Satyajit Ray
Encyclopedia
Satyajit Ray was an Indian Bengali filmmaker
. He is regarded as one of the greatest auteurs
of 20th century cinema. Ray was born in the city of Kolkata
into a Bengali
family prominent in the world of arts
and literature
. Starting his career as a commercial artist, Ray was drawn into independent film
making after meeting French filmmaker Jean Renoir
and viewing the Italian neorealist
film Bicycle Thieves
of Vittorio De Sica
during a visit to London
.
Ray directed thirty-seven films, including feature films, documentaries
and shorts
. He was also a fiction writer, publisher, illustrator, graphic designer and film critic. Ray's first film, Pather Panchali (1955), won eleven international prizes, including Best Human Documentary at the Cannes film festival
. This film, Aparajito
(1956) and Apur Sansar
(1959) form The Apu Trilogy. Ray did the scripting
, casting, scoring, and editing, and designed his own credit titles and publicity material. Ray received many major awards in his career, including 32 Indian National Film Awards
, a number of awards at international film festival
s and award ceremonies, and an Academy Honorary Award
in 1992.
was a writer, illustrator, philosopher, publisher, amateur astronomer and a leader of the Brahmo Samaj
, a religious and social movement in nineteenth century Bengal
. He also set up a printing press by the name of U. Ray and Sons
, which formed a crucial backdrop to Satyajit's life. Sukumar Ray
, Upendrakishore's son and father to Satyajit, was a pioneering Bengali
writer of nonsense rhyme
and children's literature
, an illustrator and a critic. Ray was born to Sukumar and Suprabha Ray in Kolkata.
Sukumar Ray died when Satyajit was barely three, and the family survived on Suprabha Ray's meager income. Ray studied at Ballygunge Government High School, Calcutta
, and completed his B.A. (Hons.) in economics at Presidency College of the University of Calcutta
, though his interest was always in fine art
s. In 1940, his mother insisted that he study at the Visva-Bharati University
at Santiniketan
, founded by Rabindranath Tagore
. Ray was reluctant due to his love of Kolkata, and the low opinion of the intellectual life at Santiniketan His mother's persuasion and his respect for Tagore finally convinced him to try. In Santiniketan, Ray came to appreciate Oriental
art. He later admitted that he learned much from the famous painters Nandalal Bose
and Benode Behari Mukherjee
. Later he produced a documentary film, The Inner Eye, about Mukherjee. His visits to Ajanta, Ellora
and Elephanta
stimulated his admiration for Indian art
.
In 1943, Ray started work at D.J. Keymer, a British-run advertising agency, as a "junior visualiser," earning eighty rupees a month. Although he liked visual design (graphic design) and he was mostly treated well, there was tension between the British
and Indian employees of the firm. The British were better paid, and Ray felt that "the clients were generally stupid." Later, Ray also worked for Signet Press
, a new publishing house started by D. K. Gupta. Gupta asked Ray to create cover designs for books to be published by Signet Press and gave him complete artistic freedom. Ray designed covers for many books, including Jim Corbett
's Maneaters of Kumaon, and Jawaharlal Nehru
's Discovery of India. He worked on a children's version of Pather Panchali, a classic Bengali novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay
, renamed as Am Antir Bhepu (The mango-seed whistle). Designing the cover and illustrating the book, Ray was deeply influenced by the work. He used it as the subject of his first film, and featured his illustrations as shots in his groundbreaking film.
Along with Chidananda Dasgupta
and others, Ray founded the Calcutta Film Society
in 1947. They screened many foreign films, many of which Ray watched and seriously studied. He befriended the American GIs
stationed in Kolkata during World War II, who kept him informed about the latest American films showing in the city. He came to know a RAF
employee, Norman Clare, who shared Ray's passion for films, chess and western classical music.
In 1949, Ray married Bijoya Das
, his first cousin and longtime sweetheart. The couple had a son, Sandip
, who is now a film director. In the same year, French director Jean Renoir
came to Kolkata to shoot his film The River
. Ray helped him to find locations in the countryside. Ray told Renoir about his idea of filming Pather Panchali, which had long been on his mind, and Renoir encouraged him in the project. In 1950, D.J. Keymer sent Ray to London to work at its headquarters office. During his three months in London, Ray watched 99 films. Among these was the neorealist
film Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thief) (1948) by Vittorio De Sica
, which had a profound impact on him. Ray later said that he came out of the theater determined to become a filmmaker.
(1928), the classic bildungsroman
of Bengali literature
, as the basis for his first film. The semi-autobiographical novel describes the maturation of Apu, a small boy in a Bengal village.
Ray gathered an inexperienced crew, although both his cameraman Subrata Mitra
and art director
Bansi Chandragupta
went on to achieve great acclaim. The cast consisted of mostly amateur actors. He started shooting in late 1952 with his personal savings and hoped to raise more money once he had some passages shot, but did not succeed on his terms. As a result, Ray shot Pather Panchali over three years, an unusually long period, based on when he or his production manager Anil Chowdhury
could raise additional funds. He refused funding from sources who wanted a change in script or supervision over production. He also ignored advice from the government to incorporate a happy ending, but he did receive funding that allowed him to complete the film. Ray showed an early film passage to Anglo-Irish director John Huston
, who was in India scouting locations for The Man Who Would Be King
. The passage was of the vision which Apu and his sister have of the train running through the countryside, the only sequence which Ray had yet filmed due to his small budget. Huston notified Monroe Wheeler at the New York Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) that a major talent was on the horizon.
With a loan from the West Bengal government
, Ray finally completed the film. It was released in 1955 to great critical and popular success. It earned numerous prizes and had long runs in both India and abroad. In India, the reaction to the film was enthusiastic; The Times of India
wrote that "It is absurd to compare it with any other Indian cinema [...] Pather Panchali is pure cinema." In the United Kingdom, Lindsay Anderson
wrote a glowing review of the film. But, the reaction was not uniformly positive. After watching the movie, François Truffaut
is reported to have said, "I don’t want to see a movie of peasants eating with their hands." Bosley Crowther
, then the most influential critic of The New York Times
, wrote a scathing review of the film. Its American distributor Ed Harrison was worried Crowther's review would dissuade audiences, but the film had an exceptionally long run when released in the United States.
Ray's international career started in earnest after the success of his next film, Aparajito
(The Unvanquished). This film shows the eternal struggle between the ambitions of a young man, Apu, and the mother who loves him. Critics such as Mrinal Sen
and Ritwik Ghatak rank it higher than Ray's first film. Aparajito won the Golden Lion
at the Venice film festival
, bringing Ray considerable acclaim. Before completing The Apu Trilogy, Ray directed and released two other films: the comic Parash Pathar
(The Philosopher's Stone), and Jalsaghar
(The Music Room), a film about the decadence of the Zamindar
s, considered one of his most important works.
While making Aparajito, Ray had not planned a trilogy, but after he was asked about the idea in Venice, it appealed to him. He finished the last of the trilogy, Apur Sansar
(The World of Apu) in 1959. Critics Robin Wood
and Aparna Sen
found this to be the supreme achievement of the trilogy. Ray introduced two of his favourite actors, Soumitra Chatterjee
and Sharmila Tagore
, in this film. It opens with Apu living in a Kolkata house in near-poverty. He becomes involved in an unusual marriage with Aparna. The scenes of their life together form "one of the cinema's classic affirmative depictions of married life." They suffer tragedy. After Apur Sansar was harshly criticised by a Bengali critic, Ray wrote an article defending it. He rarely responded to critics during his filmmaking career, but also later defended his film Charulata, his personal favourite.
Ray's film successes had little influence on his personal life in the years to come. He continued to live with his wife and children in a rented house, with his mother, uncle and other members of his extended family.
During this period, Ray composed films on the British Raj
period (such as Devi), a documentary on Tagore, a comic film (Mahapurush) and his first film from an original screenplay
(Kanchenjungha). He also made a series of films that, taken together, are considered by critics among the most deeply felt portrayals of Indian women on screen.
Ray followed Apur Sansar with Devi (The Goddess), a film in which he examined the superstitions in the Hindu
society. Sharmila Tagore starred as Doyamoyee, a young wife who is deified
by her father-in-law. Ray was worried that the censor board might block his film, or at least make him re-cut it, but Devi was spared. In 1961, on the insistence of Prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru
, Ray was commissioned to make a documentary
on Rabindranath Tagore
, on the occasion of the poet's birth centennial, a tribute to the person who likely most influenced Ray. Due to limited footage of Tagore, Ray faced the challenge of making a film out of mainly static material. He said that it took as much work as three feature films.
