Regents' Lecturer and film director Mani Kaul will discuss the films of Ritwik Ghatak. For an introduction to Mani Kaul, please see film note for March 27. Presented in Association with the UC Berkeley Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies.
The Mechanical Man (also known as Pathetic Fallacy) is Ghatak's best-known film outside of India. Like Ray's Pather Panchali, with which it coincides chronologically (and thematically, in its portrayal of the disintegration of rural Bengal), it was a seminal force in the re-evaluation of the Indian cinema that was to take place in the sixties. The story of the taxi-driver Bimal, whose best friend and true love is the jalopy he has named Jagatdal--is at once an entertaining tale and a gritty parable of the psychological condition of a culture that is being torn apart. The setting is a corner of Bengal in which mining and industrial activities are juxtaposed with pockets of tribal culture; Bimal's attempts to integrate himself, in his lonely way, into both the machine age and the traditional world focus almost entirely on his beloved Jagatdal. His social life is a series of brief encounters with fares--a young woman deserted by a lover, an elderly man rushing to meet a dying loved one, a group of tribals on their way to a secluded village in whose idyllic surroundings Bimal chooses to lose himself. When the old crate finally sounds its death rattles, Bimal promises him resurrected life, and the intensity of The Mechanical Man reaches a haunting climax. As in most of Ghatak's films, a note of optimism rings through the pain; and as for Bimal's attachment to his mechanical friend, Ghatak has said, “You can call him a lunatic, a child, or a tribal...they all react to lifeless things almost passionately. This is an ancient, archetypal reaction...”