Ritwik Ghatak (1925-1976) was a contemporary of two other Bengali cinema giants, Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen. “A broken intellectual”, as Nilkantha, the character Ghatak himself plays in his last film, Jukti Takko Aar Gappo (1974), who had and still has a strong influence on the filmmaking of the generation that emerged around the 1970s. Pelting down on the banks of the Titas, the rain penetrates the film’s opening shots – a natural sign of a tragedy already underway. We can no longer distinguish the river from the title of the film itself, Ghatak’s cinema is an unpredictable ebb and flow, sudden cuts, frames overflowing with intensity, as remittent as memory and as sinuous as reason. JB
Restored print
