One of my Bengali friends tells me that when he watches a Satyajit Ray film on DVD with his (non-Bengali) wife, it takes them twice the movie’s running time to get through it. “I have to hit Pause every couple of minutes just to explain the finer points of a dialogue that was mangled by the subtitles.”
Wretched subtitling on home-grown DVDs is one good reason to welcome the fine new Criterion release of Ray’s 1958 classic Jalsaghar (The Music Room), about a music-loving zamindar living his last days alone in his decrepit palace as the world changes around him. But another reason is the film’s tremendous visual and aural beauty, something I could fully appreciate only when I saw it on this restored DVD — the print being much superior to the faded, scratch-ridden TV version that assailed me a few years ago.
Right from the opening-credits shot of an ominously swaying chandelier (an important element in the film’s mise-en-scene), Ray’s distinct visual sense and Subrata Mitra’s camerawork draw us into a world of grandeur lost and briefly regained. There are many lovely shots, such as the one of the protagonist, Biswambhar Roy, gazing into an unpolished mirror, wiping the dust away with a puzzled expression, almost as if wondering if the great days of his past were an elaborate dream. Or the plaintive shot of him leaning on his stick, watching a lonely elephant in the distance. The new print transfer makes these images vivid, perhaps bringing them close to the images Ray had in his head when he set about conceptualising the film. And the audio restoration is just as important, for Jalsaghar’s background score is by the great Ustad Vilayat Khan, and the film contains performances by such doyens of classical music as Begum Akhtar and Bismillah Khan.
This film is a key work in the context of Ray’s career: made shortly after the first two entries in the Apu Trilogy, it came at an early stage in the forming of his reputation, both in and outside India. At that time, based on Pather Panchali and Aparajito, it was possible to pigeonhole Ray as a director who would operate in the mode of documentary-like minimalism; an objective chronicler rather than a stylist. Hard as it is to imagine, during the earliest days of his career, some Western critics assumed that he came from a rural, uneducated background — and that Pather Panchali, with its village setting, was an autobiographical work! (Even today, some movie buffs are largely unaware of the rich vein of fantasy in his family background, and of his children’s films like Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne and Sonar Kella.)
But it’s clear that from the start, Ray intended Jalsaghar to be a film of visual flourishes — including zooms and tracking shots that would contrast the zamindar’s past glory with the life he is now leading (and the delusions that still crowd his mind). In an essay in Our Films, Their Films, he admitted that having won an award at Cannes shortly before making this film, he allowed himself the indulgence of a crane for overhead shots, and one certainly gets the impression of a director consciously trying to use the camera in inventive ways. Perhaps this might explain why Jalsaghar was a bit of a puzzle to its initial audiences — who had formed their own impressions of the “type” of director Ray was going to be — and why it took relatively long to be rediscovered and appreciated. But happily, it’s here to stay now, and I think it’s close to the first rung of his work.
Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer
