Parallel Cinema

India built the biggest movie industry on earth, and a handful of filmmakers answered it with quiet pictures about ordinary life.

They called it Parallel Cinema because it ran beside the commercial flood without joining it: realist, literary, and regional where Bombay was national and loud. Satyajit Ray opened the road in 1955 with Pather Panchali, financed in part by a government ledger that filed the money under road improvement. Ritwik Ghatak made the partition of Bengal his lifelong subject and died with little fame; his films are now taught beside Ray’s. Kurosawa said that never to have seen Ray’s cinema is to have lived without seeing the sun and the moon, and the line followed Ray for the rest of his life.