Pather Panchali: Satyajit Ray’s Artwork Shines at Sao Paulo International Film Festival | Kolkata News

Kolkata: A sketch by Satyajit Ray — part of his visual script for ‘Pather Panchali‘ — is the main poster artwork for Brazil’s 48th Sao Paolo International Film Festival that begins Thursday with India as its focal point.
For movie buffs, this decision by the organisers of this prestigious film festival — also known as the 48th Mostra (‘Mostra’ is Portuguese for ‘show’) — is nothing short of a celebration and homage to Indian cinema.
The sketch captures an intimate, everyday domestic moment from Ray’s groundbreaking debut: Sarbajaya combing Durga’s hair in the foreground, while a man and a boy (Harihar and a young Apu, most likely) can be seen in the background in silhouette, framed by a doorway.
Ray’s sketchbook, in which he drew this particular scene, is preserved at Cinémathèque Française, a renowned film archive in Paris— a French non-profit film organisation that holds one of the largest archives of film documents and film-related objects in the world. The festival’s website offers a short appreciation of the sketch — and how Ray captures, and even transcends, its apparent simplicity. “Amidst the multitude of films, scenes and frames competing for the attention of the Mostra’s audience, the most visible image represents something so common and extraordinary: a house. In it, we see a woman combing a girl’s hair. In the background, there are a man and a boy sitting at the door…. The image captures the daily life of a family, as well as encompassing two universes: the inside and the outside, the home and the world. After 70 years, contemporary cinema continues to capture the complex, and sometimes conflicting, cohabitation of the intimate and the public,” it says.
Luka Brandi, the festival’s executive producer, said: “The festival has a tradition of using a filmmaker’s drawings and paintings as its artwork for a given year. This specific storyboard was chosen by Sandip Ray and showcases Satyajit Ray’s aesthetic thought and ability quite nicely.”
It is well known that Ray, during the pre-production phase of ‘Pather Panchali’, meticulously drew illustrations in gouache in a drawing book. Riddhi Goswami of the Ray Society told TOI that this particular book was procured from GC Laha, a leading store of stationery and art supplies in central Kolkata. “The contents of the book primarily comprise intricate sketches and sparse dialogues, with minimal notations pertaining to camera techniques such as ‘fade in’, ‘fade out’, and ‘dissolve’. Ray later donated this sketchbook to the Cinémathèque Française in Paris to honour the request of eminent French journalist and film scholar Georges Sadoul,” said Goswami.
The festival is also showcasing a Ray retrospective, with screenings of ‘Pather Panchali’, ‘Charulata’, ‘Mahanagar’, ‘Kapurush’, ‘Nayak’, ‘Aparajito’ and ‘Apur Sansar’.
Varsha Bansal, whose grandfather R D Bansal had produced some of those movies, said: “I recall my grandfather mentioning how Ray’s storyboard and script helped even a non-technical person, such as the producer, to envision how a film would turn out. Ray never exceeded the budget by even a single rupee, thanks to this meticulous pre-production process.”
Among other films in the India Focus segment are Sreemoyee Singh’s ‘And, Towards Happy Alleys’, Payal Kapadia’s ‘All We Imagine as Light’, Anupama Srinivasan’s and Anirban Dutta’s ‘Nocturnes’, Suman Ghosh’s ‘Scavenger of Dreams’, Dibakar Das Roy’s ‘Dilli Dark’, Subhadra Mahajan’s ‘Second Chance’, Karan Tejpal’s ‘Stolen’ and Rahul V Chittella’s ‘Gulmohar’.