...there was real hunger, at least there were masterly attempts at representing the actual human experience of hunger in all its un glamorous details.
Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray's
The Distant Thunder (1973), is such an attempt. I recall having seeing the movie with my parents. My parents would not miss any Ray movie, so around the time that this particular Ray movie was released, they dragged the entire family, including us little kiddies and our paternal grandmother, to the theaters.
Everybody knew that the film wouldn't have a long run because the theme--of famine--wasn't "entertaining. So, it had to be seen right away.
The Distant Thunder (translated from the Bengali
Oshoni Shongket) did not treat hunger as a trope or metaphor, but as a direct result of, as film reviewer Richard Brody
says, the "inexorable and abstract machinery of economics."
The film is a fictionalized account of the great Bengal famine of 1943, when India became a victim of a war it was part of not by choice but by compulsion.
Colonial India had rich reserves of grain, which Great Britain diverted to its troops in an effort to shore up its war against imperial Japan. At the time of the famine, Japan had invaded Singapore and GBR was on the side of the Singaporeans.
My father said he had faint memories of the famine, but his extended family, being Brahmins, were spared the worst of its effects in the countryside.
We watched the movie, spellbound: My parents were spellbound by the artistic mastery on display on screen, while we were spellbound because there was nothing in this film for kids. It was an altogether joyless movie.
The only person who interrupted the visual experience was my grandmother. She fidgeted and at the end of the film, outside the theater, she said she hated the film.
