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PAULINE KAEL
world might envy. The Indian film industry is so
thoroughly
corrupt
that Ray could start fresh, as if it did not exist. Consider the Americans,
looking under stones for some tiny piece of subject matter they can
call their own, and you can judge the wealth, the prodigious, fabulous
heritage that an imaginative Indian can draw upon. Just because there
has been almost nothing of value done in films in India, the whole
country and its culture is his to explore and express to the limits of hi!
ability; he is the first major artist to draw upon these vast and ancient
reserves. The Hollywood director who re-makes biblical spectacles or
Fannie Hurst stories for the third or sixth or ninth time is a poor
man-no matter how big his budget-compared to the first film artist
of
India. American directors of talent can still try to beat the system, can still
feel that maybe they can do something worth doing, and every once
in a while someone almost does. In India, the poverty of the masses,
and their desperate
need
for escapist films, cancels out illusions.
Ray began his film career with a masterpiece, and a trilogy at that;
this makes it easy
to
shrug off his other films as very fine but not reaIIy
up to the trilogy. It
is
true that the other films are smaller in scope.
But, if there had been no trilogy, we would say of
Devi,
"This is the
greatest Indian film ever made." And if there had been no trilogy and
no Devi, I would say the same of his still later film,
T eenkenya.
(Ray
has had so little box-office draw in the United States, that
The
Music
Room,
made between the second and third parts of the trilogy, has
had only a few scattered showings, and
T eenkenya,
based on three
Tagore stories, hasn't been released here. I saw two of the episodes
of
Teenkenya
in Canada last year, and one of them,
The Postmaster,
is
the most beautiful short-story film I've ever seen, East or West, bar
none.)
Devi,
based on a theme from Tagore, is here thanks
to
the personal
intercession of Nehru, who removed the censors' export ban. According
to official Indian policy,
Devi
is misleading in its view of Indian life.
We can interpret this to mean that, even though the film is set
in
the
nineteenth century, the government is not happy about the world getting
the idea that there are or ever were superstitions in India. In the film, the
young heroine is believed by her rich father-in-law to be an incarnation
of the goddess Kali. I don't know why the Indian government was
so
concerned 'about this-anyone who has ever tried to tell children how,
for example, saints function in Catholic doctrine may recognize that
we have a few things to explain, too. Those who grow up surrounded
by Christian symbols and dogmas are hardly in a pOSItIon to point a
finger of shame at Kali worship-particularly as it seems so closely
