Udayer Pathe Film Analysis

A New Attitude: The 1940s

With the 1940s came a paradigm shift in the attitude to cinema, with film makers increasingly adhering to cinematic norms of acting, as opposed to the theatrical and demonstrating a willingness to address everyday reality. The film that can be said to have been instrumental in bringing about this change was Udayer Pathe, made in 1944. Its writer, Jyotirmay Roy, was responsible for the streak of social awareness that informs the film, while director Bimal Roy, later to find international recognition with his neo realist Hindi feature Do Bigha Zameen in 1953, showed great vision in doing away with stars, getting his amateur performers to emote with restraint and structuring his script tightly. Though marred by its at times stilted dialogues and a tendency to oversimplify, there is no doubt that Udayer Pathe was a trendsetter. The

By the time the 1980s dawned, decline and degeneration had set in almost permanently. A number of factors were responsible for this. Rising costs of making films was a deterrent to good cinema. Further, the New Cinema Movement had started to peter out, thanks as much to a lack of proper distribution and marketing as to the self-indulgence of many of its practitioners and the changing economics of film making. Finally, none of the new actors and technicians who emerged measured up to the old guard who were slowly on their way out. The death of Uttam Kumar robbed Bengali commercial cinema of its most saleable name and many films aficionados argue that the void he left is yet to be filled. Where once Bengali cinema of the 1950s and 1960s used to be the inspiration for remakes in sundry other Indian languages, things came to such a pass that most Bengali films came to resemble a badly made Hindi commercial