Ritwik Ghatak and other Bengali filmmakers who are not Satyajit Ray

xyzzzz will have to suggest more than R.G., per previous posts of his. (We would go to the movies a lot if I lived in London, dude.)

Anyway I rewatched The Cloud-Capped Star in its Criterion edition which, as the sole supplement points out, has a particularly significant soundtrack (both music and effects). I know I missed a lot of the cultural and historical references but perhaps not all of them, since i've done a little reading after also seeing Ajantrik and Subarnarekha.

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6580-the-cloud-capped-star-a-cry-for-life

We would def go to the movies a lot Morbz!!

Tbh idk lots about Bengali cinema but Ghatak is really one of the best imo. I'll try and post something more in-depth whenever I get to re-watch.

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/01/25/a-new-look-at-ritwik-ghataks-bengal/

Alas, Ghatak’s own military campaigns ended in failure. All his films, with the exception of Cloud-Capped Star, were out-and-out box-office flops, which is unsurprising since little money was put into marketing them (the producers made the self-fulfilling assumption that such challenging art would have few takers). Worse, critics on the left denounced Ghatak for bourgeois pessimism and decadence, charges he repeatedly and vainly denied in print. Early in his career he took to drinking heavily; by the mid-1960s, he was an inveterate alcoholic. His students at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), where he served as a vice-principal between 1964 and 1965, remember a brilliant man who was often drunk. “Keep a bottle of liquor in one pocket and your childhood in another,” he advised young directors.

all but unavailable on DVD in the UK :(

I thought the bfi would have a copy of Titas at least

that's the only one that seems to be not at hyper-inflated out of print prices

It's the only one I have, watched everything else at the cinema and the one I started with.