The Dream in Ray’s Nayak
Uttam Kumar plays a top movie star undergoing a sense of angst through the course of the film as he ponders on matters ranging from personal fulfillment to professional mortality.
Uttam Kumar plays a top movie star undergoing a sense of angst through the course of the film as he ponders on matters ranging from personal fulfillment to professional mortality.
May 11, 2009 at 9:06 AM
I also wanted to included the magnificent dream sequence in Devi but sadly this isn’t available on youtube. Ray, a master at so much else, was also one when it came to ‘dreams’!
May 11, 2009 at 5:07 PM
There is another extraordinary moment in the film, possibly one of the best I have ever seen in the medium, when Uttam Kumar and Sharmila Tagore are seated in the dining car right by the window, the train pulls over at a platform and the crowd instantly recognizing the superstar crowds around the window. Sharmila averts her gaze and turns away, she is unable to look at the hysterical crowd. She gets very uncomfortable. Meanwhile Uttam Kumar, the much more practiced at this, coolly ignores those gathered. Eventually they start tapping madly on the glass to attract his attention but he remains placid and does not really engage in eye contact with them. This is a true auteurist moment. A commentary on the essence of the cinematic. The screen that separates the star from the crowd. The way Ray frames this one can feel a kind of ‘pressure’ as a viewer, so intense is the attention of the spectators. We are in a sense in Sharmila Tagore’s position, a bit tense in that moment. But of course in another sense we are not with those tapping on the glass but really on the inside, or the other side of the screen where the star resides. We have been watching this film really from Uttam Kumar’s vantage point throughout. But in this moment suddenly the veil is shattered in a strange way. We feel uneasy because we are on Uttam Kumar’s side and yet we are ‘perforce’ also part of the audience. Of course one member of the audience is seated with the star at that point in the figure of Sharmila Tagore. So we are again inside as well. The semiotics of this entire moment are quite profound and not easy to unravel. For this scene alone I regret missing out on the film in the recent retrospective because I believe this scene must have been mesmerizing in the theater.
On a similar note I felt the same revisiting Charulata for here again there is a rather unique cinematic moment with the entire swing sequence.
May 15, 2009 at 5:32 PM
Again Nayak is a perfect film. The reason I wouldn’t put it up there with a Devi or a Jalsaghar is because the subject somehow doesn’t seem as capacious. It is one of the great films about cinema however. I might not have seen a better one in this kind of humanistic context.