'What else is there but people?'

 

Editor’s note: Ritwik Ghatak (1925-1976) had a short, volatile, and highly influential career as a writer, filmmaker, and critic. A contemporary of Satyajit Ray, Ghatak offered a counterpoint to Ray’s Western sensibilities with his working-class tales of outcasts, migrants, and rebels.  Despite never receiving commercial or critical success during his lifetime, Ghatak’s work also influenced two strands of Indian cinema that followed: the maximalists Subhash Ghai and Sanjay Leela Bhansali, and the formalists Adoor Gopalakrishnan, John Abraham, Kumar Shahani, and Mani Kaul—most of them Ghatak’s students at the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune. 

 

To mark his birth centenary, we offer this rare interview with the uncompromising maverick.

 

Unmechanical: Ritwik Ghatak in 50 Fragments, edited by Shamya Dasgupta, has been excerpted with permission from Westland.

 

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An interview with Ritwik Ghatak, conducted sometime in the 1960s

 

Why do you make films?

 

Ghatak: For the people. What else is there but people? The last word in all art is the people. I, in my own small way, try to do the same.

 

They say all art is mimesis of life. Do you agree that cinema is also an imitation of life?

 

Ghatak: There is nothing different about cinema. Like with all art, in cinema, too, we try to find something new, something deep. Cinema is a form of art. Therefore, it has to be responsible. Responsible to the people. This we cannot ignore.

 

If it imitates life, what life are we talking about: the social or the personal?

 

Ghatak: The personal is becoming less relevant now. It’s the social that is becoming more and more significant. So art must make the social life of humans its accessory. Of course, there is the question of the art being liked; the artist is rendered irrelevant if that isn’t the case. I feel that is a distortion of sorts in all art. If you understand that, you will understand what I have said so far.

 

Looking at the other forms of art—literature, paintings, dance, music—does cinema have a quality that sets it apart?

 

Ghatak: Nothing significant. The fact of attracting human beings and mesmerising them is true of all art and equal in all art. There’s no need to assign any additional value to cinema in this regard. Human beings are human beings. They express their love in much the same way towards all art. I don’t see any reason to put cinema on a pedestal. I don’t know what else to say.

 

 

Watch Martin Scorsese speaking on Ritwik Ghatak’s ‘A River Called Titas’:

 

 

Along with changes in the social life of human beings, does cinema also change in terms of its form and content?

 

Ghatak: Content comes first. Rabindranath had said one must first bow at the altar of truth and only then beauty. Try to understand what he was saying. Form is nothing. It’s just the shell.

Take the films of Andrzej Wajda—made with so much labour and suffering, they are criticised for being impertinent. There is a need to penetrate the depths of the human mind. That’s where content takes shape and where form charts its own path. But these are external factors. The main thing is philosophy. That is in short supply these days.

 

After Luis Buñuel, [Kenji] Mizoguchi is no more, [Yasujirô] Ozu is no more. Only [Akira] Kurosawa has a free run. [Federico] Fellini has sold out. [Michelangelo] Antonioni doesn’t have the mentality to go deep enough into these things. [Ingmar] Bergman is a knave. [Michael] Cacoyannis did try some good things, in films like Elektra (1962), but he also lost his way.

 

The French Nouvelle Vague and the Polish and Czechoslovakian versions of Nouvelle Vague that followed pain me. The ones that adapted Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Albert Camus’s way of thinking were mostly infantile, childish. There was no depth to their work. Shirley Clarke has also been dishonest in films like Connection (1961) and so has Lindsay Anderson. They were not able to go deep into anything. All forms of art are constant, certain.

 

If cinema is a form of art, then [Sergei] Eisenstein, [Vsevolod] Pudovkin, [D.W.] Griffith and [Charlie] Chaplin, in his earlier works, are the only ones standing tall, supremely powerful. The mischief film-makers are up to these days is not acceptable to me at all. Apart from Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and everything Buñuel has made.

 

 

Watch Ritwik Ghatak’s short film Fear (1965), starring Subhash Ghai and Asrani

 

Are there any significant distinctions in the recent films made in the socialist countries of Europe and in other Western countries?

 

Ghatak: I don’t think so. Film-makers from the socialist countries are imitating the gimmickry of the French. I despise that. Their society is nothing like they are portraying in these films. The Russian films, with the exception of a couple of film-makers, are idiotic. There is no need to waste time talking about them. I haven’t watched films from Vietnam, I haven’t watched films from Cuba, I haven’t watched films from China. So I don’t have a right to speak about cinema from these countries. If they have made films like educated and sophisticated people, then thank you to them.

 

In trying to paint a reflection of life, do the artists try to make us see the world the way they do?

 

Ghatak: An artist is forever searching for something. Maybe the artist reaches somewhere at the end of it, maybe they fail to. But both are right in their own ways. The artist tries. And at one point, the artist gives up trying. But the fact that the artist has raised a question, that is what touches people, makes them think. That is what the artist’s success lies in.

 

But what if the audience doesn’t accept the artist, or the artist’s worldview? What should the artist do—stay firm in their convictions or think about their worldview based on what the audience tells them? Where does the independence of the artist end?

 

Ghatak: An artist must always remain firm in their convictions.

 

I asked you that because it is after your cinema that the era of subjective realism has begun to take shape in India.

 

Ghatak: Yes, I have heard that too, but such labelling has no meaning. Those are just labels, of no other use. Everyone is charting their own path. And this French ‘New Wave’ … I think it’s just a stunt.

 

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This interview has been translated from the version published in Ritwik: Nijer Kothay, Nijer Lekhay (Ritwik: In his words, in his writings), edited by Sanjay Mukhopadhyay and published by Bodhisattva Books in 2003. The interview has been published elsewhere too, but the editor of this anthology has regretfully not been able to confirm the name of the interviewer or the publication it first appeared in.