In the same year, together with Subhas Mukhopadhyay
and others, Ray was able to revive Sandesh
, the children's magazine
which his grandfather once published. Ray had been saving money for some years to make this possible. A duality in the name (Sandesh means both "news" in Bengali and also a sweet popular dessert) set the tone of the magazine (both educational and entertaining). Ray began to make illustrations for it, as well as to write stories and essays for children. Writing became his major source of income in the years to come.
In 1962, Ray directed Kanchenjungha
. Based on his first original screenplay, it was his first film in colour. The film tells of an upper-class family spending an afternoon in Darjeeling, a picturesque hill town in West Bengal. They try to arrange the engagement of their youngest daughter to a highly paid engineer educated in London. He had first conceived shooting the film in a large mansion, but later decided to film it in the famous hill town. He used the many shades of light and mist to reflect the tension in the drama. Ray noted that while his script allowed shooting to be possible under any lighting conditions, a commercial film contingent present at the same time in Darjeeling failed to shoot a single scene, as they only wanted to do so in sunshine.
In the sixties, Ray visited Japan and took particular pleasure in meeting the filmmaker Akira Kurosawa
, for whom he had very high regard. While at home, he would take an occasional break from the hectic city life by going to places such as Darjeeling or Puri
to complete a script in isolation.
In 1964 Ray made Charulata
(The Lonely Wife); it was the culmination of this period of work, and regarded by many critics as his most accomplished film. Based on "Nastanirh
", a short story of Tagore, the film tells of a lonely wife, Charu, in 19th-century Bengal, and her growing feelings for her brother-in-law Amal. Critics have referred to this as Ray's Mozartian
masterpiece. He said the film contained the least flaws among his work, and it was his only work which, given a chance, he would make exactly the same way. Madhabi Mukherjee
's performance as Charu, and the work of both Subrata Mitra and Bansi Chandragupta in the film, have been highly praised. Other films in this period include Mahanagar (The Big City), Teen Kanya (Three Daughters), Abhijan (The Expedition) and Kapurush o Mahapurush (The Coward and the Holy Man).
to science fiction
to detective films
to historical drama
. Ray also made considerable formal experimentation during this period. He expressed contemporary issues of Indian life, responding to a perceived lack of these issues in his films. The first major film in this period is Nayak (The Hero), the story of a screen hero traveling in a train and meeting a young, sympathetic female journalist. Starring Uttam Kumar
and Sharmila Tagore, in the twenty-four hours of the journey, the film explores the inner conflict of the apparently highly successful matinée idol
. In spite of the film's receiving a "Critics prize" at the Berlin Festival, it had a generally muted reception.
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. Columbia Pictures
was the producer for what was a planned U.S.-India co-production, and Peter Sellers
and Marlon Brando
were cast as the leading actors. Ray found that his script had been copyright
ed and the fee appropriated by Mike Wilson. Wilson had initially approached Ray through their mutual friend, Arthur C. Clarke
, to represent him in Hollywood. Wilson copyrighted the script credited to Mike Wilson & Satyajit Ray, although he contributed only one word. Ray later said that he never received a penny for the script. After Brando dropped out of the project, the project tried to replace him with James Coburn
, but Ray became disillusioned and returned to Kolkata. Columbia expressed interest in reviving the project several times in the 1970s and 1980s, but nothing came of it. When E.T.
was released in 1982, Clarke and Ray saw similarities in the film to his earlier Alien script. In a 1980 Sight & Sound
feature, Ray had discussed the collapse of his American co-project. His biographer Andrew Robinson
provided more details in The Inner Eye (1989). Ray believed that Spielberg
's film would not have been possible without copies of his script of The Alien having been available in the United States. Spielberg has denied this charge. Besides The Alien, two other unrealized projects which Ray had intended to direct were adaptations of the ancient Indian epic
, the Mahābhārata
, and E. M. Forster
's 1924 novel A Passage to India
.
In 1969, Ray released what would be commercially the most successful of his films. Based on a children's story written by his grandfather, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne
(The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha), it is a musical
fantasy
. Goopy the singer and Bagha the drummer, equipped by three gifts allowed by the King of Ghosts, set out on a fantastic journey. They try to stop an impending war between two neighbouring kingdoms. Among his most expensive enterprises, the film project was difficult to finance. Ray abandoned his desire to shoot it in colour, as he turned down an offer that would have forced him to cast a certain Bollywood
actor as the lead.
Ray made a film from a novel by the young poet and writer, Sunil Gangopadhyay
. Featuring a musical motif structure acclaimed as more complex than Charulata, Aranyer Din Ratri
(Days and Nights in the Forest) traces four urban young men going to the forests for a vacation. They try to leave their daily lives behind. All but one of them become involved in encounters with women, which express their characters. Critics thought the film to be a revealing study of the Indian middle class
. Ray cast Bombay-based actress Simi Garewal
as a tribal woman. She was pleased that he could envision someone as urban as she in that role.
After Aranyer, Ray addressed contemporary Bengali life. He completed what became known as the Calcutta Trilogy
: Pratidwandi
(1970), Seemabaddha
(1971), and Jana Aranya
(1975), three films that were conceived separately but had thematic connections. Pratidwandi (The Adversary) is about an idealist young graduate; if disillusioned at the end of film, he is still uncorrupted. Jana Aranya (The Middleman) showed a young man giving in to the culture of corruption to make a living. Seemabaddha (Company Limited) portrayed an already successful man giving up his morality for further gains. In the first film, Pratidwandi, Ray introduces a new, elliptical narrative style, such as scenes in negative, dream sequences, and abrupt flashbacks. In the 1970s, Ray adapted two of his popular stories as detective films. Though mainly addressed to children and young adults, both Sonar Kella
(The Golden Fortress) and Joy Baba Felunath (The Elephant God) found some critical following.
Ray considered making a film on the Bangladesh Liberation War
but later abandoned the idea. He said that, as a filmmaker, he was more interested in the travails of the refugees and not the politics. In 1977, Ray completed Shatranj Ke Khiladi
(The Chess Players), a Hindi
film based on a story by Munshi Premchand
. It was set in Lucknow
in the state of Oudh, a year before the Indian rebellion of 1857
. A commentary on issues related to the colonization of India by the British, this was Ray's first feature film in a language other than Bengali. It is his most expensive and star-studded film, featuring Sanjeev Kumar
, Saeed Jaffrey
, Amjad Khan
, Shabana Azmi
, Victor Bannerjee and Richard Attenborough
.
In 1980, Ray made a sequel
to Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, a somewhat political Hirak Rajar Deshe
(Kingdom of Diamonds). The kingdom of the evil Diamond King, or Hirok Raj, is an allusion to India during Indira Gandhi
's emergency period
. Along with his acclaimed short film Pikoo
(Pikoo's Diary) and hour-long Hindi film, Sadgati, this was the culmination of his work in this period.
(Home and the World), Ray suffered a heart attack
; it would severely limit his productivity in the remaining 9 years of his life. Ghare Baire was completed in 1984 with the help of Ray's son (who operated the camera from then on) because of his health condition. He had wanted to film this Tagore novel on the dangers of fervent nationalism
for a long time, and wrote a first draft of a script for it in the 1940s. In spite of rough patches due to Ray's illness, the film did receive some critical acclaim. It had the first kiss fully portrayed in Ray's films. In 1987, he made a documentary
on his father, Sukumar Ray
.
Ray's last three films, made after his recovery and with medical strictures in place, were shot mostly indoors, and have a distinctive style. They have more dialogue than his earlier films and are often regarded as inferior to his earlier body of work. The first, Ganashatru
(An Enemy of the People) is an adaptation of the famous Ibsen play
, and considered the weakest of the three. Ray recovered some of his form in his 1990 film Shakha Proshakha
(Branches of the Tree). In it, an old man, who has lived a life of honesty, comes to learn of the corruption of three of his sons. The final scene shows the father finding solace only in the companionship of his fourth son, who is uncorrupted but mentally ill. Ray's last film, Agantuk
(The Stranger), is lighter in mood but not in theme. When a long-lost uncle arrives to visit his niece in Kolkata, he arouses suspicion as to his motive. This provokes far-ranging questions in the film about civilization.
