Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960) was included among the "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die," edited by Steven Schneider.
(starting around 47 mins) The instrument with the split piece of wood that the singer is holding is called a gopichand. The two 'arms' of wood hold an open-ended coconut shell, with one side covered by a thin skin, not unlike a drumhead. A single thin metal string is fastened from a friction peg at the end of the (split) piece of wood through the center of the skin, and adjusted ('tuned') by turning the peg. Plucking the string makes a twanging sound, which can have its pitch altered by pushing the two arms together. Although it seems that a melody could be played on a gopichand, the instrument is used solely as a rhythm instrument, not to play a tune.
Shaktipada Rajguru is the second film of what some call Ritwik Ghatak's Partition Quartet, which also includes Nagarik (1977), Komal Gandhar (1961), and Subarnarekha (1965) (completed in 1962). These four films address directly the lifeworld of Bengali refugees, but the Partition was the defining experience of Ghatak's life, and he evokes it in a variety of ways throughout his fictional cinema.
Shaktipada Rajguru was Ritwik Ghatak's fourth completed feature, and it is the one he is best known for, as well as the only one that enjoyed commercial success. Ghatak considered Sergei Eisenstein to be his guru, and that influence is evident in this film's mise-en-scène-particularly in its placement of actors and objects in the frame and its frequent use of low angles, high-contrast expressionist lighting, and fluid camera movements. Ghatak also regularly invoked Eisenstein in his contrapuntal use of sound.
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