Profile of Satyajit Ray on Famous Like Me

Satyajit Ray (Bangla:সত্যজিত্‍ রায়) (May 2, 1921 - April 23, 1992) was an Academy Award winning Indian film director whose films are perhaps the greatest testament to Bengali and Indian cinema. He is mostly known for his Apu trilogy - the films Pather Panchali (Song of the Road), Aparajito (The Unconquered), and Apur Sansar (The World of Apu). - but has a large collection of works that are acclaimed among the world film industry, most notably by the likes of Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. He has been called one of the four greatest director/producers of cinema in the world, and Kurosawa famously said of Ray:

"Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon."

Life

Satyajit Ray was born into a relatively wealthy and highly influential Brahmo family in Kolkata. His father Sukumar Ray was one of the leading Bengali writers, in the vein of Lewis Carrol and Edward Lear, and his grandfather Upendrakishore Ray (Ray Chowdhuri) was a renaissance man with many interests ranging from writing to typography. Likewise, Ray was well-educated, attending the Presidency College, Kolkata and also at the Vishwabharati (Santiniketan) established by Rabindranath Tagore. Thereafter, he spent many years as a layout artist in a publishing house (Signet Press) and worked with a reputed advertising agency (D.J.Keemer). Inspired by the novel Pather Panchali by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, he decided to adapt it into a film and shoot it on location using friends as actors, putting up the initial funding himself.

Creative Career

In 1949, before he decided to make films, Ray met the great French director Jean Renoir who visited Calcutta to scout locations for his film The River (1950). Renoir encouraged Ray to make films and this was part of the motivation that led to the making of Pather Panchali.

Partway through filming he ran out of funds; the Government of West Bengal loaned him the rest, allowing him to finish the film. The film was successful both artistically and commercially, winning kudos at the 1955 Cannes film festival and heralded a new era in the Indian film industry. After a Cannes screening, François Truffaut, is reported to have said: “I don’t want to see a movie of peasants eating with their hands.”

Most of Ray's work {especially his early work including the Apu Trilogy or the three films entitled Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1957) and The World of Apu / Apur Sansar (1959)} seems to have been influenced by the Italian Neorealist movement in Italian post-war cinema. In fact, the one film which moved Ray the most before he started scripting Pather Panchali was Italian Neorealist film-maker Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thief, which he reportedly saw 55 times. Two of the actors from the Apu Trilogy, Soumitra Chatterjee and Sharmila Tagore (the great-grandaughter of Rabindranath Tagore) would appear in a number of his other films.

Ray's work tends to be both realistic and subdued; his early work is compassionate and touching; his later work, while more political, is also at times cynical, but still infused with his typical humour. Ray's first film outside of the Apu trilogy was the comic Paras Pathar/The Philosopher's Stone, in 1958. It was soon followed by Jalsaghar/The Music Room, which generated critical praise in the U.S. and Europe.

As the Apu trilogy was completed, it was followed by a creative period that won Ray continued acclaim at home and internationally - several of his most popular films (Charulata, Mahanagar/The Big City, Devi, and Teen Kanya/Three Daughters) were made at this time. In 1962, Ray directed Kanchenjungha, which was his first original screenplay and colour film. Kanchenjungha is notable as one of the few films to be shot in real time. Beginning with Kanchenjungha, Ray also took over responsibility for musical composition within his films.

Later Projects

Other notable works in Ray's career include Nayak (1965), Goopy Gayen Bagha Bayen/The Adventures Of Goopy And Bagha, a children's film from 1969 featuring Ray's own songs (and based on Upendrakishore Ray's stories), and 1970's Aranyer Dinratri/Days And Nights In The Forest. During the 1970s Ray completed the Calcutta trilogy: Seemabaddha/Company Limited, Pratidwani/The Adversary and Jana Aranya/The Middleman, three films which were conceived seperately, but whose thematic connections form a loose trilogy. Each generated further acclaim, with Jana Aranya winning additional awards.

In 1977, Ray completed Shatranj Ke Khiladi/The Chess Players, an Urdu/Hindi movie about chess players of Lucknow. This film starred Sanjeev Kumar, Saeed Jaffrey, Amjad Khan, Shabana Azmi, Victor Bannerjee and Richard Attenborough. Apart from a later short film in Hindi, Sadgati, starring Om Puri and the late Smita Patil, this was his only feature film in a language other than Bengali. Both these films were based on original stories by Munshi Premchand, the giant of Hindi literature.