In 1992, Ray's health deteriorated due to heart complications. He was admitted to a hospital, and would never recover. An honorary Oscar was awarded to him weeks before his death, which he received in a gravely ill condition. He died on 23 April 1992 at the age of seventy-one.
. In his two non-Bengali feature films, he wrote the script in English; translators interpreted it in Hindi or Urdu under Ray's supervision. Ray's eye for detail was matched by that of his art director Bansi Chandragupta. His influence on the early films was so important that Ray would always write scripts in English before creating a Bengali version, so that the non-Bengali Chandragupta would be able to read it. The craft of Subrata Mitra
garnered praise for the cinematography of Ray's films. A number of critics thought that his departure from Ray's crew lowered the quality of cinematography
in the following films. Though Ray openly praised Mitra, his single-mindedness in taking over operation of the camera after Charulata caused Mitra to stop working for him after 1966. Mitra developed "bounce lighting", a technique to reflect light from cloth to create a diffused, realistic light even on a set. Ray acknowledged his debts to Jean-Luc Godard
and François Truffaut
of the French New Wave
for introducing new technical and cinematic innovations.
Ray's regular editor was Dulal Datta
, but the director usually dictated the editing while Datta did the actual work. Because of financial reasons and Ray's meticulous planning, his films were mostly cut "on the camera" (apart from Pather Panchali). At the beginning of his career, Ray worked with Indian classical music
ians, including Ravi Shankar
, Vilayat Khan
and Ali Akbar Khan
. He found that their first loyalty was to musical traditions, and not to his film. He had a greater understanding of western classical forms, which he wanted to use for his films set in an urban milieu. Starting with Teen Kanya, Ray began to compose his own scores.
He used actors of diverse backgrounds, from famous film stars to people who had never seen a film (as in Aparajito). Robin Wood
and others have lauded him as the best director of children, pointing out memorable performances in the roles of Apu and Durga (Pather Panchali), Ratan (Postmaster) and Mukul (Sonar Kella). Depending on the talent or experience of the actor, Ray varied the intensity of his direction, from virtually nothing with actors such as Utpal Dutt
, to using the actor as "a puppet" (Subir Banerjee as young Apu or Sharmila Tagore as Aparna). Actors who had worked for Ray praised his customary trust but said he could also treat incompetence with "total contempt".
Ray created two very popular characters in Bengali children's literature
—Feluda
, a sleuth
, and Professor Shonku, a scientist
. He was a prominent writer of science fiction. Feluda often has to solve a puzzle to get to the bottom of a case. The Feluda stories are narrated by Topshe, his cousin, something of a Watson to Feluda's Holmes
. The science fictions of Shonku are presented as a diary discovered after the scientist had mysteriously disappeared. Ray also wrote a collection of nonsense verse
named Today Bandha Ghorar Dim
, which includes a translation of Lewis Carroll
's "Jabberwocky
". He wrote a collection of humorous stories of Mullah Nasiruddin
in Bengali.
His short stories
for adults were published as collections of 12 stories, in which the overall title played with the word twelve (for example Aker pitthe dui, or literally "Two on top of one"). Ray's interest in puzzles and puns is reflected in his stories. Ray's short stories give full rein to his interest in the macabre, in suspense and other aspects that he avoided in film, making for an interesting psychological study. Most of his writings have been translated into English, and are finding a new group of readers.
Most of his screenplays have been published in Bengali
in the literary journal Eksan. Ray wrote an autobiography about his childhood years, Jakhan Choto Chilam
(1982).
He also wrote essays on film, published as the collections: Our Films, Their Films
(1976), along with Bishoy Chalachchitra
(1976), Ekei Bole Shooting
(1979). During the mid-1990s, Ray's film essays and an anthology of short stories were also published in English in the West. Our Films, Their Films
is an anthology of film criticism by Ray. The book contains articles and personal journal excerpts. The book is presented in two sections: Ray first discusses Indian film
, before turning his attention toward Hollywood, specific filmmakers (Charlie Chaplin
and Akira Kurosawa
), and movements such as Italian neorealism
. His book Bishoy Chalachchitra
was published in translation in 2006 as Speaking of Films. It contains a compact description of his philosophy of different aspects of the cinema.
Satyajit Ray designed four typeface
s for roman script named Ray Roman, Ray Bizarre, Daphnis, and Holiday Script, apart from numerous Bengali ones for the Sandesh
magazine. Ray Roman and Ray Bizarre won an international competition in 1971. In certain circles of Kolkata, Ray continued to be known as an eminent graphic designer, well into his film career. Ray illustrated all his books and designed covers for them, as well as creating all publicity material for his films. He also designed covers of several books by other authors.
and universality, and of a deceptive simplicity with deep underlying complexity. The Japanese director Akira Kurosawa
said, "Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon." But his detractors find his films glacially slow, moving like a "majestic snail." Some find his humanism simple-minded, and his work anti-modern; they criticize him for lacking the new modes of expression or experimentation found in works of Ray's contemporaries, such as Jean-Luc Godard
. As Stanley Kauffman wrote, some critics believe that Ray "assumes [viewers] can be interested in a film that simply dwells in its characters, rather than one that imposes dramatic patterns on their lives." Ray said he could do nothing about the slow pace. Kurosawa defended him by saying that Ray's films were not slow, "His work can be described as flowing composedly, like a big river".
Critics have often compared Ray to artists in the cinema and other media, such as Anton Chekhov
, Renoir
, De Sica
, Howard Hawks
or Mozart
. The writer V. S. Naipaul
compared a scene in Shatranj Ki Khiladi (The Chess Players) to a Shakespearean
play; he wrote, "only three hundred words are spoken but goodness! – terrific things happen." Even critics who did not like the aesthetics
of Ray's films generally acknowledged his ability to encompass a whole culture with all its nuances. Ray's obituary in The Independent
included the question, "Who else can compete?"
Political ideologues took issue with Ray's work. In a public debate during the 1960s, Ray and the Marxist filmmaker Mrinal Sen
engaged in an argument. Sen criticized him for casting a matinée idol such as Uttam Kumar
, whom he considered a compromise. Ray said that Sen only attacked "easy targets", i.e. the Bengali middle-classes. Advocates of socialism
said that Ray was not "committed" to the cause of the nation's downtrodden classes; some critics accused him of glorifying poverty in Pather Panchali and Ashani Sanket
(Distant Thunder) through lyricism and aesthetics. They said he provided no solution to conflicts in the stories, and was unable to overcome his bourgeoisie
background. During the naxalite
movements in the 1970s, agitators once came close to causing physical harm to his son, Sandip. Early in 1980, Ray was criticized by an Indian M.P.
and former actress Nargis Dutt, who accused Ray of "exporting poverty." She wanted him to make films to represent "Modern India."
Satyajit Ray is a cultural icon in India and in Bengali communities worldwide. Following his death, the city of Kolkata came to a virtual standstill, as hundreds of thousands of people gathered around his house to pay their last respects. Satyajit Ray's influence has been widespread and deep in Bengali cinema
; a number of Bengali directors, including Aparna Sen
, Rituparno Ghosh
and Gautam Ghose
in India, Tareq Masud and Tanvir Mokammel
in Bangladesh
, and Aneel Ahmad
in England, have been influenced by his film craft. Across the spectrum, filmmakers such as Budhdhadeb Dasgupta, Mrinal Sen
and Adoor Gopalakrishnan
have acknowledged his seminal contribution to Indian cinema
. Beyond India, filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese
, James Ivory
, Abbas Kiarostami
, Elia Kazan
, François Truffaut
, Carlos Saura
, Isao Takahata
and Danny Boyle
have been influenced by his cinematic style, with many others such as Akira Kurosawa
praising his work. Gregory Nava
's 1995 film My Family
had a final scene that repeated that of Apur Sansar. Ira Sachs
's 2005 work Forty Shades of Blue
was a loose remake of Charulata. Other 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
. According to Michael Sragow of The Atlantic Monthly, the "youthful coming-of-age
dramas
that have flooded art houses since the mid-fifties owe a tremendous debt to the Apu trilogy". The trilogy also introduced the bounce lighting technique. Kanchenjungha
(1962) introduced a narrative structure that resembles later hyperlink cinema
. Pratidwandi
(1972) helped pioneer photo-negative
flashback
and X-ray
digression techniques.
The character Apu Nahasapeemapetilon
in the American animated television series The Simpsons
was named in homage to Ray's popular character from The Apu Trilogy. Together with Madhabi Mukherjee
, Ray was the first Indian film figure to be featured on a foreign stamp (Dominica
).
