On Halloween, afterlife of a ghost dance

Toronto: The ghost dance - ' bhooter naach' - sequence in Satyajit Ray's 1969 movie, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, is no ordinary fantasy interlude waiting to be relished on Halloween tonight. It's a 6-min experiment in perception, a hallucinatory ritual that feels startlingly modern, if not contemporaneous, today. When the ghosts arrive, the forest itself seems to shift. Moonlight hardens to metal, drums pulse like a second heartbeat, and shadows break free to dance on their own.

Ray was too disciplined to talk of rebellion. But he was fascinated by what cinema could do to the senses. In this sequence, he uses every tool available - under-cranking, negative printing, rhythmic layering, cross- cutting - to create a trance. The dance unfolds like a psychedelic raga or a trip: a single beat summons the first ghost; others join in symmetrical waves; rhythms thicken, cuts shorten, and the clearing becomes a vortex of overlapping motion.

Just when chaos peaks, the ghosts lock into a vertical tableau and the forest drops back into silence. The audience, like singer Goopy and drummer Bagha, sits stunned - altered, but restored.

Percussion drives the sequence. Each ghost-class seems to have its own distinct rhythm, created by a layering of drums. Instruments like the mridangam, khol and dhol combine to give each group a unique sonic identity - a heavy, classical beat for the kings, a folk rhythm for the villagers. As these rhythms layer, they induce a kind of collective entrainment - the brain's tendency to sync with external beats. It is why breath quickens as the dance builds: the viewer is being pulled, body first, into the film's pulse.

The images work the same spell. Sections shot at lower frame rates make the ghosts flicker and stutter. Negative-printed portions turn the forest into a ghostly X-ray. The editing accelerates until the eye stops tracking individual shapes and simply rides the rhythm. Then, with the tableau comes the reset: a visual mandala of kings above, commoners below, order momentarily restored.

That tableau has long invited allegory. It can be read as reconciliation - four classes united in a single vertical frame. Or, as bitter irony: even in death, hierarchy holds. In 1969 West Bengal, with its food riots, strikes and uprisings, the image would have offered staggering interpretive malleability and aesthetic charge. Ray offers no speech, no violence. Just a clearing where history's ghosts dance themselves out and freeze.

Seen globally, the 'bhooter naach' belongs to the great experiments of 1968-69: Stanley Kubrick's star-gates, the Beatles' animation, Woodstock's split screens. But Ray's vision is rooted in Bengal. His ghosts are recognisable types, his rhythms borrowed from folk percussion, his hallucination offered as a village rite.

The dance has since lived many afterlives: on TV reruns, VHS, restored prints, YouTube, Instagram. Fans remix it with electronic music, loop the negative frames into GIFs, slow it down to study its grammar. Far from trivialising it, these remixes keep the sequence alive - a living text, not a museum piece.

And in an era of immersive art installations and psychedelic therapy, Ray's experiment feels prophetic. Where others might now spend millions to induce sensory disorientation, all the great director needed were four drums, a clearing and a B&W camera.

But technique serves meaning. Ray's formal experiment carries the weight of history, and his ghosts are not abstract spirits but recognisable social types. The clearing becomes a stage where Bengal's past performs itself: kings with their martial swagger, colonial sahebs with stiff gaits that border on parody, rotund priests and landlords, loose-limbed villagers. Each enters in historical order, as centuries collide. The choreography encodes the very tensions Ray's 1969 audience would have recognised from their streets and headlines.

The bhooter naach endures because it does more than entertain. It stages the forces that still haunt us: hierarchy, fear, collective memory, pleasure of surrendering to rhythm. When the ghosts vanish, the air does not clear; it quivers. Even today, whether on a cinema screen or a phone, the clearing seems to wait... as if the drums, unbidden, might just start again.

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this column are that of the writer. The facts and opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of www.economictimes.com)