Page 133 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

120 The Apu Trilogy

nearer to the camera until we can see her anguished expression
in extreme close-up. Then, at the sound of a piercing train whis-
tle, she half-turns, and the shot changes abruptly to a blurred
view of passing railway carriages: we know Sarbajaya’s mind is
made up, and that she and Apu are now on their way to the new
village.
As Ray remarked of his editing in an interview in 1958, before
the Apu Trilogy was completed, ‘I hate conventional time-lapses.
They draw attention to themselves. I like strong modulations
from one thing to another. You see, I am always hopefully con-
cerned to get the feeling of the movement of life itself. There
are no neat transitions in life. Things make the transition for
me. A travelling train, for example. Again, there is no moment
of evident transition, say, from childhood to boyhood, or on to
youth.’
This comment pinpoints an underlying difficulty with
Aparajito after the film leaves Benares. There are now several
inevitable transitions in Apu’s life as he grows up – becoming a
young priest, going to school in the village, leaving for Calcutta
to study science in college, taking his first real job in a print-
ing press, and, of course, turning from a ten-year old (Pinaki
Sen Gupta) into an adolescent (Smaran Ghosal). Some of them
feel a little too neat. However, although Apu’s general trajectory
from rural obscurity to metropolitan enlightenment is predict-
able, like a Bengali David Copperfield, the specifics of the path
he follows and the characters he meets on the way are not, which
maintains our interest.
One irresistible scene, like the grocer–schoolmaster’s school
in Pather Panchali, shows the visit of a schools inspector. With
Ray, formal education tends to be pictured as either monotonous
or comic. Here comedy predominates, through many delicious
touches, in particular the fastidious headmaster, a Christian in an
immaculate black jacket and dhoti, shooing away a cow from the
school courtyard by clapping his hands and shouting in English
at the recalcitrant animal, shortly before the arrival by phaeton

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