Distant Thunder (Ray, 1973): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6pm
This 4K presentation is part of the Restored strand at BFI Southbank (details here).
BFI review:
Satyajit Ray had been
planning to make a film about the Bengal famine of 1943 to 1944 for some
years when he finally returned to the village landscapes he’d left
behind with Three Daughters. A man-made catastrophe exacerbated by war
and natural disasters, the famine decimated rural agriculture, leading
to the death of some five million people. Adapted by Ray from the
contemporaneous novel by Bibhutibhusan Banerjee, Distant Thunder
examines the causes of the cataclysm. Shooting in vibrant colour, Ray
fielded accusations that he’d glamourised or aestheticised the famine,
and while it’s true that cinematographer Soumendu Roy captures the
lushness of the natural world in vibrant detail, its disharmony with man
speaks to the film’s bitter critical ironies. Although
Distant Thunder took the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival,
otherwise it seems Ray couldn’t win. Local critics found it
insufficiently anguished, while western writers saw only unsubtle
melodrama. It’s a powerful examination of human failure, but charges of
universality do Ray – and his subject – a disservice. “From the first
moment of any Ray film,” read The Times review, “the spectator forgets
the racial and cultural difference of the characters and sees only human
beings.” As biographer Andrew Robinson has noted, however, that’s a
misleading charge, however well-intentioned, for such an explicit – and
specific – examination of caste tensions.
Matthew Thrift
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