In India the Art Films of Satyajit Ray Are Less Wellattended Than Bollywood Films

THE BENGALI Motion picture Director Satyajit Ray has simply received an Academy Award for lifetime accomplishment. Those who know his work must experience that the honor is long overdue. Ray'south best-known films—the "Apu Trilogy," Charulata, The Music Room, to name a few—are world-class, supranational classics, to exist viewed and enjoyed again and again.

Besides directing his movies, Ray writes his ain scripts, works the camera, edits the negative, and composes the music. He has a control almost unknown in cinema. This, together with his ability to interpret the human middle, transforms the flickering, insubstantial images of motion-picture show into a real world in which we can recognize our family, our friends, and even our own social club—though petty could exist more strange to a Western audience than India, Bengal, Calcutta, and a apprehensive village without electricity or running water. A bang-up office of Ray'due south brilliance lies in taking the smallest, poorest Bengali village and peopling information technology with characters and situations we know from our everyday lives, no matter who nosotros are or where we alive.

It is e'er difficult to convey on newspaper, in words and nonetheless images, where the genius of a film lies—particularly so when the film has the artistic scope of virtually any of Ray's movies. On the occasion of this Oscar, and so, nosotros have asked L. Somi Roy and James Ivory, who know Ray's art well, to put him in context for the wider audience that volition hear of the award just might non otherwise know his work.

—Anthony Korner

SATYAJIT RAY'Southward FIRST FILM, Pather Panchali (Vocal of the Piddling Road, 1955), is peradventure the single most of import Indian movie. Its simultaneously poetic and realistic portrayal of a rural Bengal village revolutionized Indian cinema. Forth with its two sequels, Aparajito (The Unvanquished, 1956) and Apur Sansar (The World of Apu, 1959)—the "Apu Trilogy"—it establishes Ray as i of the smashing filmmakers of our time. What is even more remarkable, merely perhaps less known, is the range of the work that followed. Ray has looked at gimmicky India in over xxx feature films, shorts, and documentaries. He has made delightful fantasies that entreatment to children and adults alike, has turned his hand to both satire and detective films, and has shown his mastery over the catamenia film.

Ray was built-in in Calcutta in 1921, in the country of Bengal, into a family of artists and intellectuals. His father, Sukumar Ray, was a major literary figure, an Indian Edward Lear whose nonsense verse is still pop with children today. Ray'due south outset feel of cinema was as a immature child watching Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd. He spent his youth with the films of Frank Capra, John Huston, Billy Wilder, William Wyler, and other not bad Hollywood directors, every bit well as with European and Soviet films. He then studied fine arts at Santiniketan, the university started by the Nobel poet laureate Rabindranath Tagore, Ray'due south fundamental creative and intellectual influence.

Ray, like Tagore before him, belonged to Bengal's progressive centre grade, the bhadralok, which led the Bengal Renaissance of the 19th century. The bhadralok had a comfortable and judicious respect for both mod, Western ideas and Indian traditions, but sought to rid those traditions of values inimical to modernization, for example the degree organization and the subjugation of women. This intellectual and artistic lineage is central to Ray's work, shaping his liberal and humanist worldview.

Ray also draws upon the sensibility and concerns of the sophisticated mod civilization that developed during the years of India'southward nationalist movement confronting the British. He belongs to the generation of artists who came of age during this period—contemporaries like Ritwick Ghatak and Mrinal Sen, who also made their first films in the belatedly '50s. These directors did not, of class, invent the serious Indian film (as singled-out from the popular, escapist musical melodrama); Five. Shantaram's Duniya nu Mane (The Unexpected, 1937), K. A. Abbas' Dharti ke Lal (Children of the Earth, 1946), and Bimal Roy's Exercise Bigha Zamin (2 Acres of Land, 1953) had all won considerable critical recognition in their time. What distinguishes Ray and his peers from the earlier generation is their emphasis on the reconstruction of a newly independent society.

