SATYAJIT RAY: The Indian Filmmaker

Satyajit Ray (2 May 1921-23 April 1992) was a Bengali Indian Film maker who was born in Kolkata, India into a Bengali Family of art and literature. He started his career as a commercial artist in Kolkata and went on to become to win international recognition in films.

On a visit to London he met Jean Renoir the French Filmmaker and saw the neorealist film Bicycle Thief (1948) by Vittorio De sica after which he decided to try his hands on filmmaking.

In 1952, Ray started shooting his first film Pather Panchali with an inexperienced crew and some personal savings. It took him three years to complete the film and finally, with a loan from the Government of West Bengal it was released in 1955 and went on to win eleven international prizes, including ‘Best Human Document’ at Cannes Film Festival.

Ray did scripting, casting, scoring, cinematography, art direction, editing and designed his own credit titles and publicity material. He was a fiction writer, publisher, illustrator, graphic designer and film critic. He considered script-writing to be an integral part of direction which initially was the reason why he only made films in the Bengali language. He had designed four typefaces for roman script named Ray Roman, Ray Bizarre, Daphnis, and Holiday Script, apart from numerous Bengali once. Ray Roman and Ray Bizarre won an international competition in 1971.

Ray's international career started after the success of his next film, Aparajita (The Unvanquished) which was the sequel of his first film and won the Golden Lion in Venice. The last of the series Apur Sansar (The World of Apu) was made in 1959. In 1961, the Prime-Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru requested and commissioned Ray to make a documentary on Rabindranath Tagore, the legendary Indian poet on the occasion of the his birth centennial.

In 1964 Ray made Charulata (The Lonely Wife). Many critics regard this period of his life at the peak during which he made his most accomplished film. Based on Nastanirh, a short story written by Tagore, the film tells the tale of a lonely wife, Charu, in 19th century Bengal, and her growing feelings for her brother in law, Amal. This film is often referred to as Ray's Mozartian masterpiece, In the post Charulata period, Ray took on projects of increasing variety, ranging from fantasy to science fiction to detective films to historical drama In 1967, Ray wrote a script for a film to be called ‘The Alien’ based on his short story Bankubabur Bandhu ("Banku Babu's Friend") which he wrote in 1962 for Sandesh, the Ray family magazine. The Alien had Columbia Pictures as producer for this planned U.S.-India co-production, and Peter Sellers and Marlon Brando as the leading actors. However, Ray was surprised to find that the script he had written had already been copyrighted by Mike Wilson. Wilson had initially approached Ray as an acquaintance of a mutual friend, Arthur.C.Clarke, to represent him in Hollywood. Ray later stated that he never received a penny for the script. Ray became disillusioned and returned to India. When ‘E.T’ was released in 1982, Clarke and Ray saw similarities in the film to the script, further details revealed by Ray's biographer Andrew Robinson ( The Inner Eye, 1989). His script of The Alien was available throughout America in mimeographed copies. Spielberg denies this. Robin Wood and others have often described him as the best director of children. Depending on the talent or experience of the actor Ray's direction would vary from virtually nothing to using the actor as a puppet. According to actors working for Ray, his customary trust in the actors would occasionally be tempered by his ability to treat incompetence with total contempt.

Ray's work has been recognized as Humanistic and of deceptive simplicity with deep underlying complexity. The Japanese film maker Akira Kurosawa has said, "Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon." and defended him on his films being criticized as slow and praised his work as the ‘kind of cinema that flows with the serenity and nobility of a big river’. Some find his humanism simple-minded and his work anti-modern and claim that they lack new modes of expression or experimentation found in works of Ray's contemporaries like Jean-Luc Godard. As Stanley Kauffman wrote, some critics believe that Ray "assumes his viewers can be interested in a film that simply dwells in its characters, rather than one that imposes dramatic patterns on their lives."

He is regarded as one of the greatest auteur of 20th century cinema. Critics have often compared Ray to artists in the cinema and other media, such as Anton Chekhov, Renoir, De Sica, Howard Hawks or Mozart. Shakespeare has also been invoked for example by the writer V. S. Naipaul, who compared a scene in “Shatranj Ki Khiladi” to a Shakespearian play.

Beyond India, filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, James Ivory, Abbas Kiarostami and Elia Kazan have been influenced by his cinematic style. Ira Sachs's 2005 work Forty Shades of Blue was a loose remake of Charulata, and in the 1995 film My Family, the final scene is duplicated from the final scene of Apur Sansar. Similar references to Ray films are found, for example, in recent works such as Sacred Evil, the Elements trilogy of Deepa Mehta and even in films of Jean-Luc Godard. The character Apu Nahasapeemapetilon in the American animated television series The Simpson was named in homage to Ray's popular character from The Apu Trilogy.

Many literary works include references to Ray or his work, including Saul Bellow's Herzog and J. M. Coetzee's Youth. Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories contain fish characters named Goopy and Bagha, a tribute to Ray's fantasy film. In 1993, UC Santa Cruz established the Satyajit Ray Film and Study collection, and in 1995, the Government of India set up Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute for studies related to film. In 2007, British Broadcasting Corporation declared that two of his ‘Feluda’ stories (detective) would be made into radio programs. During the London film festival, a regular "Satyajit Ray Award" is given to first-time feature director whose film best captures "the artistry, compassion and humanity of Ray's vision". Wes Anderson has claimed Ray as an influence on his work; his most recent film, The Darjeeling Limited, set in India, is dedicated to Ray. Satyajit Ray was awarded with 32 National Film Awards by the Government of India during his lifetime. He was the second film personality to be awarded honorary doctorates by Oxford University, after Charlie Chaplin. Ray was also awarded the ‘Legion of Honor’ by the President of France in 1987 and the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 1985.

In the year 1992 The Government of India awarded him the highest civilian honor Bharat Ratna and The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored him with an Oscar for Lifetime Achievemnet in his sickbed and was as well awarded the Akira Kurosawa Award for Lifetime Achievement in Directing at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

By: Kasturi Mishra