Der Bürger

Nagarik is an extremely remarkable film especially given the year in which it is made. Had it been made at the end of the fifties, one would be tempted to see the influence of Camus' L'Etranger, of Osborne's Look Back in Anger or the plays of Harold Pinter but Nagarik pre-dates all of them. Verismo certainly but not quite in the manner of Satyajit Ray's later Pather Panchali (1955) because Nagarik is highly stylised and has very much the feel cinematographically of a film noir. Although nothing like it in theme, it has stylistic echoes of Kamal Amrohi's 1949 Hindi film Mahal(and uses narration in a way very typical of Amrohi). Few films have ever better depicted the despair of poverty, the debilitating pattern of hopes defeated, of humiliations endured. Yet for all that it remains an engaged film (there are echoes too of Eisenstein, of Gorky, of the Renoir of Les Bas-Fonds). It is little less than criminal that this film remains so little known.