Film lover and connoisseur of all things cine? You have one more reason to rejoice. Read on…
The hand-drawn sketches with rough line work are striking and instantly grab your attention. The story being told in the panels seems familiar—one that was translated on silver screen to Pather Panchali by Satyajit Ray in 1955. The movie, over the years, acquired cult status and is a film school must-watch. While a lot has been known about Ray’s journey of making the movie, The Pather Panchali Sketchbook brings together a book that is a film lover’s paradise.
The book edited by Ray’s filmmaker son, Sandeep, provides a glimpse of how Ray imagined his adaptation of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s novel of the same name. The publication includes Ray’s original drawings that served as a blueprint for the screenplay and photographs of the cast and crew on location. Apart from the 58-page sketchbook, the book brings together essays on the film by Ray’s collaborators like Subrata Mitra (cinematographer), Bansi Chandragupta (art director) and Dulal Dutt (editor). The essays first written in Bengali, now published in English for the first time, were on their collaboration with Ray and were published when the film was out in now defunct Bengali journals. The book also includes reviews on the film published in magazines like Sight and Sound when the movie came out, ads, booklets describing the movie and post stamps.
Back in time When Satyajit Ray made a trip to London along with wife Bijoya in 1950, he made the visual scenario for Pather Panchali on a boat, on their way back home in a 58-page drawing block bought from GC Laha Paints Shop at Dharamsala, Kolkata. “Because he was a graphic artist, he created a story board of the important scenes from the film. The sketches were done to convince the producers to invest in the film,” says Sandeep Ray. “The sketches were precise with the kind of lighting and frames he wanted. He never managed to convince the producers and it was a futile effort but for us, it’s now a masterpiece,” he adds.
Later, sometime in the 1960s, he donated this book to Cinémathèque Française, the famed cine museum in Paris—that holds one of the largest archives of film documents and film-related objects in the world—at the request of some of his French friends, including Georges Sadoul (a French journalist and film writer). “In his final days, Ray expressed a desire to have a look at the script. Sandeep contacted the Cinémathèque authorities for the return of the sketchbook,” says Arup De of Society for the Preservation of Satyajit Ray Archives. But, the authorities replied that the sketchbook had gone missing. “I’ve no idea how it was suddenly missing. Probably they became like our government for a moment,” jokes Sandeep.
Fantastic artworks and where to find them Last year, The Criterion Collection, a New York-based company ‘dedicated to gathering the greatest films from around the world’, spotted that the Cinémathèque had a good scanned copy of the sketchbook. “They were planning to release a DVD of the Apu Trilogy where they wanted to include some of the Pather Panchali sketches as an extra attraction,” says De. When Criterion sought his help to get the sketches, he gave the Cinémathèque the requisite permission to give the copy to Criterion. “They then got it and sent us a copy as well,” he says. “This was the first time even I was seeing the sketches. I was dumbfounded when I saw them—they were so elaborate,” says Sandeep. Though Ray did continue to sketch his stories after this film, they weren’t as elaborate as “he was now The Satyajit Ray and he no longer had to convince producers,” he adds, laughing.
Sandeep had plans to come out with some kind of a book with exclusive memorabilia being the 60th anniversary of the film and the timing of sketchbook was just right. The idea was to create a collector’s edition of the sketchbook, along with other collectables. So, scrapbooks dating back to the 1950s filled with Ray’s printed writings and innumerable cuttings from newspapers and magazines containing articles and pictures on his work were dug up. “We got some other material from the archives of The Statesman, the Hindustan Standard and Sight & Sound,” reveals De. Sandeep says it was a laborious process and it took around six to seven months to bring everything together.
While no parts of the sketchbook were missing, a bit of restoration had to be done while the book was being laid out. “The book will serve to be a very important document as it formed the foundation on which Ray’s maiden film was based. Later, Ray did two traditional scripts for Pather Panchali. But he did not follow either of them while making the film,” adds De.
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