Comparing Ritwik Ghatak’s twenty-five year career with eight films and a handful of unfinished fragments would not be proper; he was much more than that. Ghatak was a film teacher; did a stint as the vice principal of the Film Institute at Pune, was a playwright and producer, and was a writer of short stories; he claimed to have written over fifty which were published; we have an account of only fourteen, and not to forget the number of articles he wrote on cinema both in Bengali and English. In the article, we discuss his ideas on ‘art’ in cinema through his writings.

  Everything in this world is relative, so art should also be relative to something, and for Ritwik Ghatak, that something is man; Indian man and his environment. The word ‘art’ in films is much maligned. For instance, whatever is pretentiously dull or breathtakingly spectacular is not necessarily art. Neither does art consist of ambitious subjects or propositions,....