Pather panchali blu ray movie#
Pather panchali blu ray series#

They explore the village and its surroundings, with much attention paid to local flora and fauna. He and Durga play with other children and envy their relative prosperity. Apu (Subir Banerjee) attends school in a dirt-floored, open-walled shelter that doubles as a shop.

Pather panchali blu ray series#

We witness Apu’s birth and watch him grow to about age seven through a series of picaresque episodes illustrating village life.

Pather panchali blu ray movie#

Chunibala Devi shamelessly steals the movie in an astonishing, vital performance in this role. And most memorably, his aged, toothless grandmother (actually, the exact relationship is never made clear), Indir Thakrun, totters around the family home, cackling and grumbling and constantly threatening to leave when she feels unrecognized or unappreciated. His older sister, Durga (Uma Das Gupta), is loving but mischievous, frequently enraging the better-off neighbors by stealing fruit from their orchard. His strong-willed, sharp-tongued mother, Sarbajaya (Karuna Bannerjee), lives in a seemingly perpetual state of frustration. His father, Harihar (Kanu Bannerjee), is a scholar and playwright, habitually unable to support his household. Pather Panchali (generally translated as “Song of the Little Road” and first shown in 1955) introduces Apu’s Brahmin family, living in poverty in a tiny Bengali village. The Apu films are a classic Bildungsroman, following the central character from birth to manhood, through trials and triumphs. The results of the restoration are sensational the films probably didn’t look this good on their initial release. Fortunately, the invaluable Criterion Collection has recently undertaken a massive restoration of the three Apu films, and new Digital Cinema Projection (DCP) “prints” are currently traveling across the country and will eventually be used for new Blu-ray and DVD releases.

For decades, the only available projection prints have been of poor quality, and home video issues looked washed out, scratchy, unfocused. A major factor in this neglect has been the accessibility and the condition of his films. Although his films reliably show up on all-time best lists, especially his landmark “Apu Trilogy,” and especially the first of those films, Pather Panchali, he lingers on the sidelines in the U.S. But the Indian director and his works have never quite passed into the general consciousness in the manner of his contemporaries. In critical circles, Satyajit Ray is a name held in the same high regard as fellow mid-century Art Cinema titans Bergman, Fellini, and Kurosawa.