21 Facts About Pather Panchali

Pather Panchali is described as a turning point in Indian cinema, as it was among the films that pioneered the Parallel Cinema movement, which espoused authenticity and social realism.

Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay's novel Pather Panchali is a classic bildungsroman in the canon of Bengali literature.

Pather Panchali is a type of narrative folk song that used to be performed in Bengal and was the forerunner of another type of folk performance, the jatra.

Pather Panchali did not have a script; it was made from Ray's drawings and notes.

Pather Panchali considered the incomplete footage to be of very high quality and encouraged Ray to finish the film so that it could be shown at a MoMA exhibition the following year.

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Realist narrative style of Pather Panchali was influenced by Italian neorealism and the works of French director Jean Renoir.

Pather Panchali created a piece based on the raga Patdeep, played on the tar shehnai, by Dakshina Mohan Tagore to accompany the scene in which Harihar learns of Durga's death.

Pather Panchali had its domestic premiere at the annual meeting of the Advertising Club of Calcutta; the response there was not positive, and Ray felt "extremely discouraged".

Pather Panchali was released in Basusree, a Calcutta cinema on 26 August 1955 and received a poor initial response.

Lindsay Anderson commented after the Cannes screening that Pather Panchali had "the quality of ultimate unforgettable experience".

Pather Panchali is available in DVD in Region 2 PAL and Region 1 NTSC formats.

On 4 May 2015, the restored Pather Panchali premiered at the Museum of Modern Art, a little more than 60 years to the day after the film's world premiere at the same venue.

Pather Panchali represents the bond between Durga and Indir, and their fate, as signifying a philosophical core: that both the young and the old die.

Robinson writes about a peculiar quality of "lyrical happiness" in the film, and states that Pather Panchali is "about unsophisticated people shot through with great sophistication, and without a trace of condescension or inflated sentiment".

Sharmishtha Gooptu discusses the idea that the idyllic village life portrayed in Pather Panchali represents authentic Bengali village life, which disappeared during the upheavals of Partition in 1947.

Pather Panchali suggests that the film seeks to connect an idealised, pre-partition past with the actual present of partitioned Bengal, and that it uses prototypes of rural Bengal to construct an image of the ideal village.

Mainak Biswas has written that Pather Panchali comes very close to the concept of Italian neorealism, as it has several passages with no dramatic development, even though the usual realities of life, such as the changing of seasons or the passing of a day, are concretely filmed.

Pather Panchali was followed by two films that continued the tale of Apu's life—Aparajito in 1956 and Apur Sansar in 1959.

Pather Panchali was the first film made in independent India to receive major critical attention internationally, placing India on the world cinema map.

Pather Panchali worked on scripting, casting, scoring, cinematography, art direction and editing, as well as designing his own credit titles and publicity material.

Pather Panchali developed a distinctive style of film-making based, as was the case with Pather Panchali, on visual lyricism and strongly humanistic themes.