Satyajit Ray
(1921 - 1992)
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ShareThree Key Films: The Apu Trilogy: Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956) & The World of Apu(1959), The Music Room (1959), Charulata (1964)
Underrated: Nayak: The Hero(1966). This film has been largely ignored in the Ray canon, though it has an amazing, layered performance from the Bengali matinee idol of the ‘50s and ‘60s, Uttam Kumar. Kumar bravely excoriates his own on and off-screen persona, as Arindam Mukherjee, a successful movie star who has compromised his artistic principles over the years for money and fame. The film presents us with the question of whether this man can satisfy both his greed and narcissim while still holding on to the noble qualities that made him want to become an artist in the first place. There were many films made in Europe and America about the complicated nature of celebrity, from La Dolce Vita to The Bad and the Beautiful, but this is Satyajit Ray’s take on celebrity culture in India in the ‘60s. There’s a pivotal series of scenes in the movie that focuses on the Arindam Mukherjee’s early career as a stage actor trying to hone in his craft in Indian classical theatre. During one performance, a casual, cruel slight from an older, veteran actor, an off-hand remark about Arindam’s lack of talent, changes something in the young man. A few years later, when Arindam’s career is soaring in the movies, the veteran actor is now washed-up and out-of-work and he comes to call on Arindam to ask for a job, some bit-part in a movie to pay off some bills. Arindam turns him away. This episode haunts him again and again throughout his life, and Ray seems to say that the ambition and ego that drive an actor towards success are also what ruins him as a person.
Unforgettable: Durga’s dance in the monsoon rains in Pather Panchali. Apu and his older sister Durga spend their days outdoors in the village jungles of West Bengal, and when the monsoon rains come, its a time of such abundance and relief, that rather than running home for shelter, Durga spins around and dances in the pouring rain, her sari and hair drenched across her skin. Set to the rapturous music of Ravi Shankar’s sitar, and peerlessly filmed by Subrata Mitra (only a few cinematographers like Gunnar Fischer or Guy Green could shoot a film in black-and-white in this extraordinary way), the scene is one of the most unforgettable moments, not only in Indian cinema, but in world cinema. Ray sets out to capture a fleeting moment of childhood recklessness and sensuality. It’s become a scene that brings nature to life in front of the camera, and says something about how this character temporarily forgets the reality of her family’s poverty to experience the beauty of the world around her.
The Legend: Satyajit Ray was one of the first filmmakers to chronicle the life of India’s rural poor. Inspired by the Italian Neo-Realists, his three films about young Apu Ray and his family, Pather Panchali(1955), Aparajito(1956), and The World of Apu(1959), have become iconic in Indian cinema. They were the first elegantly made, intimately staged and directed independent art films from India. They dealt with the growing up of a young boy, who overcame poverty to win a scholarship and go to university, but they also dealt with life in a newly-independent India, free from colonial rule and coming to terms with its modern identity. The question of what it meant to be an Indian in the mid-20th century was something that Ray grappled with in his films. Mahanagar (1964) shows us a young woman from a conservative bourgeois family in Calcutta, whose dire financial situation compels her to work as a salesperson in a large department store, much to the dismay of the family, who are prurient and sanctimonious in regards to a woman parading herself in front of other men, but are too impractical to realize their own situation. This is of course the first step to this young woman’s empowerment and the developing of her own identity outside her home—something many young women in India faced during the late ‘50s and early ‘60s.
Ray was brilliant at skewering the pretensions of the hypocritical, Indian middle-classes. Along with Mahanagar, Kanchenjunga (1966), a story about an affluent family on summer holiday in Simla, shows us the ways in which women are pulled back from certain goals and possibilities by being compelled to marry before they turn 25. Devi (1960) is the story of a young woman whose father-in-law believes her to be a reincarnation of the goddess Kali, and who literally places her in the center of the household shrine for the entire village to come and worship her, which eventually leads to her mental breakdown. For India to be a part of the 20th century, it had to reconcile its complicated older traditions with the new. It had to cast aside prejudices and superstitions, something which it was unwilling to do, something which it is still relatively unwilling to do.
Ray also had a great gift with actors, and some of the best Indian actors have blossomed in cinema thanks to his guidance: Soumitra Chaterjee, Madhabi Mukherjee, Sharmila Tagore, Aparna Sen, and Jaya Bachan. He was a great writer as well, and the original screenplays he wrote for Nayak (1966) and Kanchenjunga, as well as the numerous adapted screenplays he did over the years contain some of the most brilliant dialogue in Indian films. From the mid-‘60s and onwards, Ray’s name became synonymous with Indian cinema, and he had become the guru for all filmmakers coming to India. James Ivory and Ismail Merchant, when they started work on their first film in India in, The Householder (1963), looked to Ray for guidance. The film has tone of some of Ray’s work, like Aparijito, and you can begin to see where Ray’s influence would across in the work of other directors. Wes Anderson’s Darjeeling Limited (2007) is so enamored of Ray’s cinema, that its entire soundtrack consists of borrowed snippets of sitar music from each of Ray’s films.
Ray’s films are meant to be watched and enjoyed in the way you would read a very good short story. They’re focused, distilled, and full of detail and revelation in places you don’t sense the first time around. They are great Indian films, of course, but they’re great films period. They transcend nationality, race, and culture, and are moving stories of people coming to terms with who they are and with their personal relationships. 
Farisa Khalid
