Page 21 - THE CHANGING WORLD OF RAY

of Nehru’s project, democ- long-takes portray the des-

racy as political oppression, perate faces and tired bodies

alongside the dismantling of silent, unemployed men,

of old family structures, the pointlessly waiting in the

increasing feeling of person- cue for a job. It is a collective

al isolation and desperation form of castration, as their

in overpopulated, alienating, shakti is never revitalized,
urban settings, and the rise or set free; instead, it is so-

of inequality, unemployment, cially and economically en-

street violence, and nostal- trapped in the impersonal

gia for state of massive unemploy-

a lost ment. This collective sense

imag- of alienation is felt by Sid-
ined dhartha, who is portrayed as

past a dislocated wonderer, both

(i.e. the from himself and from the

imag- world. This sense of disloca-

ined, tion is expressed in the se-

magical quence portraying Siddhar-
forest in tha’s vision in a temple. As

Pather he aimlessly gazes at some

Pancha- American tourists, who are

li). fascinated by a ‘holy’ cow

Ray’s angriest film, Pratid- while smoking weed, next

wandi, portrays the journey to beggars dying of hunger,

of Siddhartha, a young, pas- Siddhartha’s gaze is lost in
sionate, modern Buddha, his own social invisibility.

walking aimlessly up and

down the streets of the new In this liminal state

Calcutta in search for a job. of mind, his visionary expe-

Large sections of the film rience begins with a night-

take place in the oppressive marish vision of modernity

mise-en-scene of public of- in the form of exoticism: the
fices, where slow-panning caricatures of an aboriginal