NARRATIVE DISJUNCTION IN THE CINEMA OF SATYAJIT RAY

prescription of the realist theorist, Siegfried Kracauer who was very fond of open endings.

Ray ends ‘Pratidwandi’ with a letter wherein, once again, there is a play of time and space. The letter is voiced even before it is written and the contents are shown before the writing; the film ends with the protagonist signing off, concluding a film with a distinctly elliptic narrative structure.

In ‘Ghare Baire’ (The home and the world-1984), it is an ambitious presentation, somewhat flawed but replete with passages of great aesthetic beauty. Based on the novel by Tagore, the text is composed using a polyphony of voices, a hydra-headed narrative perspective. The film shows the perspectives of Bimala, the modern woman, Sandip, the revolutionary for whom the end justifies the means and Nikhilesh, the landowner with a sense of justice and responsibility.

“I have come through the fire” declares the voice of Bimala and one feels that this background narration is as arresting and evocative as in the Resnais films of the early sixties9. The script evolves using familiar narrative techniques but the multiple voices contribute towards a shift from the simple, linear narrative.

‘Ghare Baire’ does not sustain the initial promise of its beginning, later lapsing into somewhat conventional story-telling but its stress on key moments like Bimala and Nikhilesh’s difference of opinion, Bimala’s singing lessons, her entry into the outer world with her husband and the signals of her infatuation with the Sandip persona – all merge art with artifice. This is a fairly linear narrative but by no means a simple, straightforward one.

Ray’s last three films did not impress to the extent that his earlier films did but ‘Agantuk’ (The outsider1992) has elements of dramaturgy that makes a virtue of ambiguity. The suspicion with which the outsider is viewed by the family is communicated to the audience in a subtle manner and this gives an unexpected flavour to the narrative. The denouement is significant for it seems that the director has used a microscope to analyse the urban middle class and shown it as unfeeling, selfcentred and lacking in a generosity of spirit. Their realization of their own folly is the only redeeming feature that the director finds in the urban middle class of that time. As elsewhere, there is a distinct musical pattern in even these last films.

This quality of tunefulness is quite abstract; it is a product of Ray's meticulous organization. Right from the design of the sequence, there is a noticeable and unique pattern that is felt even in the editing and sound applications.

Consider the film, ‘Charulata’. If one looks at the denouement, it is a longish sequence comprising the following:

The letter from Amal is shown on a small table, using a gently menacing crane shot that establishes the epistle as an index of foreboding ('coming events cast their shadows before'), forecasting Charu's volatile propinquity to Amal. Then, Bhupati's perusing of the letter and his innocent, unknowing remarks about Amal's plans and programmes are shown. Bhupati casually asks Charu to take a look at the letter. Then, he leaves to go outside.

Eventually, Charu goes to the letter and as she reads, she is overcome by a paroxysm of emotion and she breaks down screaming out her 'forbidden desire' for Amal. Suddenly Bhupati returns, unexpectedly, having forgotten something; and he is horrified at the revelation of Charu's love for Amal. Bhupati, in a situation of extreme dejection and shock, wanders about aimlessly in a phaeton10. When he returns, in a scene fraught with uncertainty and ambiguity, Charu, with fear and guilt writ large on her countenance, gestures to him to come inside. The elderly domestic help waits with a lamp in his hands. Bhupati enters but Ray freezes the moment even before Charu's and Bhupati's hands can meet, thus symbolizing “the broken nest". Words are insufficient to express the aesthetic pattern of this resonant miseen-scène.