Mrinal Sen, one of the three classic masters of the Bengali school of Indian
cinema with Ritwik Ghatak and Satyajit Ray,
who had debuted with the mediocre Rathhore/ Dawn (1955) and the anti-imperialist Nil Akasher Niche/ Under the Blue Sky (1959), the first film banned in India,
described the crisis of the transition from rural society to urban society in
Baishey Shravana/ Wedding Day (1960), which tells the struggles of an emigrant who marries a teenage girl half his age in a remote village but has to live with his wife's suicide.
Punascha/ Over Again (1961)
Abasheshe/ And at Last (1963)
Pratinidhi/ The Representative (1964)
Akash Kusum/ Up in the Clouds (1965) told the story of a lower-class man who climbs
the ladders of society and began his experimental political cinema.
His political intent only grew from there, dealing with unemployment,
workers conditions, student rebellion, and so on, but always maintaining the
urban setting of Kolkata, with all its poverty and unrest.
He also made films in Odiya (MatirManish, 1966), Hindi (Bhuvan Shome/ Mr Shome, 1969, one of his best, and
Mrigayaa, 1976), and Telugu (Oka Oori Katha, 1977).
Sen abandoned his saga of contemporary people in
Charulata (1964) and Nayak (1966).
Ek Adhuri Kahani/ An Unfinished Story (1971)
Interview (1971), the first film of the "Calcutta trilogy", includes a section in which the actor turns to look straight into the camera and talks to the viewer, explaining why the director Mrinal Sen chose his character to make a film.
Sen devoted
Calcutta 71 (1972) and Padatik/ The Guerilla Fighter (1973) to Kolkata at the same time that Ray was filming his Calcutta trilogy, except that
Sen focused on the Naxalite insurrection and employed a Godard-ian style.
Calcutta 71 (1972), a set of interconnected stories that span four decades, is the better of the two.
Chorus (1974)
Mrigayaa/ The Royal Hunt (1976)
was set in tribal India.
Oka Oori Katha/ The Outsiders (1977): un attore nichilista, bestiale e pazzo, rifiuta
i meccanismi dello sfruttamento, ma cade nella rete del crimine, malvagita` come ribellione totale;
specula persino sulla morte di parto della nuora (con i soldi della colletta si ubriacano lui e il figlio);
perverso, cinico, repellente, inumano: violenza e sesso sono il prodotto della societa` capitalistica.
Parasuram/ The Man with the Axe (1978)
Ek Din Pratidin/ And Quiet Rolls the Dawn (1979),
an adaptation of Ramapada Choudhury's novel "Beej":
in una vecchia casa di un quartiere piccolo borghese di
Calcutta vive un pensionato con i suoi cinque figli; a mantenere la famiglia e` la figlia maggiore, che una
sera, rientrando tardi a casa, si espone allo scandalo pubblico; vizi pregiudizi e ipocrisie di una piccola
borghesia anacronistica.
Akaler Sandhane/ In Search of Famine (1980) is one of his best, in which
a filmmaker aspiring to make a film about the Bengali famine of 1943.
Chalchitra/ The Kaleidoscope (1981)
Kharij/ The Case Is Closed (1982) e` un'inchiesta sulla borghesia indiana centrata sulla morte per asfissia di un servo.
Khandahar/ Ruins (1983), affresco psicologico della decadenza senile: una vecchia inferma vive
con la figlia che l'accudisce amorevolmente in una casa padronale cadente, sperando di far sposare un
giorno la figlia con un cugino; la ragazza sa che il cugino si e` gia` sposato, ma, per evitare di darle un
dispiacere, chiede a un visitatore di posare da promesso sposo; quando pero` la vecchia scopre la verita`
fra le due si spezza il rapporto durato tanti anni e soltanto quando gli estranei se ne vanno nella casa torna
la quiete.
Genesis (1986)
The protagonist of Ek Din Achanak/ Suddenly One Day (1989) is a
character who disappears right away: a professor who leaves home one day for
a walk and never returns, causing the family to try to understand what made him
run away while moving on with their lives.
Mahaprithibi/ World Within World Without (1991)
Antareen/ The Confined (1993)
His last film, Amaar Bhuvan/ This My Land (2002), was an adaptation of Afsar Ahmed's novel "Dhanjyotsna".
Sen died in 2018.
