Ritwik Ghatak

Ritwik Ghatak made eight features, most of them about the partition of Bengal, drank himself to death at fifty, and is now argued to be the better filmmaker of his generation. He was born in Dhaka, in what became East Pakistan, and the family came across as refugees in 1947 - the displacement is the subject of almost everything he made and he said openly that he could not get past it. He worked first in theatre with the Indian People's Theatre Association, which is where the politics and the taste for melodrama both come from. Meghe Dhaka Tara, Komal Gandhar and Subarnarekha, made between 1960 and 1962, follow refugee families in Calcutta and use sound as violently as image, with whipcracks and folk song cutting across dialogue. They failed commercially and he was left largely unable to finance work. He taught at the Film and Television Institute in Pune, where his students included Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani, and his influence there outran his own output. Alcoholism and institutionalisation took his last decade. Reappraisal began in the 1980s and has not stopped. Nagarik, made in 1952, was his first feature and went unreleased until after his death, which makes it arguably the first Bengali art film by date and not by influence. He wrote the story for Madhumati, a large commercial Hindi success, which is most of what he earned in his life. Titash Ekti Nadir Naam was made in Bangladesh in 1973 after independence. He appeared, visibly ill, in his own last film Jukti Takko Aar Gappo, playing an alcoholic intellectual. He wrote extensively on cinema and those essays are collected. He died in a Calcutta hospital of tuberculosis complicated by drink.

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