The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, December 7-13
The Ritual (1977)
Directed by Girish Kasaravalli
Taking cues from Italian Neorealism, Ozu, and Parallel Cinema pioneers such as the more household name Satyajit Ray, Kasaravalli burst onto the Indian New Wave scene with his first feature Ghatashraddha. Naani (Ajit Kumar), a young boy of an aristocratic family, arrives in a small village to study at a dilapidated Vedic school. Naani resides with Yamuna (Meena Kuttappa), the schoolmaster’s daughter, along with two violent and manipulative students, who constantly taunt, trick, and dehumanize him. Yamuna, meanwhile, possesses a secret, one that is making her physically unwell. Naani and Yamuna form a deep bond of companionship, but village gossip and surveillance boil to a breaking point, culminating in a series of harrowing events.
Ghatashraddha is grim. It’s a work that divulges not only the suppression of women, specifically in the context of Karnataka villages of the time and tradition wherein a mistake could lead to the darkest of spectacles, but also of human cruelty on a universal level. The brutalization young Naani endures is parallel to that of Bresson’s Mouchette. And, like Bresson, Kasaravalli employs a handling of celluloid all his own; it is very subtle, and very effective. The narrative pace is slowed via missing sequences, heightening the viewer’s sense of investigative immersion. Haunting music creeps unexpectedly, often melting with pounding doors or slamming windows, sometimes building to a chaotic cacophony far beyond what the moving image is telling us. The cinematography, framing, editing, sound, all that might contribute to a moving picture is utterly delectable here. But, as Bresson points out in a 1967 interview discussing Mouchette, “Cinematography is a powerful machine that can ultimately be crushing.” Samuel T. Adams (December 11, 2pm at the Museum of the Moving Image as part of India Kaleidescope, a celebration of regional Indian cinema)