Screening of Satyajit Ray’s The Adversary – June 3

Rita Banerjee will introduce and lead the discussion for Satyajit Ray’s 1970 film, The Adversary (প্রতিদ্বন্দী), on Tuesday June 3, 2014 from 6-8:30 pm for the Institute for Indology and Tibetology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.  The screening will take place in Seminar Room 427 (Ludwigstr. 31, Munich).  The screening is part of the course Bengali 2: Introduction to the Bengali Language & Art House Film, II at LMU.  Anyone interested in Bengali Cinema or South Asian Art House Film is welcomed to join the screening.  Created amid the growing social unrest and political violence of India (and the world) post-1969, and specifically responding to Bengal’s armed Naxalite radical movement, The Adversary is Ray at his most openly political, yet also Ray at his most compassionate and even humorous. A young college graduate seeks employment (or at least respect) in Calcutta, “that nightmare city” (as Ray described it at the time), and finds neither. Indifferent to joining polite society, his younger brother chooses revolution instead. “This is Ray’s funniest, most piercing film,” wrote Pauline Kael; “its humanism is like the quality of Olmi’s Il Posto.” – Jason Sanders [The Adversary is based on a story by the Bengali Modernist writer, Sunil Gangopadhyay]