Jukti Takko Aar Gappo is a 1974 Bengali

Bengali language

Bengali or Bangla is an eastern Indo-Aryan language. It is native to the region of eastern South Asia known as Bengal, which comprises present day Bangladesh, the Indian state of West Bengal, and parts of the Indian states of Tripura and Assam. It is written with the Bengali script...

 film directed by Ritwik Ghatak.

Ghatak plays the role of an alcoholic intellectual named Nilakantha. The film is considered technically superior to other films of that era due to its camera work, and was his last film and is placed in the league of Jean Cocteau

Jean Cocteau

Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María...

's Testament of Orpheus

Testament of Orpheus

Testament of Orpheus is a 1960 film directed by and starring Jean Cocteau. It is considered the final part of the Orphic Trilogy, following The Blood of a Poet and Orphée...

and the Nicholas Ray

Nicholas Ray

Nicholas Ray was an American film director best known for the movie Rebel Without a Cause....

 and Wim Wenders

Wim Wenders

Ernst Wilhelm "Wim" Wenders is a German film director, playwright, author, photographer and producer.-Early life:Wenders was born in Düsseldorf. He graduated from high school in Oberhausen in the Ruhr area. He then studied medicine and philosophy in Freiburg and Düsseldorf...

's noted documentary film, Lightning Over Water

Lightning Over Water

Lightning Over Water is a 1980 documentary film by Wim Wenders and Nicholas Ray about the last days of Ray's own life; the director was most famous for his 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause. It was screened out of competition at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival.- Summary :The film is a collaboration...

.

Synopsis

Jukti Takko Aar Gappo was the legendary Ritwik Ghatak's last film, starring the writer/director in highly personal allegory, Ghatak plays his own alter ego, an alcoholic, disillusioned intellectual who begins wandering once he's lost wife, child and home, whose wife leaves him because of his insufferable alcoholism. Forced from his home, he wanders through the countryside and meets unusual folks along the way. The film, adventurous and revolutionary, is an exceptional mix of images that challenge the limits of narrative storytelling.

Technical Team

• Story, Screenplay, Music and Direction: Ritwik Ghatak
• Cinematography: Baby Islam
• Editor: Amalesh Sikdar
• Choreography: S Bhattacharya
• Music: Ustad Bahadur Khan

Cast

• Neelkantha: Ritwik Ghatak
• Satya: Ritaban Ghatak
• Jagannath: Bijon Bhattacharya
• Nachiketa: Saugata Burman
• Shatrujit: Utpal Dutt
  Utpal Dutt
  Utpal Dutt was an Indian actor, director, and writer-playwright. He was primarily an actor in Bengali Theatre, where he became a pioneering figure in Modern Indian theatre, when he founded the 'Little Theater Group' in 1947, which enacted many English, Shakespearean and Brecht plays, in a period...
  
  
• Bangabala: Shaonli Mitra
• Durga: Tripti Mitra
• Panchanan Ustad: Gyanesh Mukherjee
• Leader of Naxalites: Ananya Ray

Remarks

• " What has been thematised in the whole movie is the decadence. In multiple ways, so many lives are being wasted. May be the whole country is being wasted." -- Amalendu Basu

• " When Mrinal Sen opened up a new dimension in the Bengali cinema by making political films, Ritwik showed how he could give a new shape even to this genre...to make a film simultaneously political and autobiographical...the more important thing is that here autobiography is no mere hankering for recollection of the past, but a self-analysis, self-criticism...this film enables us to confront one's own self...but Ritwik's arguments, Ritwik's story all seem to be the prattling of an alcoholic,but the person who has the guts to strip himself before the truth, is not Ritwik, the alcoholic, but Ritwik,a true revolutionary." -- Dipendu Chakrabarty

• " Jukti Takko aar Gappo, a film so daring in its complete disregard of the very language and grammar of cinema he had mastered and developed that it is difficult to understand how it achieves its intense intimacy with the audience.It is as if the characters step out of the screen to talk and to you and you are forced to respond to them, to react very sharply for or against them.The central character played by Ghatak himself parodies his real life in such a way that it comples the audience to reflect and criticise him. Perhaps this is just what Ritwik had been struggling to do through cinema all his life. Ironically, perhaps, he wanted to see that it could be achieved only through a conscious rejection of much of what has come to be accepted as the language of cinema." -- Safdar Hashmi
  Safdar Hashmi
  Safdar Hashmi was a Communist playwright, actor, director, lyricist, and theorist, chiefly associated with Street theatre in India, and is still considered an important voice in political theatre in India....
  
  

• " In Jukti Takko ar Gappo, the elements were presented in their new raw form—reason,argument,story,song that hunger which is the basis of human creativity.So that Riwik calls himself a humbug a civilisation sees how it is reduced to ashes.Yet there was no nihilism;he dies pleading with those who would annihilate their compassion along with their enemy.Our heroism will find itself trapped in mechanical crossfire of gunpowder, if it refuses to nourish itself on nature and history.For Ritwik, the heroic act the ultimate and the first sacrifice,has to be the act of union." -- Kumar Sahani

• "In it(Argument and story)the political backdrop of West Bengal from 1971 to 1972 as I saw it has been portrayed.There is no ideology.I saw it from a point of view of not a politician.I am not supposed to please a political ideology..." -- Ritwik Ghatak

External links

• Jukti Takko Aar Gappo (online)