Suspended meanings: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s and Ritwik Ghatak’s ‘epic melodramas’

Abstract

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s encounter with India is well known, but India’s engagement with Pasolini’s work is much less considered. This article puts the work of Pasolini in dialogue with the work of Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak, one of the most important figures in Indian parallel cinema. Ghatak discussed the Italian director’s work on several occasions. More importantly, Ghatak’s intellectual path and films have notable similarities with Pasolini’s. Both directors, Ghatak and Pasolini, pursued a ‘heretical’ approach to Marxist ideology by contaminating it with a passionate identification with the marginalized communities of today’s Bangladesh and southern Italy, respectively. Drawing from film critic Bhaskar Sarkar’s notion of epic melodrama, I suggest an analysis of two coeval films, Mamma Roma () and Meghe dhaka tara (The Cloud-Capped Star) (), in order to expose the directors’ complex location between Brechtian aesthetic, epic-religious vision and melodramatic motives. This article argues that these epic-melodramatic films suspend a final interpretation, providing an aesthetic correlative to the unreconciled position of the people the directors aimed to represent.