Pather Panchali - Reception

Reception

Ray and his team worked day and night during post-production, and just managed to get the film ready to send it to MoMA for the exhibition in May 1955, although it lacked subtitles. It was billed as "The Story of Apu and Durga", and was a part of a series of six evening performances at MoMA including the US debut of sarod maestro Ali Akbar Khan and the classical dancer Shanta Rao. Pather Panchali's MoMA opening was well received. The film had its domestic premiere at the annual meeting of the Advertising Club of Calcutta. The response was not positive, and Ray felt "extremely discouraged". Before its general release in Calcutta, Ray himself designed some large advertisements, including a neon sign showing Apu and Durga running, which was strategically placed in a busy location of the city. Pather Panchali was released in a Calcutta cinema on 26 August 1955 and had a poor initial response. However, thanks to word of mouth, the screenings started filling up within a week or two. It opened again at another cinema hall, where it ran for seven weeks. A delay in subtitling caused the postponing of the film's release in UK until December 1957. It went on to great success in the US in 1958, running for eight months at the Fifth Avenue Playhouse in New York.

In India, the reaction to the film was enthusiastic. The Times of India wrote that "It is absurd to compare it with any other Indian cinema Pather Panchali is pure cinema". Bidhan Chandra Roy, the Chief Minister of West Bengal, arranged a special screening of the film for Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru in a Calcutta theatre. Nehru was impressed by the film. Thus, despite opposition from some quarters within the Governments of West Bengal and India because of its depiction of poverty, Pather Panchali was sent to the 1956 Cannes Film Festival with the personal approval of the Prime Minister. The film was screened towards the end of the festival, coinciding with a party thrown by the Japanese delegation. Thus, only a small number of critics attended the show. Although some were initially unenthusiastic at the prospect of yet another Indian melodrama, they found "the magic horse of poetry" slowly invading the screen. Subsequently, the film was awarded the Best Human Document prize at this festival.

Pather Panchali was the first film made in independent India that received major critical attention internationally, and placed India on the world cinema map. In the United Kingdom, Lindsay Anderson noted it as "a beautiful picture, completely fresh and personal. reaches forward into life, exploring and exposing, with reverence and wonder." Hazel-Dawn Dumpert of LA Weekly wrote that the film was "as deeply beautiful and plainly poetic as any movie ever made. Rare and exquisite." Pauline Kael commented: "The first film by the masterly Satyajit Ray—possibly the most unembarrassed and natural of directors—is a quiet reverie about the life of an impoverished Brahmin family in a Bengali village. Beautiful, sometimes funny, and full of love, it brought a new vision of India to the screen." Basil Wright commented: "I have never forgotten the private projection room at the British Film Institute during which I experienced the shock of recognition and excitement when, unexpectedly, one is suddenly exposed to a new and incontrovertible work of art." Time wrote that "Pather Panchali is perhaps the finest piece of filmed folklore since Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North." Newsweek critic, Jack Kroll, reviewed the film as "one of the most stunning first films in movie history", while Philip French of The Observer has described Pather Panchali as "one of the greatest pictures ever made". James Berardinelli writes, "This tale, as crafted by Ray, touches the souls and minds of viewers, transcending cultural and linguistic barriers".

However, the reaction was not uniformly positive. After watching the movie, François Truffaut is reported to have said, "I don’t want to see a movie of peasants eating with their hands." Bosley Crowther, then the most influential critic of The New York Times, wrote in a scathing review of the film, "Any picture as loose in structure or as listless in tempo as this one is would barely pass as a "rough cut" with the editors in Hollywood." The Harvard Crimson wrote, "Many of the fragmented episodes are effective, but many others have little to add to the general effect. The disconnection itself has its purpose, and gives an all-inclusive quality to the film; yet it is also distracting and contributes to the film's great weakness: its general diffuseness, its inability to command sustained attention. For Pather Panchali, remarkable as it may be, is something of a chore to sit through." Early in 1980, Ray was openly criticised by an Indian Member of Parliament and former actress Nargis Dutt, who accused Ray of "exporting poverty". While many critics celebrated Pather Panchali as a eulogy of third world culture, others criticised it for what they took to be romanticisation of such a culture.

Twenty years after the release of Pather Panchali, Akira Kurosawa summarised the effect of the film as follows: "I can never forget the excitement in my mind after seeing it. I have had several more opportunities to see the film since then and each time I feel more overwhelmed. It is the kind of cinema that flows with the serenity and nobility of a big river... People are born, live out their lives, and then accept their deaths. Without the least effort and without any sudden jerks, Ray paints his picture, but its effect on the audience is to stir up deep passions. How does he achieve this? There is nothing irrelevant or haphazard in his cinematographic technique. In that lies the secret of its excellence."

The film has a 97% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on an aggregate of 34 reviews. Pather Panchali is thus ranked at #71 on Rotten Tomatoes' list of top 100 foreign films.

As of 2008, Pather Panchali is available in DVD in both Region 2 PAL and Region 1 NTSC formats. Artificial Eye Entertainment is the distributor of Region 2 while Columbia Tri-Star is the distributor of Region 1 format.