Satyajit Ray Date of Publication: 2004-06-03 Language: English Author: Amitav Ghosh In 1989, during my first extended stay in New York, I was suddenly struck by a wave of Ray nostalgia. It was no coincidence perhaps that I had recently finished writing The Shadow Lines, which is, of all my novels, the one that more clearly shows the influence of Satyajit Ray. It struck me that Ray too had once been a stranger in this overwhelming city; that he too had walked the streets on Manhattan in Kolkata-bought shoes. One day, plucking up my courage, I made an appointment with the director James Ivory, who I knew to be a friend of Ray's. Later that week I went to interview Ivory, cassette recorder in hand. This is how Ivory described his first meeting with Ray, in the winter of 1960: 'I looked him up in Calcutta,' Ivory said. 'I had never met him. I had seen at that point, Pather Panchali ('Song of the Road') and Aparajito ('Undefeated'). I knew that Apur Sansar (...
THE DELHI MANIFESTO Our cinema screen has become an ill-constructed, and conventional portal to a world we aspire of, rather than a mirror, which reflects us. Our emotions are guided by leitmotifs placed deftly, and religious beliefs exploited. Our spirit of inquiry has become dead and we have been reduced to mere receivers in the process. Cinema and television has replaced interaction with imposition of thought. Its thought. An artificial, fake and ill-created thought, a manifestation of our needs to escape ourselves. The medium has become a symbol of cheap entertainment, devoid of any examination of the form, and a victim of our collective need to create personalities, perfect alternate universes, and images of our aspiration. Our criticism has become trivial. Stories take precedent over the intrinsic qualities of the cinematic medium. Our film lovers are snobs, indulging in their wholehearted pseudo-intellectual diatribe, condemning the ignorant, and the ignorant have become so used...
PART 1 Aparajito, which Ray chose to film, had earned tremendous reviews as a novel and achieved another milestone in the literary career of eminent novelist Bibhuti Bhusan Bandopadhyay But Satyajit Ray’s perception was exclusive. His scenario was based on reality — a concept which the masses could correlate and conjure as such he evaded the mythology or any alien culture. The character Leela in the novel is thus transposed with the city Calcutta where chronological events in the life of Apu emerge within the framework of a modern city. To explore the psyche of Ray on cinema — an in-depth study of his book "Our Films Their Films" is particularly relevant. His perception on cinema —long before the idea of filming Pather Panchali emerged is evident from the essay "What is Wrong with Indian Cinema" in 1955. He writes ".....in the primitive state films were much alike no matter where they are produced. As the pioneers began to sense the uniqueness of the medium, th...
Comments