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
contains 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 Feluda stories would be made into radio programs. During the London Film Festival
, a regular "Satyajit Ray Award" is given to a 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 2007 film, The Darjeeling Limited
, set in India, is dedicated to Ray.
by the Government of India, in addition to awards at international film festival
s. At the Berlin Film Festival, he was one of only three filmmakers to win the Silver Bear for Best Director
more than once and holds the record for the most number of Golden Bear
nominations, with seven. At the Venice Film Festival
, where he had previously won a Golden Lion
for Aparajito
(1956), he was awarded the Golden Lion Honorary Award in 1982. That same year, he received an honorary "Hommage à Satyajit Ray" award at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival
.
Ray is the second film personality after Chaplin to have been awarded honorary doctorates
by Oxford University. He was awarded the Dadasaheb Phalke Award
in 1985 and the Legion of Honor by the President of France in 1987. The Government of India
awarded him the highest civilian honour, Bharat Ratna
shortly before his death. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
awarded Ray an honorary Oscar in 1992 for Lifetime Achievement
. It was one of his favourite actresses, Audrey Hepburn
, who represented the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
on that day in Calcutta
. Ray, unable to attend the ceremony due to his illness, gave his acceptance speech to the Academy via live video feed in his home. In 1992 he was posthumously awarded the Akira Kurosawa Award for Lifetime Achievement in Directing at the San Francisco International Film Festival
; it was accepted on his behalf by actress Sharmila Tagore
.
In 1992, the Sight & Sound
Critics' Top Ten Poll ranked Ray at #7 in its list of "Top 10 Directors" of all time, making him the highest-ranking Asian filmmaker
in the poll. In 2002, the Sight & Sound critics' and directors' poll ranked Ray at #22 in its list of all-time greatest directors, thus making him the fourth highest-ranking Asian filmmaker in the poll.
In 1996, Entertainment Weekly
magazine ranked Ray at #25 in its "50 Greatest Directors" list. In 2007, Total Film
magazine included Ray in its "100 Greatest Film Directors Ever" list.
Bengali cinema
Bengali cinema refers to the Bengali language filmmaking industries in the Bengal region of South Asia. There are two major film-making hubs in the region: one in Kolkata, West Bengal, India and the other in Dhaka, Bangladesh .The history of cinema in Bengal dates back to the 1890s, when the first...
. He is regarded as one of the greatest auteurs
Auteur theory
In film criticism, auteur theory holds that a director's film reflects the director's personal creative vision, as if they were the primary "auteur"...
of 20th century cinema. Ray was born in the city of Kolkata
Kolkata
Kolkata , formerly known as Calcutta, is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal. Located on the east bank of the Hooghly River, it was the commercial capital of East India...
into a Bengali
Bengali people
The Bengali people are an ethnic community native to the historic region of Bengal in South Asia. They speak Bengali , which is an Indo-Aryan language of the eastern Indian subcontinent, evolved from the Magadhi Prakrit and Sanskrit languages. In their native language, they are referred to as বাঙালী...
family prominent in the world of arts
ARts
aRts, which stands for analog Real time synthesizer, is an audio framework that is no longer under development. It is best known for previously being used in KDE to simulate an analog synthesizer....
and literature
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
. Starting his career as a commercial artist, Ray was drawn into independent film
Independent film
An independent film, or indie film, is a professional film production resulting in a feature film that is produced mostly or completely outside of the major film studio system. In addition to being produced and distributed by independent entertainment companies, independent films are also produced...
making after meeting French filmmaker Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir was a French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author. As a film director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s...
and viewing the Italian neorealist
Italian neorealism
Italian neorealism is a style of film characterized by stories set amongst the poor and working class, filmed on location, frequently using nonprofessional actors...
film Bicycle Thieves
Bicycle Thieves
Bicycle Thieves , also known as The Bicycle Thief, is a 1948 Italian neorealist film directed by Vittorio De Sica. It tells the story of a poor man searching the streets of Rome for his stolen bicycle, which he needs to be able to work. The film is based on the novel of the same name by Luigi...
of Vittorio De Sica
Vittorio de Sica
Vittorio De Sica was an Italian director and actor, a leading figure in the neorealist movement....
during a visit to London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
.
Ray directed thirty-seven films, including feature films, documentaries
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
and shorts
Short subject
A short film is any film not long enough to be considered a feature film. No consensus exists as to where that boundary is drawn: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences defines a short film as "an original motion picture that has a running time of 40 minutes or less, including all...
. He was also a fiction writer, publisher, illustrator, graphic designer and film critic. Ray's first film, Pather Panchali (1955), won eleven international prizes, including Best Human Documentary at the Cannes film festival
Cannes Film Festival
The Cannes International Film Festival , is an annual film festival held in Cannes, France, which previews new films of all genres including documentaries from around the world. Founded in 1946, it is among the world's most prestigious and publicized film festivals...
. This film, Aparajito
Aparajito
Aparajito is a 1956 Bengali film directed by Satyajit Ray, and is the second part of The Apu Trilogy. It is adapted from the last one-fifth of Bibhutibhushan Bannerjee's novel Pather Panchali and the first one-third of its sequel Aparajito. It focuses on the life of Apu from childhood to college...
(1956) and Apur Sansar
Apur Sansar
Apur Sansar , also known as The World of Apu, is a Bengali film directed by Satyajit Ray. It is the third part of The Apu Trilogy, about the childhood and early adulthood of a young Bengali named Apu in the early twentieth century Indian subcontinent...
(1959) form The Apu Trilogy. Ray did the scripting
Screenplay
A screenplay or script is a written work that is made especially for a film or television program. Screenplays can be original works or adaptations from existing pieces of writing. In them, the movement, actions, expression, and dialogues of the characters are also narrated...
, casting, scoring, and editing, and designed his own credit titles and publicity material. Ray received many major awards in his career, including 32 Indian National Film Awards
National Film Awards
The National Film Awards is the most prominent film award ceremony in India. Established in 1954, it is administered, along with the International Film Festival of India and the Indian Panorama, by the Indian government's Directorate of Film Festivals since 1973.Every year, a national panel...
, a number of awards at international film festival
Film festival
A film festival is an organised, extended presentation of films in one or more movie theaters or screening venues, usually in a single locality. More and more often film festivals show part of their films to the public by adding outdoor movie screenings...
s and award ceremonies, and an Academy Honorary Award
Academy Honorary Award
The Academy Honorary Award, instituted in 1948 for the 21st Academy Awards , is given by the discretion of the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to celebrate motion picture achievements that are not covered by existing Academy Awards, although prior winners of...
in 1992.
Early life and background
Satyajit Ray's ancestry can be traced back for at least ten generations. Ray's grandfather, Upendrakishore RayUpendrakishore Ray
Upendrokishore Ray , also known as Upendrakishore Raychowdhury was a famous Bengali writer, painter, violin player and composer. He was born on 10 May 1863 in a little village called Moshua in Mymensingh District in Bengal, now in Bangladesh...
was a writer, illustrator, philosopher, publisher, amateur astronomer and a leader of the Brahmo Samaj
Brahmo Samaj
Brahmo Samaj is the societal component of the Brahmo religion which is mainly practiced today as the Adi Dharm after its eclipse in Bengal consequent to the exit of the Tattwabodini Sabha from its ranks in 1859. It was one of the most influential religious movements responsible for the making of...
, a religious and social movement in nineteenth century Bengal
Bengal
Bengal is a historical and geographical region in the northeast region of the Indian Subcontinent at the apex of the Bay of Bengal. Today, it is mainly divided between the sovereign land of People's Republic of Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal, although some regions of the previous...
. He also set up a printing press by the name of U. Ray and Sons
U. Ray and Sons
U. Ray and Sons was a privately held printing and publishing firm in Calcutta founded by Upendrakishore Ray in 1895. At its inception the firm was christened U. Ray after its owner. The epithet Sons was added in 1900 when his son Sukumar Ray joined the firm. The family ownership of the firm...
, which formed a crucial backdrop to Satyajit's life. Sukumar Ray
Sukumar Ray
Sukumar Ray , , was a Bengali humorous poet, story writer and playwright who mainly wrote for children. As perhaps the most famous Indian practitioner of literary nonsense, he is often compared to Lewis Carroll...