Literary Adaptations

Though most of the Bengali stories filmed are also written by him, he has also adapted a number of books by famous authors into films: Kapurush and Mahanagar (Premendra Mitra), Mahapurush and Paras Pathar (Parashuram), Chiriyakhana (Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay), Tagore's Charulata, Teen Konya, Ghare Baire, Shankar's Jana Aranya, and Sunil Gangopadhyay's Aranyer Dinratri. He had also adapted Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People in his film Ganashatru.

Unfilmed

In 1967, Ray wrote a script for a movie to be entitled "The Alien," with Columbia Pictures as producer for this planned US/India co-production, and Peter Sellers and Marlon Brando as the leading actors. However Ray was surprised to find that the script he had co-written had already been copyrighted and the fee appropriated. Marlon Brando dropped out of the project and though an attempt was made to bring James Coburn in his place, Ray became disillusioned and returned to Calcutta. Columbia expressed interest in reviving the project several times in the 70s and 80s but nothing came of it. When E.T. was released in 1982, many saw striking similarities in the movie to Ray's earlier script - Ray discussed the collapse of the project in a 1980 Sight & Sound feature, with further details revealed by Ray's biographer Andrew Robinson (in The Inner Eye, 1989). Ray believed that Spielberg's movie "would not have been possible without my script of The Alien being available throughout America in mimeographed copies." Spielberg denied this by saying "I was a kid in High School when this script was circulating in Hollywood".

Other Accomplishments

In 1985, Ray won the Dadasaheb Phalke Award for lifetime contribution to Indian cinema. He received the Academy's Lifetime Achievement Award in 1992, one of only two Oscar winners from India. He was also awarded the Bharat Ratna in 1992. He had also obtained the Legion of Honor from the hand of the French president in Kolkata. A project to restore all of Ray's films was launched in the early 1990s, with many individuals in India and the United States participating (including noted filmmakers Martin Scorsese, James Ivory and Ismail Merchant). A theatrical retrospective of the restored films toured internationally in the 1990s, generating press and new audiences.

Satyajit Ray was also a prolific writer in Bengali. Arguably his most famous written works were the exploits of Feluda, a Bengali detective, and Professor Shanku, a scientist. Most of his writings have now been translated into English, and are finding an eager second generation of readers. Ray wrote his autobiography encompassing his childhood years, Jakhtan Choto Chilam (1982) and essays on film: Our Films, Their Films (1976), along with Bishoy Chalachchitra (1976), Ekei Bole Shooting (1979). Most of his novels and stories have been published as books by Ananda Publishing, Calcutta and most of the screenplays are published in Bengali in the Eksan Journal. During the mid-1990s, Ray's film essays and an anthology of short stories had also been published in the West.

Trivia

Sikkim (film) - the documentary was commissioned by the King of Sikkim when he saw the sovereignity of Sikkim under threat from China and India. Satyajit Ray's documentary captures exactly that - the sovereignity of Sikkim. After the Indian annexation of Sikkim in 1975, the documentary was banned by the Indian government, and all existing copies of the documentary destroyed. The only piece of the film left is a scene-by-scene written reconstruction of the film by the remaining film team members. However, rumors flame of a copy of the film being present with the royal family in exile, and another copy in the film library of an American university. As a postscript, India and China agreed to mutually recognize Sikkim and Tibet as legal parts of the other nation, a sad story for the South Asian diversity which this film projected.

Filmography

• Pather Panchali (1955)
• Aparajito (1957)
• Parash Pathar (1958)
• Jalsaghar (1958)
• The World of Apu / Apur Sansar (1959)
• Devi / The Goddess (1960)
• Teen Kanya (1961)
• Rabindranath Tagore (1961)
• Kanchenjungha (1962)
• Abhijan (1962)
• Mahanagar (1963)
• Charulata (1964)
• Kapurush (1965)
• Mahapurush (1966)
• Nayak (1966)
• Chiriyakhana (1967)
• Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969)
• Aranyer Din Ratri / Days and Nights in the Forest (1970)
• Pratidwandi (1971)
• Seemabaddha (1971)
• Sikkim (1971)
• The Inner Eye (1972)
• Ashani Sanket (1973)
• Sonar Kella (1974)
• Jana Aranya (1976)
• Bala (1976)
• Shatranj Ke Khiladi (1977)
• Joi Baba Felunath (1978)
• Hirok Rajar Deshe (198])
• Ghare Baire/ The Home and the World (1984)
• Sukumar Ray (1987)
• Ganashatru (1989)
• Shakha Proshakha (1990)
• Agantuk (1991)

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