Ritwik Ghatak - Impact and Influence

Impact and Influence

At the time of his death (February 1976), Ghatak's primary impact would seem to have been through former students. Though his stint teaching film at FTII was brief, one-time students Mani Kaul, John Abraham, and especially Kumar Shahani (among many others), carried Ghatak's ideas and theories, which were further elaborated upon in his book Cinema And I, into the mainstream of Indian art film. Other students of his at the FTII included the acclaimed filmmakers Saeed Akhtar Mirza and Adoor Gopalakrishnan.

Ghatak stood entirely outside the world of Indian commercial film. None of the elements of the commercial cinema (singing and dancing, melodrama, stars, glitz) featured in his work. He was watched by students and intelligentsia, not by the masses. His students have also tended to work in the art cinema or independent cinema tradition.

While other neo-realist directors like Satyajit Ray succeeded in creating an audience outside India during their lifetime, Ghatak was not so fortunate. While he was alive, his films were appreciated primarily within India. Satyajit Ray did what he could to promote his colleague, but Ray's generous praise did not translate into international fame for Ghatak. For example, Ghatak's Nagarik (1952) was perhaps the earliest example of a Bengali art film, preceding Ray's Pather Panchali by three years, but was not released until after his death in 1977. His first commercial release Ajantrik (1958) was also one of the earliest Indian films to portray an inanimate object, in this case an automobile, as a character in the story, many years before the Herbie films. Ghatak's Bari Theke Paliye (1958) had a similar plot to François Truffaut's later film The 400 Blows (1959), but Ghatak's film remained obscure while Truffaut's film went on to become one of the most famous films of the French New Wave. One of Ghatak's final films, Titash Ekti Nadir Naam (1973), is one of the earliest films to be told in a hyperlink format, featuring multiple characters in a collection of interconnected stories, predating Robert Altman's Nashville (1975) by two years.

Ghatak's only major commercial success was Madhumati (1958), a Hindi film which he wrote the screenplay for. The film was one of the earliest to deal with the theme of reincarnation and is believed to have been the source of inspiration for many later works dealing with the theme of reincarnation in Indian cinema, Indian television, and perhaps world cinema. It may have been the source of inspiration for the American film The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975) and the Hindi film Karz (1980), both of which dealt with reincarnation and have been influential in their respective cultures. Karz in particular was remade several times: as the Kannada film Yuga Purusha (1989), the Tamil film Enakkul Oruvan (1984), and more recently the Bollywood film Karzzzz (2008). Karz and The Reincarnation of Peter Proud may have also inspired the American film Chances Are (1989). The most recent film to be directly inspired by Madhumati is the hit Bollywood film Om Shanti Om (2007), which led to the late Bimal Roy's daughter Rinki Bhattacharya accusing the film of plagiarism and threatening legal action against its producers.

Ghatak's work as a director also had an impact on many later Indian filmmakers, including those from the Bengali film industry and elsewhere. Ghatak is said to have influences on Kumar Shahani, Mani Kaul, Ketan Mehta, and Adoor Gopalakrishnan. For example, Mira Nair has cited Ghatak as well as Ray as the reasons she became a filmmaker. Ghatak's impact as a director began to spread beyond India much later; beginning in the 1990s, a project to restore Ghatak's films was undertaken, and international exhibitions (and subsequent DVD releases) have belatedly generated an increasingly global audience. In a critics' poll of all-time greatest films conducted by the Asian film magazine Cinemaya in 1998, Subarnarekha was ranked at No. 11 on the list. In the 2002 Sight & Sound critics' and directors' poll for all-time greatest films, Meghe Dhaka Tara was ranked at No. 231 and Komal Gandhar at No. 346 on the list. In 2007, A River Named Titas topped the list of 10 best Bangladeshi films, as chosen in the audience and critics' polls conducted by the British Film Institute.

Bangladeshi filmmaker Shahnewaz Kakoli told she has been greatly influenced by Ritwik Ghatak's films and regarded Ghatak as her idol. She told–

Like all Bengalis, I too have grown up watching movies of Satyajit Ray and Ghatak, though I like Ghatak more and I idolise him. I am greatly inspired by him and consequently my movie 'Uttarer Sur' (Northern Symphony) too is influenced by Ghatak.