Ritwik Ghatak: Cloud-Capped Star

Ritwik Ghatak: notes on Cloud-Capped Star

(India, 1960)

The visionary Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak peers into the future, and sees nothing but disintegration. Succeeding at multiple levels, Cloud-Capped Star humanizes this bleak vision - Ghatak places the drama in a Bengali family immediately post-partition, but the complex events developing throughout the film are also something of a howl of outrage at what had become of his divided homeland.

The central figure in this vast melodrama (with some coincidental stylistic resemblances to European new wave and neo-realism, as well) is Nita, the eldest daughter in a once-middle class, intellectual family, driven by the partition of India and Pakistan into refugee status in the slums of Calcutta. Varied family members react in different opportunistic ways to their reduced (and still disintegrating status), and their need to survive, all of which takes an extreme toll on Nita, who ultimately becomes the family's sole breadwinner. The performances throughout are excellent - Supriya Choudhury as Nita is riveting, and Niranjan Roy is particularly strong as Sanat.

Throughout, Ghatak boils human nature and the survival instinct down to the most ruthless basics: this is a compelling and visionary film, but there is virtually no room for lofty ideals or sentimental altruism in the world created here - one mourns what one must, but ultimately one does what one must do to survive. Sentiment and ideals - in this film - are vain luxuries and pretenses, and from the cruelty of such a truism, Ghatak crafted one of cinema's most devastating moral tragedies.

Ghatak claimed very few Western cinematic influences - like Jean-Luc Godard in France and Nagisa Oshima in Japan, his primary concerns were historical and political, and also technical - how to alter cinema to express those concerns in reasonably accessible language? For Ghatak the solution was found in using outdoor locations, natural sound, idiosyncratic editing, and a minimum of the flash seen in Bollywood or Hollywood; in particular, Ghatak favored a casual, unusual use of sound, with exaggerated and highly unrealistic effects, and deliberate (and disorienting) discontinuities between what is seen and what is heard. Visually and dramatically, the expectation of an operatic quality in melodrama (this film - at a fundamental level - is melodrama), is subverted with jagged and unpredictable visual editing; Ghatak was willing to sacrifice conventional continuity in the attempt to drive a certain level of emotional impact. The end result is a film which is dark, very sharply focused in its thematic sensibility, and very morally upsetting.

For all of these reasons, it stands as one of the more obscure global masterpieces out there (there has yet to be an official US release on VHS or DVD), rarely seen or commented upon. This lingering obscurity is highly unfortunate - as a film of moral/social outrage, this may rival Bresson; its' overall feel for the everyday evokes Italian neo-realism; it's willingness to experiment boldly evokes contemporaries Godard or Oshima; in it's concerns with the status of women (another of the many themes explored here) in a society undergoing massive, multidirectional change, it recalls Naruse, Sirk or Mizoguchi.

Ghatak was a film theorist (a published selection of his theoretical writings was translated and published posthumously), translator (he was the first to translate Brecht - a strong influence - into Bengali), marxist writer and Bengali nationalist, he also battled depression, addiction and a number of other health concerns; his own biography is one of great tragedy, and one could possibly read the hopelessness of this film as an extension of his own, and see this as a drive that would have to produce at least one masterpiece (his later Subarna-Rekha is also very much worth a look), even as it brought him to a premature end. For all of its' moral outrage, this film is absolutely compelling - any cinephile (or student of history) would do well to see it.