The overriding theme of all these filmmakers is alter. Ray in particular has pointed out that all his films are "concerned with the new versus the old."^one Underlying the poetic humanism of Pather Panchali is the story of a Brahmin family in decline, a decline that sets the stage for Apu'southward growth to manhood in the second and third films of the trilogy. We run into the aforementioned focus in the awakening of the eponymous heroine of Charulata (The Lonely Wife, 1964), Ray'south undisputed masterpiece, and of Bimala, one of the three fundamental characters in Ghare-Baize (The Home and the World, 1984). It as well emerges in the story of the feudal aristocrat faced with the vulgar but wealthy upstart in Jalsaghar (The Music Room, 1958), and of the unemployed and angry young men of Pratidwandi (The Adversary, 1970) and Jana Aranva (The Middleman, 1975). The representations of the degree system in Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder, 1973) and Sadgati (Deliverance, 1981) are aspects of change likewise. The collective result is an examination, representation, and expression of facet after facet of modern Bengali life.

Ray has displayed a clearheaded and sensible approach in telling this story. His delivery to his ain esthetics has meant that his films are ignored by the bulk of India'due south cinema-going public, which prefers the musical melodramas and mythological films churned out by the studios of Mumbai, Madras, and Calcutta. Quite early in his career, Ray reflected,

What and so should the serious filmmaker do? Should he accept the state of affairs and utilise himself to the making of serious mythologicals and serious devotionals, keeping the popular ingredients and clothing them in the semblance of art? This is plain a fashion out of the impasse, but it raises an important question: can a serious filmmaker, working in India, afford to shut his eyes to the reality effectually him, the reality that is so poignant, then urgently in need of interpretation in terms of the movie theatre? I do non call up so. ²

Information technology is a measure out of Ray'southward response to the reality of India that he believes that one should make films in a language in which i is fluent. With the exception of Shatranj ke Khilari (The Chess Players, 1977) and Sadgati, both of which are in Hindi, Ray has made all his films in Bengali, a language spoken by only a sixth of Bharat's population. As a result, his work is trivial seen beyond the educated urban Bengali public. His films are virtually assured of at to the lowest degree a six-calendar week run in Calcutta, but usually appear merely in cursory runs, and with English language subtitles, in the country'due south other big cities.

For Ray, working for a minority audition has meant small budgets. This has had important consequences. After seeing Vittorio de Sica's Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief, 1948), Ray was convinced information technology offered a model for his first characteristic, and neo-Realist techniques—extensive employ of locations, natural lighting—did indeed contribute to Pather Panchali. Information technology has too been economical for Ray to operate the camera himself, as he has washed since Charulata, editing in the camera and keeping ratios of last film to film shot as low equally 1:2 or 1:3. ³ Simply Ray would be a complete filmmaker without such considerations. He not only directs only writes his own scripts, many of them original screenplays. Since Teen Kanya (Three Daughters, 1961, a three-part work released in the United States without one segment equally Two Daughters) he has also equanimous the music for his works. He has consummate control over every aspect of his films and has put a personal postage on every one of them.

Ray's interest in the individual, in the subtle shading of graphic symbol, is evident in all his films. Inner states, motivations, and relationships are developed through a strong sense of visual and dramatic grade. Even an apparently structureless moving picture like Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Woods, 1970) leaves us feeling we know the vacationing city-dwellers equally individuals. We grow to recognize Ashim, the refined executive, his buddy Sanjoy, the sophisticated and sensitive Aparna, the masculine jock Hari, the group comedian Sekhar. Through Ray's subtle and fluid interplay, the characters define each other even as they correspond themselves.

Ray excels in a totally cinematic approach, an intense and eloquent use of visual images expressing inner states of existence. In Charulata, the heroine'due south feelings of turmoil are captured in an extreme closeup of the actress Madhabi Mukherjee's eyes looking into the camera, going slightly in and out of focus equally she moves gently on a swing. Landscapes too acquire eloquence, as in the opening sequence of Distant Thunder, where the lush paddy fields of Bengal reverberate swiftly moving storm clouds and finally a peppery sunset in their shallow h2o. The fields are green; the oncoming famine is manmade. Tragedy, sorrow, and death loom on the horizon.

These are the attributes that have carried Ray's films to their international audience. There are of course limitations. His "village" films take washed amend in the West than his "city" films, reflecting in function the appeal of the exotic. His interest in human relationships and depth of label have often resulted in films where the cadences and speech patterns in the dialogue are crucial—and untranslatable. And as with any movie, one'due south appreciation of his films, characteristically unfolding through nuances of homo beliefs, is more compelling with a fuller knowledge of their social and esthetic groundwork. Probir's confidences to his sister-in-law most his decision to quit his job in Shakha Proshakha (Branches of the Tree, 1990), for example, a motion-picture show almost an old man witnessing moral decay in his family unit, or the alteration of the relationships inside an extended family in Mahanagar (The Big City, 1963), take a power of verisimilitude that is enhanced by a knowledge of the intimate all the same formal relationships within an Indian family.

