992 Academy Awards, a push toward restoration was made. For decades, much of Ray’s work was mostly seen on chewed-up prints. Yet this was more than just a typical remastering. On, Ray’s son Sandip, himself a film-maker, was on hand to present a new restoration of his late father’s most famous picture. Pather Panchali, Satyajit Ray’s debut film, one of the most important works of world cinema and the first chapter in the Apu trilogy, had its world premiere at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on.
Precisely 60 years and one day prior, at the same institution, the world first met Apu.
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