Rebel without a Cause: Nicholas Ray in the Fifties, by Peter Biskind. Film Quarterly © 1974 University of California Press. 

           

            Peter Biskind argues that director Nicholas Ray’s films are not as subversive as is commonly assumed by fans of the director and even film scholars. During the 1950s, family values reigned: the preservation of the family, with each parent in his or her gender-appropriate role was seen as the solution to emerging societal problems including homosexuality and juvenile delinquency. Biskind contends that Ray’s films never radically depart from these conservative notions. In his reading of Rebel Without a Cause (1955), the centrality of the family is consistently reaffirmed. The source of protagonist Jim Stark’s alienation is attributed to his problematic family life, where in his mother is dominant and over-bearing and his father is atypically passive. The conclusion of the film rights this deviance. The Stark patriarch learns from his son’s conduct how to be a man by 1950s standards, and his wife is finally quieted. Ray’s faith in the conventional family also explains why Sal Mineo’s Plato must die. Plato is orphaned by his parent’s neglect, and has no proper place in the pseudo-family formed by the romance between James Dean and Natalie Wood. He is the true outsider. As Dean and Wood are healed by their relationship, and can eventually reintegrate into the mainstream, Mineo meets a tragic end. To Biskind, the film occupies a political and moral middle ground, situating itself within the comfortable middleclass mainstream and failing to critique the family as a potentially problematic institution. Biskind does not view the film’s stance as a flaw, but rather a product of its time and the demands of the Hollywood machine in which it was created.

            The piece presents a complex and unconventional reading of what is often considered a truly “rebellious” film, contextualizing the response in the political atmosphere of the 1950s. It provides a historical perspective that complicates the typical reception of the film and its enduring  popularity.

This article remembers Satyajit Ray as a "lyrical chronicle of rural poverty" and reflects upon Ray's accomplishments as a master in his field. The importance placed by Ray on the story and plot of a film elevated him to be the sole representative of Indian cinema for the Western world. Although this might have been a false representation of all films being churned out by the Indian movie industry, Ray truly stood out as an anomaly in the sea of directors from his own home country. The author speaks of Ray's ideas of "feminism" and how his movies were the perfect combination of a traditional Indian woman with moral bales and the contemporary strong willed independent woman who fought for her rights. The author also mentions Ray's final film, The Stranger, alluding to the transformation Ray underwent as a director and the renewal of humor in this film, which had always been a strong element of Ray's sensibilities. This film was ‘lighter' that his previous works, prompting critics to believe that it gestures a renewal of his personal self and health. Finally, paying the due respect to Ray by calling him "The Last Great Man of the Indian Renaissance" the author respects the elegance with which he left the world - on his death bead, smiling, while accepting the Lifetime Achievement Award.

After watching Pather Panchali, and reading an article like this, it becomes evident that a Satyajit Ray injected aspects of his own personality when molding characters for his movies. The elegance and calmness with which he viewed the world seems to be reflected in the father's character in the movie. Also,  Durga seems to be the quintessential example of Ray's view of Indian women of the time, as he shows a young girl full of life, yet extremely responsible towards her family. Therefore, in order to understand Ray as a person, it is of paramount importance to watch his first, and possibly last film.

This article stresses upon the differences between the portrayal of women in Indian popular cinema and India's art film circuit. The author has used examples of films made by Satyajit Ray, and particularity those that were adaptations of short stories by Rabindranath Tagore. She suggests that Bollywood uses its women as metaphor's for suffering of the downtrodden or for India, or alternatively as the stereotype of a restricted Indian woman's life. Art films, she claims stray from this stereotype and revert back to classic Indian literature and try to explore the themes of marital relationships and steer clear of motherhood. She argues that Indian audiences in the past have preferred the stereotypical image of a woman and her ‘place' in society. But recently a growing appreciation has begun for the realistic portrayal of modern women in popular cinema. Finally, she argues that over time, women have adopted the dominant ‘subject' in all types of Indian films.

This article is very pertinent to Pather Panchali because although it is meant to be a story about a young boy Apu, the dominant characters of the film are played by two women - Durga and her mother. Apu is brought up in a household of three women who are at different stages in their lives. Thus overall the movie has a very comprehensive and real take on women of all ages, living in poverty in a small village in Bengal. Ray's depiction of women here is a mixture of the two ideas of the portrayal of women in Indian cinema. Although the mother seems to be more wary of her relationship with her husband, she is the sole caretaker of her two children, thereby stressing her role as both mother and wife. This is a realistic depiction of women in cinema, and came about at a time where people (Indian audiences) were not ready to accept such a strong reality. Thus, the movie was termed as an art-house film in India, although it received worldwide recognition.