Ritwik Ghatak

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Ritwik Ghatak (1925 - 1976) was an Bengali Indian filmmaker. Among Bengali directors, his place is probably only second to that of Satyajit Ray. He was born in Dhaka in East Bengal (now Bangladesh). He and his family moved to Kolkata just before millions of other refugees from East Bengal began to flood into the city, fleeing the terrible 1943 famine and the Partition of India in 1947. Identification with this tide of refugees was to define his practice, providing the overriding metaphor for cultural dismemberment and exile that marks his films.

Related Topics:
Bengal - India - Satyajit Ray - Dhaka - East Bengal - Bangladesh - Kolkata - Partition of India - Metaphor

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In 1948, Ghatak wrote his first play Kalo sayar (The Dark Lake), and participated in a revival of the landmark play Nabanna. In 1951, Ghatak joined the Indian People's Theatre Association ( IPTA ). He wrote, directed and acted in plays and translated Brecht and Gogol into Bengali. In 1957, he wrote and directed his last play Jwalanta (The Burning).

Related Topics:
IPTA - Brecht - Gogol

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Ghatak entered film with Nemai Ghosh's Chinnamul (1950) as actor and assistant director. Chinnamul was followed two years later by Ghatak's first completed film Nagarik (1952), both major break-throughs for the Indian cinema. Ghatak's early work sought theatrical and literary precedent in bringing together a documentary realism, a remarkable stylized performance often drawn from the folk theatre, and a Brechtian use of the filmic apparatus.

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Ritwik Ghatak directed eight full-length films. His best-known films, Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960), Komal Gandhar (1961), and Subarnarekha (1962), a trilogy based in Calcutta and addressing the condition of refugee-hood, proved controversial and prevented him from making features for the next decade. In all three films, he used a basic and at times starkly realist story-line, upon which he inscribed a range of mythic references through a dense overlay of visual and aural registers.

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Please see http://www.chaosmag.net/ghatak.html for a summary of plots for his feature films.

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Ghatak moved briefly to Pune in 1964, where he taught at the Film aand Television Institute of India ( FTII ), making his mark as a teacher to Mani Kaul, John Abraham, and others, but especially to Kumar Shahani, who was Ghatak's main inheritor in the 1970s and 1980s. At the FTII, he was involved in the making of two student films, viz. Fear and Rendezvous.

Related Topics:
FTII - Mani Kaul - John Abraham - Kumar Shahani

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Ghatak returned to film making only in the 1970s, when a Bangladeshi producer financed the epic Titash Ekti Nadir Naam (1973). His last film, and perhaps his most unusual, was the 'autobiographical' Jukti Takka ar Gappo (1974).

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