, Upendrakishore's son and father to Satyajit, was a pioneering Bengali
Bengali language
Bengali or Bangla is an eastern Indo-Aryan language. It is native to the region of eastern South Asia known as Bengal, which comprises present day Bangladesh, the Indian state of West Bengal, and parts of the Indian states of Tripura and Assam. It is written with the Bengali script...
writer of nonsense rhyme
Nonsense verse
Nonsense verse is a form of light, often rhythmical verse, usually for children, depicting peculiar characters in amusing and fantastical situations. It is whimsical and humorous in tone and tends to employ fanciful phrases and meaningless made-up words. Nonsense verse is closely related to...
and children's literature
Children's literature
Children's literature is for readers and listeners up to about age twelve; it is often defined in four different ways: books written by children, books written for children, books chosen by children, or books chosen for children. It is often illustrated. The term is used in senses which sometimes...
, an illustrator and a critic. Ray was born to Sukumar and Suprabha Ray in Kolkata.
Sukumar Ray died when Satyajit was barely three, and the family survived on Suprabha Ray's meager income. Ray studied at Ballygunge Government High School, Calcutta
Ballygunge Government High School
Ballygunge Government High School, , is one of the oldest and best schools in West Bengal, India. The school is adjacent to Kolkata RTO/Beltala police station.The school is Bengali medium, with Bengali taught as main language...
, and completed his B.A. (Hons.) in economics at Presidency College of the University of Calcutta
University of Calcutta
The University of Calcutta is a public university located in the city of Kolkata , India, founded on 24 January 1857...
, though his interest was always in fine art
Fine art
Fine art or the fine arts encompass art forms developed primarily for aesthetics and/or concept rather than practical application. Art is often a synonym for fine art, as employed in the term "art gallery"....
s. In 1940, his mother insisted that he study at the Visva-Bharati University
Visva-Bharati University
Visva Bharati University is a Central University for research and teaching in India, located in the twin towns of Santiniketan and Sriniketan in the Indian state of West Bengal. It was founded by Rabindranath Tagore who called it Visva Bharati, which means the communion of the world with India...
at Santiniketan
Santiniketan
Santiniketan is a small town near Bolpur in the Birbhum district of West Bengal, India, approximately 180 kilometres north of Kolkata . It was made famous by Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore, whose vision became what is now a university town that attracts thousands of visitors each year...
, founded by Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore , sobriquet Gurudev, was a Bengali polymath who reshaped his region's literature and music. Author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse", he became the first non-European Nobel laureate by earning the 1913 Prize in Literature...
. Ray was reluctant due to his love of Kolkata, and the low opinion of the intellectual life at Santiniketan His mother's persuasion and his respect for Tagore finally convinced him to try. In Santiniketan, Ray came to appreciate Oriental
The Orient
The Orient means "the East." It is a traditional designation for anything that belongs to the Eastern world or the Far East, in relation to Europe. In English it is a metonym that means various parts of Asia.- Derivation :...
art. He later admitted that he learned much from the famous painters Nandalal Bose
Nandalal Bose
Nandalal Bose was a notable Indian painter of Bengal school of art. A pupil of Abanindranath Tagore, Bose was known for "Indian style" of painting. He became the principal of Kala Bhawan, Shanti Niketan in 1922...
and Benode Behari Mukherjee
Benode Behari Mukherjee
Binod Behari Mukherjee was an Indian artist from West Bengal state. Mukherjee was one of the pioneers of Indian modern art, as a painter and as a celebrated muralist...
. Later he produced a documentary film, The Inner Eye, about Mukherjee. His visits to Ajanta, Ellora
Ellora Caves
Ellora is an archaeological site, from the city of Aurangabad in the Indian state of Maharashtra built by the Rashtrakuta dynasty . Well-known for its monumental caves, Ellora is a World Heritage Site. Ellora represents the epitome of Indian rock-cut architecture. The 34 "caves" – actually...
and Elephanta
Elephanta Caves
The Elephanta Caves are a network of sculpted caves located on Elephanta Island, or Gharapuri in Mumbai Harbour, to the east of the city of Mumbai in the Indian state of Maharashtra...
stimulated his admiration for Indian art
Indian art
Indian Art is the visual art produced on the Indian subcontinent from about the 3rd millennium BC to modern times. To viewers schooled in the Western tradition, Indian art may seem overly ornate and sensuous; appreciation of its refinement comes only gradually, as a rule. Voluptuous feeling is...
.
In 1943, Ray started work at D.J. Keymer, a British-run advertising agency, as a "junior visualiser," earning eighty rupees a month. Although he liked visual design (graphic design) and he was mostly treated well, there was tension between the British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
and Indian employees of the firm. The British were better paid, and Ray felt that "the clients were generally stupid." Later, Ray also worked for Signet Press
Signet Press
Signet Press in Kolkata , West Bengal, India, is a publishing house established by D. K. Gupta in 1943. Located at the famous book arcade of College Street in front of Sanskrit College. The famed film-director Satyajit Ray worked as a visual designer in this publishing house at the onset of his...
, a new publishing house started by D. K. Gupta. Gupta asked Ray to create cover designs for books to be published by Signet Press and gave him complete artistic freedom. Ray designed covers for many books, including Jim Corbett
Jim Corbett (hunter)
Edward James "Jim" Corbett was a British hunter, conservationist, author and naturalist, famous for slaying a large number of man-eating tigers and leopards in India....
's Maneaters of Kumaon, and Jawaharlal Nehru
Jawaharlal Nehru
Jawaharlal Nehru , often referred to with the epithet of Panditji, was an Indian statesman who became the first Prime Minister of independent India and became noted for his “neutralist” policies in foreign affairs. He was also one of the principal leaders of India’s independence movement in the...
's Discovery of India. He worked on a children's version of Pather Panchali, a classic Bengali novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay
Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay
Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay was one of the most famous Bengali novelist and writer of modern Bengali literature...
, renamed as Am Antir Bhepu (The mango-seed whistle). Designing the cover and illustrating the book, Ray was deeply influenced by the work. He used it as the subject of his first film, and featured his illustrations as shots in his groundbreaking film.
Along with Chidananda Dasgupta
Chidananda Dasgupta
Chidananda Das Gupta , , was a Bengali Indian filmmaker, a leading film critic, a film historian and one of the founders of Calcutta Film Society with Satyajit Ray in 1947...
and others, Ray founded the Calcutta Film Society
Calcutta Film Society
Calcutta Film Society was India’s second film society in the city of Kolkata , West Bengal, India. It was founded in 1947, just after independence, by Satyajit Ray, Chidananda Dasgupta, RP Gupta, Bansi Chandragupta and others...
in 1947. They screened many foreign films, many of which Ray watched and seriously studied. He befriended the American GIs
United States Army
The United States Army is the main branch of the United States Armed Forces responsible for land-based military operations. It is the largest and oldest established branch of the U.S. military, and is one of seven U.S. uniformed services...
stationed in Kolkata during World War II, who kept him informed about the latest American films showing in the city. He came to know a RAF
Royal Air Force
The Royal Air Force is the aerial warfare service branch of the British Armed Forces. Formed on 1 April 1918, it is the oldest independent air force in the world...
employee, Norman Clare, who shared Ray's passion for films, chess and western classical music.
In 1949, Ray married Bijoya Das
Bijoya Ray
Bijoya Ray , born in the year 1918, is the widow of the famous film director Satyajit Ray. Her son Sandip Ray is also a film director. Bijoya and Satyajit happened to be first cousins. After a long courtship, they were married in 1949...
, his first cousin and longtime sweetheart. The couple had a son, Sandip
Sandip Ray
Sandip Ray is a film director living in the city of Kolkata, West Bengal, India. He is the only son of the noted Bengali director Satyajit Ray, and Bijoya Ray.-Career:...
, who is now a film director. In the same year, French director Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir was a French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author. As a film director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s...
came to Kolkata to shoot his film The River
The River (1951 film)
The River is a 1951 film directed by Jean Renoir. It was filmed in India and was seminal to the launching of the careers of Satyajit Ray , who assisted on the film, and Subrata Mitra, Ray's cinematographer whom he met during the filming of The River.A fairly faithful dramatization of an earlier...
. Ray helped him to find locations in the countryside. Ray told Renoir about his idea of filming Pather Panchali, which had long been on his mind, and Renoir encouraged him in the project. In 1950, D.J. Keymer sent Ray to London to work at its headquarters office. During his three months in London, Ray watched 99 films. Among these was the neorealist
Italian neorealism
Italian neorealism is a style of film characterized by stories set amongst the poor and working class, filmed on location, frequently using nonprofessional actors...
film Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thief) (1948) by Vittorio De Sica
Vittorio de Sica
Vittorio De Sica was an Italian director and actor, a leading figure in the neorealist movement....
