Daydreaming!

Birth of Art!

A reckoning of it all.

No aesthetics, no pompous theory, only an attempt to get to the roots of aesthetic creation entirely in terms of my personal experience. When I turn to all those artists and thinkers around me, I have a feeling that it was perhaps that touch of the imagination that adds a glow to the vision that lay behind their greatest achievements.

Different implements come to use at different times when making a film.

Let us start with the camera, and to make things clearer still, let us begin from the still shot.

'Composition' is the English word for the organization of demonstrable materials within the frame of the image. We shall come later to how several statements can be made by means of composition.

BEDENI (1951)

Production: Sunil Roy

Screenplay &

Direction : Ritwik Ghatak (based on a story by Tarashankar Bandopadhyaya).

Cinematography: Sachin Dasgupta

Cast: Kali Banerjee, Ketaki Devi, Prabha Devi.

For any film maker today, it would be a grave and sacred thought to think of making a film on Vietnam. It would be audacity and even a sin to talk about it lightly or without deep involvement, or without a serious study of all the facts about Vietnam. But that is the sin I will be committing in the course of this piece.

[In 1974 some film enthusiasts of Delhi recorded a long interview with Ritwik Ghatak. We print below substantial portions of the recording. By that time Ghatak was an alcoholic, embittered and a physical wreck. But what come out strongly are—his irreverent attitude and an abiding hope of a better world in the future.]

 We are so used to calling cinema a visual art that I sometimes fear we shall soon forget that sound has an important world of its own. In fact, sound has that much importance in a film as it contributes to the aesthetic quality of the visuals.

 4 November 1925 Born at Jindabazar, Dhaka

 1946 Joined active Marxist politics

1947-50 B.A. from Krishnanath College, Berhampur.