Kolkata in cinema
Three directors made three completely different arguments about what a film could be, within about ten miles of each other, and most of it was shot on these streets.
1955
Pather Panchali
পথের পাঁচালী
Satyajit Ray
1963
Mahanagar
মহানগর
Satyajit Ray
1964
Charulata
চারুলতা
Satyajit Ray
1960
Meghe Dhaka Tara
মেঘে ঢাকা তারা
Ritwik Ghatak
1966
Nayak
নায়ক
Satyajit Ray
1974
Sonar Kella
সোনার কেল্লা
Satyajit Ray
1979
Joi Baba Felunath
জয় বাবা ফেলুনাথ
Satyajit Ray
1971
Interview
Mrinal Sen
1979
Ek Din Pratidin
একদিন প্রতিদিন
Mrinal Sen
1961
Saptapadi
সপ্তপদী
Ajoy Kar
Famous films
1955
Satyajit Ray
Shot on weekends over two and a half years, with a borrowed camera and an amateur crew.
Ray pawned his wife's jewellery to keep going and finished it with a West Bengal government grant booked, confusingly, under roads. It won at Cannes the following year.
1963
Satyajit Ray
A Calcutta housewife takes a job selling knitting machines, and the family's idea of itself collapses.
Madhabi Mukherjee's first lead for Ray. It is a film about the city as an economic fact: rent, wages, a shared flat, and a job you cannot admit to.
1964
Satyajit Ray
The one Ray said he would change least. A bored wife, a printing press, and a pair of opera glasses.
Adapted from Tagore's Nastanirh and set in an 1880s Jorasanko-style household. The opening seven minutes, almost wordless, are among the most studied in Indian cinema.
1960
Ritwik Ghatak
A refugee family consumes its eldest daughter, who supports all of them and dies of it.
The final cry on the hillside is one of the most cited moments in Indian cinema. Ghatak crossed from Dhaka in 1947 and made almost everything about that crossing.
1966
Satyajit Ray
A film star on an overnight train to Delhi, interrogated by a journalist and by himself.
Ray wrote it for Uttam Kumar, who was at the height of his fame and agreed to a part that takes him apart. Most of it happens in a moving carriage.
1974
Satyajit Ray
Feluda on screen: a boy who remembers a past life, and a chase across Rajasthan.
Ray wrote the Feluda stories, then filmed two of them. For most Bengalis the detective, his cousin Topshe and the writer Jatayu are as familiar as anyone in the family.
1979
Satyajit Ray
The second Feluda film, and Utpal Dutt as the villain Maganlal Meghraj.
Set in Benares but produced entirely out of Kolkata, and the knife-throwing sequence is the single most quoted scene in Bengali popular cinema.
1971
Mrinal Sen
A young man needs a Western suit for a job interview and cannot get one. Then he turns to the camera.
The first of the Calcutta trilogy, made while the city was under curfew during the Naxalite years. Sen breaks the fourth wall and asks the audience what it thinks it is doing there.
1979
Mrinal Sen
A working daughter does not come home one night, and the family's respectability disintegrates over the hours of waiting.
The quiet masterpiece. Almost the entire film takes place in one flat, over one night, and the daughter is barely on screen.
1961
Ajoy Kar
Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen on a motorcycle, and the most quoted Bengali romance there is.
The Othello rehearsal sequence, with the two of them dubbed by Utpal Dutt and Jennifer Kendal, is a set piece every Bengali household can recite.
Locations
Not every address survives, and Ray filmed a good deal of Pather Panchali in a village south of the city. What is here is what you can still stand in front of.
The village south of the city that stood in for Nischindipur.
Where the storyboards were drawn.
The clerical Calcutta the film is about.
The flat, and the streets she walks selling.
The world it recreates: a reformist Bengali mansion with its own press.
The southern and eastern edges, settled after Partition.
Where the train leaves from.
The industry the film is about.
Feluda's address in Ballygunge, and a real street.
Where the interiors were built.
The streets, shot largely without permission.
The shared building, the neighbours, the stairwell.
Studio-era Bengali cinema at its commercial height.
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Satyajit Ray
1921–1992
Wrote, drew, scored and directed. Honorary Academy Award in 1992.
Ritwik Ghatak
1925–1976
Eight features, mostly about Partition, mostly commercial failures.
Mrinal Sen
1923–2018
Broke the fourth wall and never apologised for it.
Aparna Sen
b. 1945
36 Chowringhee Lane in 1981, and a second career better than the first.
Rituparno Ghosh
1963–2013
Nineteen films in nineteen years, and the most significant queer figure in Bengali public life.
Uttam Kumar
1926–1980
The Mahanayak. Seven flops, then thirty years.
Suchitra Sen
1931–2014
Stopped in 1978 and was never photographed in public again.
Soumitra Chatterjee
1935–2020
Fourteen films with Ray, and Feluda on screen.
Madhabi Mukherjee
b. 1942
Mahanagar and Charulata, and the face of Ray's best decade.
Utpal Dutt
1929–1993
Marxist playwright, jatra writer, and the finest villain Bengali cinema had.