The Cloud-Capped Star

I had the rare privilege of seeing Ritwik Ghatak's The Cloud-Capped Star as part of the Walter Reade Theater's Watershed series of films from the period 1958-60 that comprise a sort of international New Wave. Although I had seen Ghatak's masterpiece a few years ago on DVD, it didn't prepare me for the overwhelming power of this film's impassioned social critique, told with an extraordinarily delicate and controlled visual style combined with a radically original use of sound. Ghatak mixes music, dialogue and sound effects in quite unpredictable ways that Jonathan Rosenbaum has rightly described as expressionistic. A train will suddenly burst across the image and the sound of its whistle will completely drown out a conversation mid-sentence. An emotional revelation will be accompanied by the repeated sound of a whip while the music replays obsessively as if the record is stuck. A mysterious rainfall sound seemingly out of nowhere recurs several times. Music and sounds start and stop abruptly a la later Godard.

These radical aural experiments are matched by a visual style that features amazing deep focus compositions (note the three planes of activity in the train image above) or subtle shifts in focus, remarkable use of light, contrast, camera movements and dissolves. Ghatak is long overdue for a New York retrospective, and fully deserving of inclusion with such other Watershed films as L'Avventura, The 400 Blows, Cruel Story of Youth and Shadows.