The Inner Eye

The Inner Eye is a 1972 short documentary film made by Satyajit Ray on Benode Behari Mukherjee, a blind artist and a teacher from VisvaBharati University, a university founded by Rabindranath Tagore at Santiniketan. The twenty minutes documentary features the life and works of Mukherjee in the form of paintings and photographs, starring himself. The documentary covers his journey from childhood till his blindness along with much of his works and features his words, Blindness is a new feeling, a new experience, a new state of being. The documentary was awarded as Best Information Film Documentary at 20th National Film Awards in 1972.

Benode Behari Mukherjee was an Indian artist, born on February 7, 1904, into a well educated family in Behala, in the state of West Bengal. He could not pursue normal schooling due to his poor eyesight. However, his family recognized his interest for art and literature and sent him to Santiniketan for further studies in an art faculty, Kala Bhavan. He eventually became a teaching staff member at Santiniketan in 1925. Later he joined as a curator at the Nepal Government Museum in Kathmandu and taught at the Banasthali Vidyapith, Rajasthan, during 195152. He returned to Kala Bhavan in 1958 and then became the principal of art theory. He lost his eyesight completely in an unsuccessful cataract operation. As an artist, Mukherjee worked with different media like murals, watercolor, and oils. In his work, he used a complex fusion of idioms absorbed from Western modern art and the spirituality of oriental traditions. In 1974, he was awarded with Padma Vibhushan, the secondhighest civilian award in the Republic of India. Mukherjee died on November 19, 1980, at the age of 76.The documentary begins by showcasing a process by which a wall,feet 1.5m high by 60 feet 18m wide, of a newly developed building in Santiniketan would be decorated bymurals designed by Benode Behari Mukherjee. While the narrator Satyajit Ray describes Mukherjees family, Mukherjee himself explains the process of mural making and how he spends most of his time alone in Santiniketan with his favourite drink, tea. Mukherjee, the youngest child of his family among six children, is shown spending his initial days as a student in Santiniketan with his drawings and paintings. He was a student of Nandalal Bose, another acclaimed painter from Santiniketan. The film mentions Boses influence of Mukherjees initial work with his own striking originality. ........

Source: Wikipedia