Lessons learnt from maverick teacher: Adoor remembers Ghatak as FTII professor of direction
Telegraph | 13 November 2025
“The unfortunate part about Ghatak’s career is his films were not shown in film festivals abroad in his lifetime; neither did he ever travel to foreign shores. After his death, he was discovered and there was a wave of retrospectives everywhere,” lamented Adoor Gopalakrishnan, a pioneer of new wave Malayalam cinema.
Gopalakrishnan was in town for the first Ritwik Ghatak Memorial Conversation, with filmmaker Anup Singh, at Sisir Mancha on Wednesday, which was the highlight of the penultimate day of the Kolkata International Film Festival.
Speaking of his teacher, Gopalakrishnan felt Ghatak was himself partly to blame for his lack of exposure in the West. “In terms of cinema, he was organised but he lived a disorderly life. None of his producers worked with him for a second time,” he said.
The Dadasaheb Phalke awardee was a second-year student at the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune when Ghatak joined as vice-principal and professor of direction. “Stories abounded about Ritwikda. He is said to have introduced one of his producers, saying: ‘Here is the lamb I have sacrificed at the altar of cinema’. As students, we were excited to have him as our teacher.”
Ghatak had made Ajantrik, Bari Theke Paliye, Meghe Dhaka Tara, Subarnarekha and Komal Gandhar by then. Nagarik was made but not released. “He did not deal with the theory of cinema in class. He analysed his own films.”
The students soon discovered how different he was from Satyajit Ray, who was meticulous about every detail. “The reason I think is that Ray came from the background of painting while Ghatak was from theatre,” Gopalakrishnan said.
He debunked the myth of Ray and Ghatak being adversaries. “While showing us Aparajito in class, he had cried out: ‘Look, this is great cinema.’ Ray also had told me that ‘Ghatak had cinema running in his veins’. They may have had different approaches to filmmaking but they admired each other. Ray had also recommended his name to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi for an appointment when Ghatak had no work after some of his films failed.”
Despite staying on the institute campus, never did Ghatak turn up drunk in class, stressed his former student, quashing another rumour about the maverick filmmaker.
“My friends Kumar Shahani and Mani Kaul used to hang around at his house. In class, there were just five or six of us. So his classes were never pulpit talk.”
Even after joining the film institute, so involved was the teacher in filmmaking that he once took over the reins of a diploma film, titled Rendezvous, that a senior student R.N. Shukla was making. “The film was actually Ghatak’s work. He could not stand passively watching any film being made,” he said, smiling.
Gopalakrishnan said he had learnt the use of sound from Ghatak. “In real life, we remain in the midst of so many sounds but on the film sets, there is only the sound of dialogues being spoken incessantly, like in a theatre, and the background score. Ghatak knew the importance of sound. When the protagonist in Meghe Dhaka Tara comes down the steps, there is the crack of whiplashes. It is an extraneous sound.”
While Jean-Luc Godard was credited with bringing abrupt cuts in fashion, Ghatak, contended the filmmaker, had used them earlier.
Speaking of his own techniques, Gopalakrishnan said he avoided extraneous sound unless it emanated from the visuals. Being a theatre person, like Ghatak, he said he did not allow his actors to read the full script. “Actors must not interpret the role differently from me. I explain the scene before I shoot it. I am basically an actor and I can show them how to do it.”
The audience left with a sense of anticipation as the 84-year-old director shared with festival chairperson Goutam Ghose his plan of making another film after a gap of over a decade.