NARRATIVE DISJUNCTION IN THE CINEMA OF SATYAJIT RAY

Ray’s Arindam is slightly more flawed although both characters undergo paroxysms of guilt.

The dreams in ‘Nayak’ have often come in for a great deal of criticism. The first one, in which Arindam sinks into a quicksand of cash has often been denigrated as being too literal, too obvious. While this accusation may be somewhat true owing to the directness of the presentation, there are other elements in that selfsame dream that are worth mentioning. The soundtrack is very interesting for one. The phone rings and faint ambient sounds serve to create an atmosphere of menace. The skeletal phones, too, are artistic and fearsome. The reference to Shankar Da and his appearance are ingenious and his made up face is distinctly disturbing. The second dream seems more assured in its realization albeit the influence of Fellini’s ‘8 ½’ (1963) is distinctly palpable.

The point here is that the structure of the film is in the tradition of narrative disjunction with the dreams and the flashbacks running parallel to the main track; moreover, the parallel syntagmas often impact the main journey and disturb the linearity, thus building moments of stasis.

The text of ‘Pratidwandi’ (The adversary-1971) is full of cinematic elements of varying efficacy. Apart from the use of negative shots to convey a feeling of disorientation, the screenplay uses various kinds of motifs and flash forwards that serve to interrupt the fabric of the narrative. Siddhartha often sees the world through the prism of a medical student, analysing the anatomical features of people whom he sees or meets. At times, his mind, possessed by a blinding fury, races ahead in a screeching climax where he shoots his sister’s boss for attempting to take undue advantage of her. This is a modernist film of three friends who are very different; of two brothers who are very different; Siddhartha’s brother is a true blue revolutionary, a Naxalite in the early seventies. Siddhartha imagines himself to be a Che Gue Vera of sorts but cannot totally plunge himself into the life of an underground political activist. At heart, he is middle-class, decidedly so but aspiring towards the

initiators of insurrection.

‘Pratidwandi’, while communicating the urban milieu of the seventies in the metropolis, does an effective job of subverting the narrative by the constant deviations that include flash backs, flash forwards and illusions. One cut is particularly interesting when the sister calls the brother to the terrace and we see a visual of a little sister calling her little brother; the time jump is startling and exquisitely cinematic and conveys the time worn dictum that our lives are composed of different strands of time.

This film has something of the flavour and fervour of the New Wave; if I were to be facetious, it was almost as if Ray (who has been generally critical of art being dwarfed by artifice) were doing a ‘Sen’ in his own inimitable way. Mrinal Sen who was long Ray’s contemporary filmmaker and, in a sense, a rival of sorts, became enamoured of formalistic devices that often peppered his films7.

Ray has been fond of improvisation, of using the hand held camera and rapid cutting in some of his ‘urban quadrilogy’ films. The tour de force is the sequence in ‘Pratidwandi’ wherein Siddhartha, in an outburst of frustration, (after being kept waiting in inhuman conditions) overturns the table where he was to be interviewed. He walks out and the camera, mimetically moves apposite to his dramatic departure, joining hands with the editing and creates a montage of rapidly changing shots of the metropolis scarred by posters and graffiti. The sequence becomes a trifle blurred as it merges into the beautiful countryside viewed from the perspective of a journey by train.

This may seem like a climax but it is not the end as Ray uses yet another cinematic device to conclude his narrative. This is in keeping with the tone and tenor of his script which often keeps the viewer guessing while subtly providing details and incidents that prevent the text from degenerating into melodramatic hyperbole8.

The end of ‘Pratidwandi’ does justice to the