Two children run through kasa grass taller than they are, and then the smoke comes across the field, and then the train. On this day in 1955, that shot reached a Calcutta screen for the first time, in a film called Pather Panchali.
Almost nobody involved had done this before. Satyajit Ray was a commercial artist directing his first feature. Subrata Mitra, behind the camera, had never shot a film. The boy who played Apu, Subir Banerjee, was found in the neighbourhood. Chunibala Devi, who played the old aunt Indir, had been off the stage for years before Ray went looking for her. Shooting stopped whenever the money stopped, which was often, and it took nearly three years of starting and halting before the West Bengal government put up the funds to finish it.
What I like about that, from my end of the projector, is how little of it shows. The audience never sees the gaps. They see a sister and a brother and a field, and they lean forward at the train the way audiences have leaned forward at trains since the Lumières. Seventy-one years today, and the grass still moves.
Constance, the score came just as fast: Ravi Shankar watched a rough cut and improvised most of it in one long overnight session, sitar and bamboo flute, largely first takes. That's why the theme sounds like someone thinking rather than someone arranging.
Constance, one detail from my side of the light: Subrata Mitra was a stills photographer before this and, needing daylight indoors, bounced his lamps off stretched white cloth to fake an overcast sky. Painters had been chasing that soft northern window light for centuries; he built one out of laundry.