Nayak/The Hero
Satyajit Ray is best known for his magnificent Apu Trilogy, but this week the From Below will be showing his greatest film not within the trio: *Nayak (1966), or The Hero, *on Thursday June 12th at 8pm. The Hero happens to have won the 1966 Berlin Film Fest special jury prize from a jury chaired by none other than last week’s director: Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Here is the link to RSVP. Doors are at 7:50 and we’re starting the movie by 8:10!
The story, simple and beautifully told, follows a superstar Bengali matinee actor, Arindam Mukhopadhyay, as he takes a train ride across India to Delhi to receive a special prize. On board he meets a journalist who writes for a contemporary feminist magazine, and through conversations with her he must confront his dredged up existential angst: what kind of life has he lived, and has it been a good one?
The lead playing Arindam is none other than his real-life analogue, Uttam Kumar, considered by many to be the greatest Bengali screen actor of all time and who appeared in over 200 films. When writing the script, Ray said he cast Kumar not as an actor but as a “phenomenon” to explore the psychological experience of extreme celebrity and the social hallucinatory practice of image making. At the premiere of The Hero, thousands of adoring fans rushed the theater for the chance to glimpse Kumar; an uncommon occurrence for a Satyajit Ray art film, after all. On the event of Kumar’s funeral, nearly all of Calcutta ground to a halt to mourn in the streets their hometown legend.
Through flashbacks and dream sequences, The Hero offers beautiful and delicate investigation into the nature of celebrity and legacy, the relationship between a national cinema and self-representation, changing gender roles in modern India, the tension between art and the socialist movement, and the task of leading an authentic life. Ray explores his own feelings of being hemmed in by the melodramatic form of contemporary Bengali cinema, and creates a generative cross-over clash between post-independence popular film and the socially critical, art house parallel cinema. All in all this is a fantastic train movie, and a good, sweaty summer film.
In transit,
Charlie, Stefan, and Stark