, which had a profound impact on him. Ray later said that he came out of the theater determined to become a filmmaker.
The Apu Years (1950–1959)
Ray decided to use Pather PanchaliPather Panchali (novel)
Pather Panchali is a novel written by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay and was later adapted into a film of the same name by Satyajit Ray...
(1928), the classic bildungsroman
Bildungsroman
In literary criticism, bildungsroman or coming-of-age story is a literary genre which focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood , and in which character change is thus extremely important...
of Bengali literature
Bengali literature
Bengali literature is literary works written in Bengali language particularly from Bangladesh and the Indian provinces of West Bengal and Tripura. The history of Bengali literature traces back hundreds of years while it is impossible to separate the literary trends of the two Bengals during the...
, as the basis for his first film. The semi-autobiographical novel describes the maturation of Apu, a small boy in a Bengal village.
Ray gathered an inexperienced crew, although both his cameraman Subrata Mitra
Subrata Mitra
Subrata Mitra was an Indian cinematographer. Acclaimed for his work in The Apu Trilogy , Mitra is often considered one of the greatest of Indian cinematographers....
and art director
Art director
The art director is a person who supervise the creative process of a design.The term 'art director' is a blanket title for a variety of similar job functions in advertising, publishing, film and television, the Internet, and video games....
Bansi Chandragupta
Bansi Chandragupta
Bansi Chandragupta was an Indian art director and production designer, regarded among the greatest of art directors of Indian film industry. He won Filmfare Best Art Direction Award thrice, for Seema in 1972, for Do Jhoot in 1976 and for Chakra in 1982. He was awarded Evening Standard British Film...
went on to achieve great acclaim. The cast consisted of mostly amateur actors. He started shooting in late 1952 with his personal savings and hoped to raise more money once he had some passages shot, but did not succeed on his terms. As a result, Ray shot Pather Panchali over three years, an unusually long period, based on when he or his production manager Anil Chowdhury
Anil Chowdhury
Anil Chowdhury was a production controller or production manager in several films in the Bengali film industry located in Kolkata, West Bengal, India. He is especially remembered for his association with Satyajit Ray. Anil Chowdhury was the production controller of all the films by Ray.-References:...
could raise additional funds. He refused funding from sources who wanted a change in script or supervision over production. He also ignored advice from the government to incorporate a happy ending, but he did receive funding that allowed him to complete the film. Ray showed an early film passage to Anglo-Irish director John Huston
John Huston
John Marcellus Huston was an American film director, screenwriter and actor. He wrote most of the 37 feature films he directed, many of which are today considered classics: The Maltese Falcon , The Treasure of the Sierra Madre , Key Largo , The Asphalt Jungle , The African Queen , Moulin Rouge...
, who was in India scouting locations for The Man Who Would Be King
The Man Who Would Be King (film)
The Man Who Would Be King is a 1975 film adapted from the Rudyard Kipling short story of the same title. It was adapted and directed by John Huston and starred Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Saeed Jaffrey, and Christopher Plummer as Kipling .The film follows two rogue ex-non-commissioned officers of...
. The passage was of the vision which Apu and his sister have of the train running through the countryside, the only sequence which Ray had yet filmed due to his small budget. Huston notified Monroe Wheeler at the New York Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) that a major talent was on the horizon.
With a loan from the West Bengal government
Government of West Bengal
The Government of West Bengal also known as the State Government of West Bengal, or locally as State Government, is the supreme governing authority of the Indian state of West Bengal and its 19 districts...
, Ray finally completed the film. It was released in 1955 to great critical and popular success. It earned numerous prizes and had long runs in both India and abroad. In India, the reaction to the film was enthusiastic; The Times of India
The Times of India
The Times of India is an Indian English-language daily newspaper. TOI has the largest circulation among all English-language newspaper in the world, across all formats . It is owned and managed by Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd...
wrote that "It is absurd to compare it with any other Indian cinema [...] Pather Panchali is pure cinema." In the United Kingdom, Lindsay Anderson
Lindsay Anderson
Lindsay Gordon Anderson was an Indian-born, British feature film, theatre and documentary director, film critic, and leading light of the Free Cinema movement and the British New Wave...
wrote a glowing review of the film. But, the reaction was not uniformly positive. After watching the movie, François Truffaut
François Truffaut
François Roland Truffaut was an influential film critic and filmmaker and one of the founders of the French New Wave. In a film career lasting over a quarter of a century, he remains an icon of the French film industry. He was also a screenwriter, producer, and actor working on over twenty-five...
is reported to have said, "I don’t want to see a movie of peasants eating with their hands." Bosley Crowther
Bosley Crowther
Bosley Crowther was a journalist and author who was film critic for The New York Times for 27 years. His reviews and articles helped shape the careers of actors, directors and screenwriters, though his reviews, at times, were unnecessarily mean...
, then the most influential critic of The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, wrote a scathing review of the film. Its American distributor Ed Harrison was worried Crowther's review would dissuade audiences, but the film had an exceptionally long run when released in the United States.
Ray's international career started in earnest after the success of his next film, Aparajito
Aparajito
Aparajito is a 1956 Bengali film directed by Satyajit Ray, and is the second part of The Apu Trilogy. It is adapted from the last one-fifth of Bibhutibhushan Bannerjee's novel Pather Panchali and the first one-third of its sequel Aparajito. It focuses on the life of Apu from childhood to college...
(The Unvanquished). This film shows the eternal struggle between the ambitions of a young man, Apu, and the mother who loves him. Critics such as Mrinal Sen
Mrinal Sen
Mrinal Sen is a Bengali Indian filmmaker. He was born on 14 May 1923, in the town of Faridpur, now in Bangladesh in a Hindu family. After finishing his high school there, he left home to come to Calcutta as a student and studied physics at the well-known Scottish Church College and at the...
and Ritwik Ghatak rank it higher than Ray's first film. Aparajito won the Golden Lion
Golden Lion
Il Leone d’Oro is the highest prize given to a film at the Venice Film Festival. The prize was introduced in 1949 by the organizing committee and is now regarded as one of the film industry's most distinguished prizes...
at the Venice film festival
Venice Film Festival
The Venice International Film Festival is the oldest international film festival in the world. Founded by Count Giuseppe Volpi in 1932 as the "Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica", the festival has since taken place every year in late August or early September on the island of the...
, bringing Ray considerable acclaim. Before completing The Apu Trilogy, Ray directed and released two other films: the comic Parash Pathar
Parash Pathar
Parash Pathar was Satyajit Ray's first film apart from the Apu Trilogy. It was also his first comedy and first magical realist film...
(The Philosopher's Stone), and Jalsaghar
Jalsaghar
Jalsaghar is the fourth feature film directed by Satyajit Ray. Jalsaghar is a narration of the end days of a Zamindar in Bengal. The landlord, Roy , is a just but other-worldly man who loves to spend time listening to music and putting up spectacles rather than managing his fields ravaged by...
(The Music Room), a film about the decadence of the Zamindar
Zamindar
A Zamindar or zemindar , was an aristocrat, typically hereditary, who held enormous tracts of land and ruled over and taxed the bhikaaris who lived on batavaslam. Over time, they took princely and royal titles such as Maharaja , Raja , Nawab , and Mirza , Chowdhury , among others...
s, considered one of his most important works.
While making Aparajito, Ray had not planned a trilogy, but after he was asked about the idea in Venice, it appealed to him. He finished the last of the trilogy, Apur Sansar
Apur Sansar
Apur Sansar , also known as The World of Apu, is a Bengali film directed by Satyajit Ray. It is the third part of The Apu Trilogy, about the childhood and early adulthood of a young Bengali named Apu in the early twentieth century Indian subcontinent...
