Return of the Masters

Satyajit Ray made "Pather Panchali' (1955) & Ingmar Bergman made "The Seventh Seal" (1957). The main character types in these two films were repeated in Ray's "Ashani Sanket" (1973) & Bergman's "The Serpent's Egg' (1977). It is proposed to point out the similarities here.

Ray returned to film in rural Bengal & deal with a Brahmin Priest (albeit more prosperous this time around) in colour this time. But external factors like the Bengal Famine (British made) put him & his wife in dire straits again. Though the time frame was much later with corresponding social changes, both stories were written by Bibhuti Bhushan Bandyopadhyay.

Strolling players' family played a pivotal role in the iconic "The Seventh Seal" set at the time of Black Death in Europe. "The Serpent's Egg", set at the start of the Nazi era uses a Circus couple as the pivotal characters. The Jewish man, out of work because of drink, is put to work in the archives where results of biological experiments are stored. The doctor there kills himself by cyanide, & the Jew let off but goes missing. The woman follows the oldest profession & there is no child Michael, as in the earlier film to create hope.

European Masters of Film

At the outset, it may be mentioned that most of these confined themselves to a life-long theme & explored it exhaustively.

Michelangelo Antonioni

Federico-Fellini

Antonioni examined human alienation from his society. After his critical successes, major studios roped him in to make films with international stars. Blow-Up, Red Desert, Zabriskie Point & The Passenger achieved varying degrees of main-stream acceptance, with Satyajit Ray acerbically commenting "Perhaps the artistic significance of "Blow Up" is like Antonioni's tennis ball, which a vast number of critics & filmgoers seem to have picked up & handed back to the Maestro. I, for one, am still looking."

His fellow Italian, Fellini went to the other extreme of whole-hearted embrace of a fantastical, decadent life, impossibly working air borne statues of Jesus Christ & Roman Orgies into the body of his work, including the auto-biographical "Amarcord."

Visconti, showing dysfunctional families like "Rocco & his brothers" went onto to make opulent period pieces like "The Leopard" with (the possibly miscast) Burt Lancaster in the eponymous role.

Vittorio De Sica

Ingmar Bergman

De Sica, starting with the neo-realist trend setter "Bicycles Thieves" used the star power of Sophia Loren & Marcello Mastroianni to make meaningful, popular films.

The French "New-Wave", fuelled by the critics turned auteurs, charted individual paths. The most accessible, Truffaut, charted the growth of a boy into adulthood, in a series of films starting with "Four Hundred Blows" similar to Ray's "Apu Trilogy", though he is supposed to have walked out of the screening of "Pather Panchali", the fastidious Francois revolted at the Brahmin family eating with their hands!

Claude Chabrol, the acolyte of Hitchcock, expectedly made suspenseful movies.

Resnais, the man who pioneered the use of non-linear time in his debut film "Hiroshima mon amour" took a break from his pre-occupation with non-chronological presentations in his "Stavisky", a story of a  con-man with access to the highest in the land, played with aplomb by Jean Paul Belmondo.

The iconoclast Bunuel, starting from slicing eyeballs on screen, made other anti-establishment films & also a conventional, well-made "Robinson Crusoe."

Satyajit Ray

The Swedish Bergman, delved into the innermost recesses of the human psyche, especially the female one, but occassionally redeemed himself by wondrous visions like the baby Michael & his mother appearing like the Madonna & Child, in his "The Seventh Seal."

To end on a lighter note, the anti establishment Godard made anarchic films which none liked. When Satyajit Ray was told about this, he said "I also don't like him. But his films are filled with striking things."