It is in the presentation of the specifics of modern Republic of india that Ray has been nearly profound and yet most criticized. In a state that often seems to dwarf its works of art by the scale of its tragedies, it is perhaps a mensurate of Ray'due south cultural status, ranked just adjacent to Tagore, that Bengali viewers have sought from him radical answers to the issues that face the nation. But the poverty of hamlet India depicted in Pather Panchali endures, equally does the inhumanity of the caste system portrayed in Sadgati, and the corruption of The Middleman.

Modernistic Indians take grown disenchanted with the ability of the political structures they inherited from the British to solve the problems of their newly contained land. Ray'south own state of Bengal has led this procedure, electing a Marxist authorities. In films like The Antagonist and The Middleman, Ray delineates the entrenchment of ruling interests and the helplessness of the disenfranchised. Yet in eschewing greater radicalism at a time when Bengal'south youth were advocating Maoist political activeness, he aimed at a politics that would preserve individual integrity and responsibleness. It is Ray's interest in the private rather than a general ideology that deters him from forwarding solutions. Several of his films from the 1970s on saw him looking at the political and economic problems facing the country; nevertheless Siddhartha, the job seeker in The Adversary, does non go a radical and accept to the streets. Siddhartha'due south decision to accept a low-paying and less prestigious task in the country is more than universally understandable precisely because it is based non on an ideology but on his own experience.

Ray's examination and recognition of the bug of contemporary Bharat, and his unwillingness to prescribe radical solutions, take been frustrating to some, especially in his own land. At that place is an uneasiness with political activism in his dismissal of the unmarried-minded radicalism of Siddhartha's blood brother Tunu in The Adversary. Similarly, the ambivalence of the heroine of Seemahaddha (Visitor Limited, 1971) toward her revolutionary boyfriend allows her to arroyo her blood brother-in-law'south corporate world—though she does somewhen reject that world for its amorality. Ray's sympathies prevarication with the thinking individual who harbors uncertainties and vacillations rather than with revolutionaries proclaiming political certainties. In The Dwelling house and the Earth he delves unsparingly into the psychological motivations of Sandip, a leader of Swadeshi, a nationalist anti-British motion whose progressive role in history no modern Indian would question.

Ray is comfy in his artistic inquiry and expression: "I think I like to present issues and make the public conscious of the presence of certain social problems and let them think for themselves. . . . I don't think it'southward necessary, of import or right for an creative person to provide answers, to say 'this is right and this is wrong.'"⁴ His humanism goes beyond that of a liberal who does not hold with Marxist methods of social alter; it represents the position of a modern mind that approaches India and the globe at large through a commitment to the private. In Shakha Proshakha, a bitter drama well-nigh the destruction of moral values and the corruption that swamps Bharat today, one of the characters remarks on his confusion with the events in Eastern Europe and the crumbling of the Communist regimes. True to his approach, Ray explores problems by indicating how his characters experience them. At a time when countries are scrambling to cope with a globe spanned by the ability of capitalism and consumerism, and intellectuals are faced with diminished ideological alternatives, his films stand in good stead. He may not have provided the answers, but he has asked crucial questions and retained for his characters their ultimate right—their humanity.

L. Somi Roy, formerly the film programmer at the Asia Gild, is a specialist in Asian cinema who lives in New York.

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NOTES

i. Satyajit Ray, quoted in Marie Seton, Satyajit Ray: Portrait of a Manager, London: Doobson Books. Ltd., 1971, p. 141.
2. Ray, Our Films Their Films, New Delhi Orient Longman, 1976, pp. forty–41.
three. Ben Nyce, Satyajit Ray: A Study of His Films, New York: Praeger, 1988, p. 196.
iv. Roy, quoted in "Film India: Satyajit Ray," Directorate of Film Festivals, ed. Chidananda Das Gupta, New Delhi: Advisers of Film Festivals, 1981, p. 136. The original source is Folke Isaacson, "Interview with Ray," Sight and Sound, Summer 1970.