মেঘে ঢাকা তারা Meghe Dhaka Tara, The Cloud-Capped Star (1960)

The claustrophobic interior reflects the suffocation of Nita as her tuberculosis advances. Her home crumbles around her as she herself withers away. Throughout the scene, the heads and profiles of Nita and Shankar are strongly lit from the front and back, often against almost total blackness, giving the composition a disembodied feel. Shankar declares that he is leaving their home in protest against her suffering and smothering at the hands of the family. She asks him to teach her a Tagore song, as she will be expected to sing at Gita’s wedding. As Shankar starts the song and Nita joins in, the camera slowly dollies at a low angle away from them, to a long shot of the pair from across the stifling, dim room. The chasm widens between brother and sister as they sing. The song is about a visitation by God:

I didn’t realize that You had come to my room,
the night when my doors broke down in the raging storm.
Darkness had encompassed everything,
my oil lamp blew out.
I stretched out my hand to the sky,
though I knew not towards whom.
I lay forlorn in the darkness thinking the storm a dream,
ignorant that the storm was actually a symbol of Your victory flag.
Opening my eyes in the morning I am amazed to behold You,
standing [there], filling the room, [filling] my heart’s void.
By the end of the song, the camera has dollied back to the pair; in the remaining shots they are now separately framed. The singular composition of the last few shots of the scene signal Nita’s isolation and estrangement from even Shankar. The climatic shot is a low angle, medium close-up of Nita’s frightened face. Her eyes widen as she clutches her neck with her hands and silently gasps for air, while the faint sound of a whiplash comes up on the soundtrack. A cut follows to Nita alone in the blackness, collapsed in a heap on the floor. Her sobs meld into a solitary sarod strain on the soundtrack. Thus, the sound of the whiplash undercuts the deliverance that the Tagore song promises. Salvation and redemption are not in Nita’s future — not even as a symbolic goddess. Ghatak utilizes the extra-diegetic sound of the whip to represent the weight of social and historical forces bearing down upon Nita, as an individual and as symbolic Motherland, and, by extension, to convey an awareness of these forces to his audience. [x]
  1. -redux reblogged this from swintons
  2. swintons reblogged this from dhrupad
  3. mekhatansh reblogged this from dhrupad
  4. sinekala reblogged this from dhrupad
  5. dhrupad posted this
Web Analytics