Pather Panchali (1955) Storyboards

Director: Satyajit Ray
Storyboards: Satyajit Ray

Pather Panchali (translated as “Song of the Little Road”) was Satyajit Ray’s first film, adapted by Ray from a 1928 Bengali novel of the same name. Previously, while working as a graphic artist at a Calcutta publishing house, Ray illustrated a children's version of the novel, and it remained dear to his heart as he moved closer to realizing his dream of becoming a filmmaker.

Filming on Pather Panchali started, financed by the director’s own funds and any loans he could raise, in 1952, when Ray was thirty-one years old, and collapsed and restarted on various occasions, only finishing in 1955 thanks to a grant from the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Throughout the three years of intermittent production, Ray searched for funding armed with two tools to show potential backers. One was a small notebook, filled with sketches, dialogue, and the treatment; the other was more of a sketchbook containing gouache illustrations of the film’s key dramatic moments. Ray later donated these to the Cinematheque Franqaise in Paris.

With its extraordinary, naturalistic sequences—Ray was inspired by the Italian neorealist movement—Pather Panchali never had a complete script and was made entirely from these sketches and notes. The original drawings have sadly now been lost, but these black and white copies still reveal the beauty of his preparatory work.

Pather Panchali tells the story of a Brahmin family in Bengal at the beginning of the last century. The father is an impoverished priest, and the mother is left alone to look after impish older daughter Durga and young Apu. Pather Panchali's neorealist take on the Bengal countryside (Ray was inspired by Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 film Bicycle Thieves') is rightly hailed for the magnificent beauty and majesty of its black and white sequences, which detail the simple joys of life for a small boy. Perhaps the most famous of these depicts Apu and Durga running through kans grass to see a train; on their return, they find the dead body of their Aunt Indir. Music by Ravi Shankar heightened the intensity of emotion.

Pather Panchali was the first in Ray’s Apu Trilogy, and was succeeded by Aparajito (1956) and Apur Sansar (1959).