THE SCREEN

...He parlays his position as his village's only Brahmin into a whole variety of jobs-priest, school teacher, etc.-and when he is asked to ward off cholera, he goes through hierophantic rituals and incantations to increase his fee while actually hoping to prevent the epidemic with a few hygiene rules gleaned from a pamphlet...

...Thus Ray's film makes us feel that the great tragedy here is how little a change famine represents-how small a difference there is between surviving and starving...

...INDIAN SUMMER THE SCREEN Satyajit Ray's Distant Thunder is about the 1942 rice famine in India which killed millions of people...

...Being more ignorant and innocent than her husband, Ananga is less suspicious and more charitable when trouble comes...

...On the one hand, he doesn't want us to sympathize with them too much...

...Their existence has always been marginal at best...

...not just a backdrop for the story of his two central characters, Gangacharan, a village Brahmin, and his wife Ananga...

...And then, while her friends do the digging to get out the enormous potato they are all to eat, she wanders off to pick a sweet little blue flower she sees nearby...

...This close-up of Ananga's hand is in fact the first human image we get in the film, and it is from this sort of idle, incidental detail of everyday living that Ray builds up his story of famine...

...Like the butterflies, this figure of a hand also reappears throughout the film, though the hand changes and transforms itself each time...

...Since great devastation like a famine is nothing but a fantasy to Americans, the characters in our own recent disaster films tend to be fantastic, an assortment of saints, martyrs and sacrificial lambs...

...They can make the transition without having their values and emotions destroyed, as you and I might, because it is not that far for them to go...

...It is the famine he is trying to dramatize here, and to a certain extent he wants us to feel for his characters in spite of their personal qualities rather than because of them...

...It was also, in terms of the sheer number of victims, an atrocity second only to the Nazi extermination of the Jews...

...This is why Ray has made his film about only the first stages of the famine rather than its ghastly final consequences: because the real pity of it is to be seen in how easily, how imperceptibly, a whole civilization can cross the line from sufficiency to insufficiency...

...In effect the conditions of Ganga's and Ananga's existence are embodied in that fragile blue flower she picks while her friends dig-in it and all the other images of beautiful, febrile things that occur and re-occur throughout Ray's film...

...On the other hand, though, almost all of Ganga's and Ananga's vices are easily forgivable ones...

...The exigencies of the world war and the Japanese occupation of Singapore and Burma just kept the rice from getting into the hands of the Indian people...

...Yet the remarkable thing about Ray's film is that in it the dimensions of the atrocity are not apparent...

...For one thing, Ganga is a bit of a charlatan...

...Likewise, when the old man Ganga would have turned away also returns at the end, this time with a half-dozen starving relatives, Ganga takes them in without hesitation...

...On the contrary, the famine only reveals resources of their character that we did not earlier suspect...

...One might even go so far as to say that there is an extraordinary consistency in Ganga's personality before and after the famine strikes...

...The striking thing about Ganga and Ananga is that they aren't like this...

...Although Ganga at first worries because he doesn't want to lose face doing work that's beneath his caste to get food, at the end of the film, when things are getting much worse and someone finally dies of hunger, he himself undertakes the burial without a second thought even though the person is an Untouchable...

...From Ananga's hand lying in relaxation in the water at the beginning, it becomes at the end Ganga's hand lifting up the arm of the Untouchable, dead from starvation, whom he must now bury...

...Ray is using it in the opposite way: to bring down in scale, and thus to humanize, an historical event so pitiless and abstract that most of us cannot grasp it in individual terms at all...

...It is the sort of image which, when it occurs in our movies, as it so often does, is being used to romanticize, to inflate and exaggerate something that is already sentimental enough...

...What is of far more interest to us in this opening scene is the open, upturned hand of Ananga trailing in the river and weakly, almost absently, splashing at the water that the river's current carries through it...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR.STERBECK, JR...

...One of them, along with images of grass and tree roots and dragonflies and lizards that punctuate the film, is an image of two butterflies perched in the mud, their wings fluttering listlessly, no longer able, it seems, to lift them off the ground...

...Its open and upturned posture makes it at once both a hand offered in salutation, which is to say, in a gesture of civility, and a hand extended in pleading, which is to say, in a gesture signifying the collapse of all civility...

...But Ananga isn't without her own folly and snobbishness either...

...Among the many small and feeble images like this that occur in the film, perhaps the central one is the one with which the film begins, Ananga's hand...

...Ray is not trying to awe us with what happened, and its full realization remains in his film only a kind of "distant thunder," as his title aptly puts it...

...The reason for this is that Ray thinks he can dramatize history here all the better by keeping some distance from it...

...But as the film begins, the thunder of that famine is as distant as the drone of fighter planes which, passing high overhead, momentarily attract the uncomprehending attention of the villagers...

...When an old man comes begging at their door because the soaring price of rice in his province has made him destitute, Ananga intercedes in his behalf to get her husband to take him in...

...What this continuity of character, this adaptability to tragedy, makes us mindful of is how perilously close to the edge these people have been even in the best of times...

...I think that the reason Ray presents his characters in this somewhat unkind way is twofold...

...It was, as a brief epilogue to Ray's film points out, the first man-made famine in human history...

...Ganga also frets a bit over his status in the community, and mumbles Sanskrit at illiterate villagers in order to impress them...

...On the contrary, they are so human a couple that they seem even to be dislikable in some ways During the first part of the film especially, it seems to be their foibles, weaknesses and petty larcenies that Ray is dwelling on...

...The famine really is Ray's subject...

...Its horror was all the greater, too, because it was an unnecessary famine...

...The crops didn't fail in Asia that year...

...As the famine begins to touch their own lives, their concern for each other is so profound that we become incapable of thinking ill of them, and any pretentiousness or false pride we may have sensed before melts away...

...Neither he nor Ananga change abruptly or become demented by the hunger and degradation of it all...

...When friends take her into the jungle to share a cache of wild potato they know about, she complains all the way because of the brambles they must tread to get there...

...The point is that it is a terrible thing for anyone to be the victim of such a catastrophe whether we like him or not, and Ray doesn't want us to like or idealize his characters so much that we lose sight of this...

...The culture of the Brahmin, like the agriculture of the peasant on whom he depends, is never more than a subsistence living...