Satyajit ray’s feminist stories: portraying powerful female characters

Women’s activist film scholar Laura Mulvey begat the term ‘male look’ in her 1975 paper “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, she evaluates the sexual lopsidedness by which the viewpoints of both the producers and the watchers are a male. She contends that women are shown as sexual objects of male craving to hint “to-be-taken a gander at ness”. Consequently in film, the crowd sees what the ‘male look’ of the producer shows: camera shots that wait on women’s body parts and scenes of psychoanalytical mastery over a lady’s viewpoint. The idea of the ‘female look’ emerged from such reactions.

Yet there is no conclusive meaning of the term, two suppositions have risen out of it which have been embraced by producers. To start with, the ‘female look’ is a converse of the ‘male look’, where men are typified rather than women or a re-emphasis of brother culture.

The second and most famous utilization of the term expects that the ‘female look’ must be accomplished with a female movie producer or an all-female cast and team. Notwithstanding, these understandings are reductive and frequently limit the term. It additionally neglects to consider recognizing crafted by male movie producers like Satyajit Ray, who are attempting to catch the interior and outer real factors of women.

In Charulata, Satyajit Ray doesn’t force his look onto his champion, however, rather he permits her to see and view the world in the manner she needs regardless of cultural limitations.

Beam and Tagore were propelled by the nuances of progress in individuals’ lives and the intricacies inside connections. Both were not intentionally women’s activists; be that as it may, they were worried about friendly change and the female perspective. A significant number of Tagore’s accounts highlight women who, in their specific circumstances and even today, stay dynamic and moderate. In any case, not at all like Tagore, whose viewpoint was blurred by Victorian goals, Ray was more worried about the province of Bengali women in the nearby setting.

Through Charulata, Ray’s filmmaking shows that the ‘female’ look isn’t about the inversion of the ‘male look’ or regular generalizations about women or having female movie producers, yet about an honest impression of how a lady in anything that setting sees her general surroundings. Beam permits his crowd to look into Charulata’s brain. Her depiction isn’t diminished to a wicked, debasing spouse who is in an unlawful undertaking however is one that feels for the void in her life which prompts her to fall affection with a man other than her better half.

The film opens with scenes portraying the different ways Charu possesses herself through weaving, perusing, taking a gander at the rest of the world through her drama glasses, playing the piano, keeping an eye on the requirements of and noticing her oblivious spouse. Afterward, while addressing her significant other she logically comments: “Amar ki shomoy’er obhab throb” (Am I at any point restricted by time?). Charu is tormented not by time, but rather due to not having a sidekick. In frontier Bengal, women were supposed to keep up with purdah (segregation/imprisonment to the home), and from the beginning, the crowd is made to see her forlorn reality. We don’t see Charu’s situation from the perspective of Ray’s camera or a male person, yet through Charu herself.

Through Ray’s strategy of outlining the shots with Charu’s show glasses, we get an understanding of her internal contemplations and sentiments, and we see what she sees. To start with, she watches out at the world she is disconnected from, from inside her home. Besides, she views her oblivious spouse as he strolls past her, ignorant about her presence. At last, she seriously centers on Amal as her illegal craving for her brother by marriage is evoked. The show glasses don’t solely give admittance to Charu’s psyche simply by seeing, yet are complemented by meager talking.

Beam fills most of his film with quiet or less discourse from his characters. While conveying Charu’s feelings, he centers around her non-verbal communication, motions, looks, outer sounds, music, or singing. She seldom says how she feels or puts herself out there with words. Frequently when we consider quiet, it is seen as an indication of shortcoming or enslavement, however, in Charulata it consumes space for women’s subjectivity. The nearby ups of Charu’s upsets face say more than words; rather than straightforwardly telling Ray asks his crowd to notice and pay attention to her implicit words.