A Film Canon

The second installment in Ray's Apu trilogy, The Unvanquished elaborates a gradual disentanglement of sight and action, drawing a much stronger distinction between Apu's physical and perceptual trajectories than occurs in Song Of The Little Road - on the one hand, in the form of his wheeling explorations of Benares and Calcutta; on the other, in his nuanced, extended observations of his father and mother, respectively compared to the male types that populate the Benares ghat, and the intellectual types that populate his Calcutta school. This gradual attachment of perception to so many distinct objects tends to dilute the surreal, dream-like ambience of the earlier film into an exquisite, neorealist sentimentality, their common denominator the unmediated candor of the non-professional child actor. As a result, the feminised, occluded, overgrown perspectives of the earlier film are either removed, or deflected into the more conventionally masculine distances of doors, windows and other urban framing devices, while the various objects of religious wonder that suffused Apu's village life are resolutely demystified by his dual education at the hands of science and the newspaper industry. That said, the second act is exclusively set in the environs of that village - and, despite being shot in a stark, expansive, glary register that is resolutely at odds with its previous, rhizomic squalor, frequently echoes its original topoi (trains, festivals, sweets, magic) in such a way as to suggest that this extended demystification may merely be a transplantation, rather than negation, of wonder; a critical tenet of the bildungsroman tradition to which Bandopadhyah subscribes.