(The World of Apu) in 1959. Critics Robin Wood
Robin Wood (critic)
Robert Paul "Robin" Wood was a Canada-based film critic and educator. He wrote books on Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Ingmar Bergman, and Arthur Penn and was a member, until 2007, of the editorial collective that publishes the magazine CineACTION!, a film theory collective founded by Wood and...
and Aparna Sen
Aparna Sen
Aparna Sen is a critically acclaimed Bengali Indian filmmaker, script writer, and actress. She is the winner of three National Film Awards and eight international film festival awards.-Biography:...
found this to be the supreme achievement of the trilogy. Ray introduced two of his favourite actors, Soumitra Chatterjee
Soumitra Chatterjee
Soumitra Chatterjee or Soumitra Chattopadhyay is an iconic Bengali actor from India, known among other things for his frequent collaborations with the great Bengali film director Satyajit Ray and his constant comparison with the Bengali screen idol Uttam Kumar.-Background:Soumitra graduated from...
and Sharmila Tagore
Sharmila Tagore
Sharmila Tagore is an Indian film actress. She has won National Film Awards and Filmfare Awards for her performances.She has led the Indian Film Censor Board from October 2004 till March 2011...
, in this film. It opens with Apu living in a Kolkata house in near-poverty. He becomes involved in an unusual marriage with Aparna. The scenes of their life together form "one of the cinema's classic affirmative depictions of married life." They suffer tragedy. After Apur Sansar was harshly criticised by a Bengali critic, Ray wrote an article defending it. He rarely responded to critics during his filmmaking career, but also later defended his film Charulata, his personal favourite.
Ray's film successes had little influence on his personal life in the years to come. He continued to live with his wife and children in a rented house, with his mother, uncle and other members of his extended family.
From Devi to Charulata (1959–1964)
British Raj
British Raj was the British rule in the Indian subcontinent between 1858 and 1947; The term can also refer to the period of dominion...
period (such as Devi), a documentary on Tagore, a comic film (Mahapurush) and his first film from an original screenplay
Screenplay
A screenplay or script is a written work that is made especially for a film or television program. Screenplays can be original works or adaptations from existing pieces of writing. In them, the movement, actions, expression, and dialogues of the characters are also narrated...
(Kanchenjungha). He also made a series of films that, taken together, are considered by critics among the most deeply felt portrayals of Indian women on screen.
Ray followed Apur Sansar with Devi (The Goddess), a film in which he examined the superstitions in the Hindu
Hinduism
Hinduism is the predominant and indigenous religious tradition of the Indian Subcontinent. Hinduism is known to its followers as , amongst many other expressions...
society. Sharmila Tagore starred as Doyamoyee, a young wife who is deified
Kali
' , also known as ' , is the Hindu goddess associated with power, shakti. The name Kali comes from kāla, which means black, time, death, lord of death, Shiva. Kali means "the black one". Since Shiva is called Kāla - the eternal time, Kālī, his consort, also means "Time" or "Death" . Hence, Kāli is...
by her father-in-law. Ray was worried that the censor board might block his film, or at least make him re-cut it, but Devi was spared. In 1961, on the insistence of Prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru
Jawaharlal Nehru
Jawaharlal Nehru , often referred to with the epithet of Panditji, was an Indian statesman who became the first Prime Minister of independent India and became noted for his “neutralist” policies in foreign affairs. He was also one of the principal leaders of India’s independence movement in the...
, Ray was commissioned to make a documentary
Rabindranath Tagore (film)
Rabindranath Tagore is a 1961 documentary on the life and works of noted Bengali author Rabindranath Tagore. It was made on the anniversary of his hundredth birthday and was written and directed by Satyajit Ray. According to the official website:...
on Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore , sobriquet Gurudev, was a Bengali polymath who reshaped his region's literature and music. Author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse", he became the first non-European Nobel laureate by earning the 1913 Prize in Literature...
, on the occasion of the poet's birth centennial, a tribute to the person who likely most influenced Ray. Due to limited footage of Tagore, Ray faced the challenge of making a film out of mainly static material. He said that it took as much work as three feature films.
In the same year, together with Subhas Mukhopadhyay
Subhas Mukhopadhyay (poet)
Subhash Mukhopadhyay Subhash Mukhopadhyay Subhash Mukhopadhyay (Bangla: সুভাষ মুখোপাধ্যায় (February 12, 1919 - July 8, 2003) was one of the foremost Bengali poets of the 20th century.-Early life:Mukhopadhyay was born in Krishnanagar, a town in Nadia district in the province of West Bengal...
and others, Ray was able to revive Sandesh
Sandesh (magazine)
Sandesh is a Bengali children's magazine. The periodical was first published by Upendrakishore Raychowdhury in 1913 through his publishing company, M/s U. Ray and Sons. After the death of Upendrakishore Roychowdhury in 1915, his eldest son Sukumar Ray succeeded as the editor of the magazine in...
, the children's magazine
Magazine
Magazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of articles. They are generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three...
which his grandfather once published. Ray had been saving money for some years to make this possible. A duality in the name (Sandesh means both "news" in Bengali and also a sweet popular dessert) set the tone of the magazine (both educational and entertaining). Ray began to make illustrations for it, as well as to write stories and essays for children. Writing became his major source of income in the years to come.
In 1962, Ray directed Kanchenjungha
Kanchenjungha
Kanchenjungha is a 1962 Bengali film by Bengali film director Satyajit Ray. It was Ray's first original screenplay and his first colour film....
. Based on his first original screenplay, it was his first film in colour. The film tells of an upper-class family spending an afternoon in Darjeeling, a picturesque hill town in West Bengal. They try to arrange the engagement of their youngest daughter to a highly paid engineer educated in London. He had first conceived shooting the film in a large mansion, but later decided to film it in the famous hill town. He used the many shades of light and mist to reflect the tension in the drama. Ray noted that while his script allowed shooting to be possible under any lighting conditions, a commercial film contingent present at the same time in Darjeeling failed to shoot a single scene, as they only wanted to do so in sunshine.
In the sixties, Ray visited Japan and took particular pleasure in meeting the filmmaker Akira Kurosawa
Akira Kurosawa
was a Japanese film director, producer, screenwriter and editor. Regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema, Kurosawa directed 30 filmsIn 1946, Kurosawa co-directed, with Hideo Sekigawa and Kajiro Yamamoto, the feature Those Who Make Tomorrow ;...
, for whom he had very high regard. While at home, he would take an occasional break from the hectic city life by going to places such as Darjeeling or Puri
Puri
Puri is district headquarter, a city situated about south of state capital Bhubaneswar, on the eastern coast of the Bay of Bengal in the Indian state of Orissa. It is also known as Jagannath Puri after the Jagannath Temple . It is a holy city of the Hindus as a part of the Char Dham pilgrimages...
to complete a script in isolation.
In 1964 Ray made Charulata
Charulata
Charulata is a 1964 film by Bengali director Satyajit Ray, based upon the novella Nastanirh by Rabindranath Tagore...
(The Lonely Wife); it was the culmination of this period of work, and regarded by many critics as his most accomplished film. Based on "Nastanirh
Nastanirh
Nastanirh , , is a Bengali novella by Rabindranath Tagore...
", a short story of Tagore, the film tells of a lonely wife, Charu, in 19th-century Bengal, and her growing feelings for her brother-in-law Amal. Critics have referred to this as Ray's Mozartian
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , baptismal name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart , was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music...
masterpiece. He said the film contained the least flaws among his work, and it was his only work which, given a chance, he would make exactly the same way. Madhabi Mukherjee
Madhabi Mukherjee
Madhabi Mukherjee née Chakraborty is a reputed Bengali actress who has acted in some of the most critically acclaimed films in Bengali cinema.Her major role was the title role of Charu in Satyajit Ray's masterpiece Charulata...
's performance as Charu, and the work of both Subrata Mitra and Bansi Chandragupta in the film, have been highly praised. Other films in this period include Mahanagar (The Big City), Teen Kanya (Three Daughters), Abhijan (The Expedition) and Kapurush o Mahapurush (The Coward and the Holy Man).
New directions (1965–1982)
In the post-Charulata period, Ray took on projects of increasing variety, ranging from fantasyFantasy
Fantasy is a genre of fiction that commonly uses magic and other supernatural phenomena as a primary element of plot, theme, or setting. Many works within the genre take place in imaginary worlds where magic is common...
to science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
to detective films
Detective fiction
Detective fiction is a sub-genre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator , either professional or amateur, investigates a crime, often murder.-In ancient literature:...
to historical drama
Historical drama film
The historical drama is a film genre in which stories are based upon historical events and famous persons. Some historical dramas attempt to accurately portray a historical event or biography, to the degree that the available historical research will allow...
