NOTE: The below Blu-ray captures were taken directly from the Blu-ray disc.

ADDITION: Second Run Blu-ray (September 2026): Second Run have transferred Girish Kasaravalli's The Ritual, aka "Ghatashraddha", to Blu-ray. Second Run's 1080P is from the 4K restoration carried out by Film Heritage Foundation with Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project and George Lucas's Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. The restoration card credits two sources - the 35mm original camera negative held by the NFDC-National Film Archive of India and a 35mm print preserved at the Library of Congress - which is worth pausing over, since Indian film heritage of this period has a grim survival record and the fact that a usable negative existed at all is the reason this presentation is possible. The result is a considerable distance from the battered prints and grey video masters that have represented the film for decades. S. Ramachandra's (Deveeri) photography is exacting in a way that punishes a poor transfer: much of the film sits in dim interiors lit from doorways and gaps in the structure, and the whole design depends on holding detail in a narrow band of low grays. There is strong shadow detail where faces stay legible in the darkest of the agrahara interiors, grain is prevalent, and the grayscale has genuine density in the blacks without crushing. Exteriors in the Malnad daylight open up with pleasing contrast. Damage has been cleaned without sterilizing the image - the odd fluctuation in density remains, particularly around, what I presume to be, reel changes - and stability is strong. The bitrate is max'ed out. Note that the disc runs 115 minutes where older references list 108; I can't confirm whether this reflects restored footage or simply a corrected frame rate / measurement.

NOTE: We have added 60 more large resolution Blu-ray captures (in lossless PNG format) for DVDBeaver Patrons HERE

On their Blu-ray, Second Run use a linear PCM dual-mono track (16-bit) in the original Kannada language. It's a faithful rather than flattering presentation of a 1977 optical mono track. The film's sonic strategy is the reverse of most - very little of B.V. Karanth's (Adi Shankaracharya) National Award-winning score, and a great deal of ambient and liturgical sound, with Vedic chant layered into household noise until the two become one texture - so the qualities that matter here are clarity in the midrange and an absence of the harshness that ruins restored optical tracks. Dialogue is clear separated from the ambient bed, the chanting has body without edge, and hiss has been reduced without hollowing out the room tone. The closing movement, where the ritual's clamor is pushed hard against the image instead of yielding to music, is the real test, and it holds together without distortion. Second Run offer optional English subtitles on their Region FREE Blu-ray.

NOTE: The subtitles were prepared in consultation with Kasaravalli as part of the restoration work - which is a substantive improvement given how much of this film's meaning travels through registers of formality and address that older subtitle tracks flattened.

This Second Run Blu-ray supplement package is lean by the standards of the label's bigger releases, but well chosen. The centerpiece is an exclusive newly filmed 1/4 hour interview with Girish Kasaravalli, now in his mid-seventies and an unusually lucid analyst of his own work - he is characteristically precise on his interest in the mechanics of "othering" rather than protest, on the decision to filter the narrative through the boy, and on the circumstances of a first feature shot at his own family home after villagers refused locations on the grounds that the title itself was inauspicious. Fifteen minutes is not much, but very little of it is wasted. The 20-page booklet does the rest of the work: new critical writing by Dr. Omar Ahmed (Revolution of Indian Parallel Cinema in the Global South (1968–1995), The: From Feminism to Iconoclasm,) whose scholarship on Indian parallel cinema makes him the right person for it, a piece by Kasaravalli on the film, and - most valuable for readers of this site - Shivendra Singh Dungarpur of Film Heritage Foundation on the restoration itself, which is where the detail on elements, sources and the state of Indian archival holdings can be found.

Girish Kasaravalli's The Ritual is one of the essential Indian films of the 1970s and has been effectively unavailable outside festival and archive screenings for most of its life - a Golden Lotus winner, later named by IFFI among the twenty best Indian films ever made, and until recently represented by prints in poor condition. Its rescue by Film Heritage Foundation and the World Cinema Project is one of the more consequential restorations of the decade, and Second Run's Blu-ray is the first opportunity most viewers anywhere will have had to see it properly. The transfer is excellent, the newly translated subtitles are a meaningful upgrade, and the Kasaravalli interview and booklet give the film the framing an unfamiliar masterwork needs. The supplements are modest in quantity; the release is not modest in importance. Second Run's Blu-ray is strongly recommended.

Gary Tooze