Page 85 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

72 The Apu Trilogy

creaking noise. They were not the right circumstances for the

first screening of a film that demanded attention. It needs ideal

projection conditions and a quiet audience and rapt attention.
When Pather Panchali opened a little later at a Calcutta cin-
ema, it ran poorly to begin with; but within a week or two word
got round, and by the end of its booking it was filling the house
and people were seeing it three times in a day. Had it not been
for the next booking – a south Indian spectacular – the cin-
ema house would have kept Pather Panchali. At six o’clock in
the morning after the film was taken off at the first cinema,
there was a ring at Ray’s door. It was the producer of the south
Indian film, S. S. Vasan. He had seen Pather Panchali and loved
it. With tears in his eyes he informed Ray that if he had known
about the film in advance, he would have agreed to postpone his
own opening. Soon, the film opened again at another cinema,
where it ran for a further seven weeks. As Ray’s friend R. P.
Gupta wrote of Pather Panchali in the 1980s, ‘All middle-aged
and older men and women know the furore ... that followed its
first release in Calcutta.’
No sequel to Pather Panchali was in Ray’s mind when it was
completed, as already mentioned. Indeed, he spent some time
in mid-1955 searching for a totally different story for his second
film. The success of Pather Panchali was what finally prompted
him to undertake Aparajito, and at the same time to resign from
his advertising job so as to become a full-time film-maker. Ray
began work on the new script in October 1955. Soon after, in
February, he mentioned Aparajito in a letter to an advertis-
ing contact in Bombay as follows: ‘I am on the verge of a new
venture – a sequel to Pather Panchali ... a story with an entirely
different texture to it, and a theme of the utmost interest and
importance’ – that is, Apu’s feeling of freedom after the death of
his beloved mother. He added: ‘I hope to avoid the many short-
comings of PP which resulted partly from my own inexperience
and partly from the manner of its making.’

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