Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 07/11/19

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, July 11, 2019

A River Called Titas (Ritwik Ghatak, 1973)

Cast: Prabir Mitra, Rosy Samad, Kabori Sarwar, Rawshan Jamil, Rani Sarkar, Sufia Rastam, Bonani Choudury, Golam Mustafa, Shafikul Islam. Screenplay: Ritwik Ghatak, based on a story by Advaita Malla Burman. Cinematography: Baby Islam. Film editing: Bashir Hossain. Music: Ustad Bahadur Khan.

The river, and the villages past which it flows, really does seem to be the central character in A River Called Titas, a film tinged by the turbulent history of Bangladesh. Although it weaves together many narrative threads, the central one is of the arranged marriage of Kishore (Prabar Mitra) and Rajar (Kabori Sarwar), which lasts only one night before Rajar is abducted. So brief is their marriage that she doesn't know his name, and after surviving the kidnapping and giving birth to the child they had conceived, spends much of her life searching for the boy's father, who went mad after the attack. The old-fashioned melodramatic fable blends with the realistic portrait of lives along the river.