Presented in cooperation with the UC Berkeley Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies as part of Festival of India 1985. Prints are from the Indian Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and the Directorate of Film Festivals, New Delhi.
A Tribute to Ritwik Ghatak continues through March with screenings in Wheeler Auditorium and the UAM Theater. Regents' Lecturer and film director Mani Kaul presents a lecture on Ghatak on March 20 in the Museum Theater.
With only 8 films Ritwik Ghatak exerted a profound influence on the modern Indian cinema. An acknowledged mentor of directors Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani and others, he began to receive critical recognition outside of India only after his death in 1975. Ghatak was a complex man who was much loved by his students but was viewed by the film establishment as an eccentric iconoclast; he died a chronic alcoholic at the age of 49. A native of East Bengal, Ghatak was shattered by the partition of that “orphan state” and his films are permeated with the personal urgency he felt for its inhabitants, whose lives and culture were irreparably ruptured. Yet his films also have a vital, regenerative power, fed by the artist's faith in the new generation; his depiction of natural forces as separate from social ills; and his skillful integration of popular forms of culture--melodrama, songs and dance--into radical themes that his contemporaries such as Satyajit Ray approached through neo-realism.
