Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali：The Amalgam Between Tradition and Modernity in Post-colonial Indian Cinema

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 영상예술학회
· 수록지 정보 : 영상예술연구 / 19호 / 257 ~ 284페이지
· 저자명 : 이희진

초록

This essay examines how collision of culture provide the dynamism of Satyajit Ray's film, especially based on his first feature Pather Panchali(1955). Satyajit Ray is Indian film director who spent his childhood and adolescence in British colonial period, experienced his country’s independence and then finally became a film-maker in post-colonial India. While he was penetrating all these historical moments, a variety of cultural factors which he absorbed influenced his first film Pather Panchali.
Ray was grown up in the westernised surroundings of Calcutta, enjoying western film, music and magazines. However, his family was Bengali intelligentsia and closely related to Bengali Renaissance which emphasized not only Western liberal ideas but also traditional Eastern values. The days at Tagore's Fine Art University made him open up his identity as an Indian man as well as Eastern arts. This sense of identity overwhelmed Ray, when he came across a Bengali novel Pather Panchali and he made decision to make this novel into a film. In addition, the history of Indian cinema was complex. In its early years, it was similar to Hollywood big studio system. However, a lot of productions started to come out its independence production outfit upon the opportunity of World War Ⅱ：the investment of independent financer to film industry, the rise of urban population of working class, the import of film stock and equipment. After the independence of India, while there was the increased need for light entertainment called masala cinema due to growing working class audience, people in the middle class were still the supporter of serious cinema. Moreover, Indian government took the initiative to regards cinema as official measures for new cultural and ideological priorities. This brought about Indian New Wave Cinema movement and Satyajit Ray was in the centre of the movement by writing nationalist film and launching Calcutta Film Society. The characteristic of realism in Pather Panchali owed a lot to Jean Renoir’s The Southerner and Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thief. These events made Ray decide not to shut his eyes to the reality around him, true India. The film texts of Pather Panchali have vivid Indian traditional culture including education, gender issues, Hinduism and local communities, whilst it is also apparent that India was changed by the British, namely modernity, in Ray’s Pather Panchali：train, telegraph pole, Western style drum and pipe band and changing caste system.
Thus Pather Panchali combines a representation of the indigent life of a rural village and imported Western technologies. All personal, historical and cultural factors stated above influenced Ray’s first film：the way of approach to cinema, film style and its own contents. Pather Panchali is truly the creation of Ray’s absorbtion between tradition and modernity and also the first cinema on the international stage.

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