. Ray also made considerable formal experimentation during this period. He expressed contemporary issues of Indian life, responding to a perceived lack of these issues in his films. The first major film in this period is Nayak (The Hero), the story of a screen hero traveling in a train and meeting a young, sympathetic female journalist. Starring Uttam Kumar
Uttam Kumar
Uttam Kumar is one of the most famous names of Indian Bengali Cinema.Born Arun Kumar Chatterjee in 1926 at Ahiritola, North Calcutta he is widely known as Uttam Kumar and Mahanayak . He remains as much of a cultural icon as he had been in his lifetime...
and Sharmila Tagore, in the twenty-four hours of the journey, the film explores the inner conflict of the apparently highly successful matinée idol
Matinee idol
Matinée idol is a term used mainly to describe film or theatre stars who are adored to the point of adulation by their fans.The term almost exclusively refers to male actors. Invariably the adulation was fixated on the actor's looks rather than performance...
. In spite of the film's receiving a "Critics prize" at the Berlin Festival, it had a generally muted reception.
In 1967, Ray wrote a script for a film to be called The Alien
The Alien
The Alien was an Indian-American science fiction film under production in the late 1960s which was eventually cancelled. It was being directed by the celebrated Indian director Satyajit Ray and co-produced by Hollywood studio Columbia Pictures. The script was written by Ray in 1967, loosely based...
, based on his short story "Bankubabur Bandhu" ("Banku Babu's Friend") which he wrote in 1962 for Sandesh
Sandesh (magazine)
Sandesh is a Bengali children's magazine. The periodical was first published by Upendrakishore Raychowdhury in 1913 through his publishing company, M/s U. Ray and Sons. After the death of Upendrakishore Roychowdhury in 1915, his eldest son Sukumar Ray succeeded as the editor of the magazine in...
, the Ray family magazine. Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. is an American film production and distribution company. Columbia Pictures now forms part of the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment, a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate Sony. It is one of the leading film companies...
was the producer for what was a planned U.S.-India co-production, and Peter Sellers
Peter Sellers
Richard Henry Sellers, CBE , known as Peter Sellers, was a British comedian and actor. Perhaps best known as Chief Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther film series, he is also notable for playing three different characters in Dr...
and Marlon Brando
Marlon Brando
Marlon Brando, Jr. was an American movie star and political activist. "Unchallenged as the most important actor in modern American Cinema" according to the St...
were cast as the leading actors. Ray found that his script had been copyright
Copyright
Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...
ed and the fee appropriated by Mike Wilson. Wilson had initially approached Ray through their mutual friend, Arthur C. Clarke
Arthur C. Clarke
Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE, FRAS was a British science fiction author, inventor, and futurist, famous for his short stories and novels, among them 2001: A Space Odyssey, and as a host and commentator in the British television series Mysterious World. For many years, Robert A. Heinlein,...
, to represent him in Hollywood. Wilson copyrighted the script credited to Mike Wilson & Satyajit Ray, although he contributed only one word. Ray later said that he never received a penny for the script. After Brando dropped out of the project, the project tried to replace him with James Coburn
James Coburn
James Harrison Coburn III was an American film and television actor. Coburn appeared in nearly 70 films and made over 100 television appearances during his 45-year career, and played a wide range of roles and won an Academy Award for his supporting role as Glen Whitehouse in Affliction.A capable,...
, but Ray became disillusioned and returned to Kolkata. Columbia expressed interest in reviving the project several times in the 1970s and 1980s, but nothing came of it. When E.T.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is a 1982 American science fiction film co-produced and directed by Steven Spielberg, written by Melissa Mathison and starring Henry Thomas, Dee Wallace, Robert MacNaughton, Drew Barrymore, and Peter Coyote...
was released in 1982, Clarke and Ray saw similarities in the film to his earlier Alien script. In a 1980 Sight & Sound
Sight & Sound
Sight & Sound is a British monthly film magazine published by the British Film Institute .Sight & Sound was first published in 1932 and in 1934 management of the magazine was handed to the nascent BFI, which still publishes the magazine today...
feature, Ray had discussed the collapse of his American co-project. His biographer Andrew Robinson
W. Andrew Robinson
W. Andrew Robinson is a British author and former newspaper editor.Andrew Robinson was educated at the Dragon School, Eton College where he was a King's Scholar, University College, Oxford where he read Chemistry and finally the School of Oriental and African Studies in London...
provided more details in The Inner Eye (1989). Ray believed that Spielberg
Steven Spielberg
Steven Allan Spielberg KBE is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, video game designer, and studio entrepreneur. In a career of more than four decades, Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg's early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as an...
's film would not have been possible without copies of his script of The Alien having been available in the United States. Spielberg has denied this charge. Besides The Alien, two other unrealized projects which Ray had intended to direct were adaptations of the ancient Indian epic
Indian epic poetry
Indian epic poetry is the epic poetry written in the Indian subcontinent, traditionally called Kavya . The Ramayana and Mahabharata, originally composed in Sanskrit and translated thereafter into many other Indian languages, are some of the oldest surviving epic poems on earth and form part of...
, the Mahābhārata
Mahabharata
The Mahabharata is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India and Nepal, the other being the Ramayana. The epic is part of itihasa....
, and E. M. Forster
E. M. Forster
Edward Morgan Forster OM, CH was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society...
's 1924 novel A Passage to India
A Passage to India
A Passage to India is a novel by E. M. Forster set against the backdrop of the British Raj and the Indian independence movement in the 1920s. It was selected as one of the 100 great works of English literature by the Modern Library and won the 1924 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. Time...
.
In 1969, Ray released what would be commercially the most successful of his films. Based on a children's story written by his grandfather, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne
Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne
Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne , directed by the late Satyajit Ray and based on a story by his grandfather Upendra Kishore Ray, is a popular Bengali children's film. It is sometimes released in the English-speaking world as The Adventures Of Goopy And Bagha...
(The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha), it is a musical
Musical film
The musical film is a film genre in which songs sung by the characters are interwoven into the narrative, sometimes accompanied by dancing. The songs usually advance the plot or develop the film's characters, though in some cases they serve merely as breaks in the storyline, often as elaborate...
fantasy
Fantasy
Fantasy is a genre of fiction that commonly uses magic and other supernatural phenomena as a primary element of plot, theme, or setting. Many works within the genre take place in imaginary worlds where magic is common...
. Goopy the singer and Bagha the drummer, equipped by three gifts allowed by the King of Ghosts, set out on a fantastic journey. They try to stop an impending war between two neighbouring kingdoms. Among his most expensive enterprises, the film project was difficult to finance. Ray abandoned his desire to shoot it in colour, as he turned down an offer that would have forced him to cast a certain Bollywood
Bollywood
Bollywood is the informal term popularly used for the Hindi-language film industry based in Mumbai , Maharashtra, India. The term is often incorrectly used to refer to the whole of Indian cinema; it is only a part of the total Indian film industry, which includes other production centers producing...
actor as the lead.
Ray made a film from a novel by the young poet and writer, Sunil Gangopadhyay
Sunil Gangopadhyay
Sunil Gangopadhyay , is a celebrated Indian poet and novelist.-Early life:...
. Featuring a musical motif structure acclaimed as more complex than Charulata, Aranyer Din Ratri
Aranyer Din Ratri
Aranyer Din Ratri , is an Indian Bengali film released in 1970 and directed by Satyajit Ray. It is based upon the Bengali novel of the same name by Sunil Gangopadhyay. It was one of the earliest films to employ the literary technique of the carnivalesque...
(Days and Nights in the Forest) traces four urban young men going to the forests for a vacation. They try to leave their daily lives behind. All but one of them become involved in encounters with women, which express their characters. Critics thought the film to be a revealing study of the Indian middle class
Middle class
The middle class is any class of people in the middle of a societal hierarchy. In Weberian socio-economic terms, the middle class is the broad group of people in contemporary society who fall socio-economically between the working class and upper class....
. Ray cast Bombay-based actress Simi Garewal
Simi Garewal
Simi Garewal is an Indian actress. She is known for her work in Mera Naam Joker, Siddhartha and Karz.-Early life:Simi Garewal was born in a Jatt Sikh family in Delhi, her father, J S Garewal served in the army rising to the rank of brigadier...
as a tribal woman. She was pleased that he could envision someone as urban as she in that role.
After Aranyer, Ray addressed contemporary Bengali life. He completed what became known as the Calcutta Trilogy
Calcutta trilogy
The Calcutta trilogy may refer to either of the following two Bengali film trilogies:Three films by Satyajit Ray:* Pratidwandi * Seemabaddha * Jana Aranya...
: Pratidwandi
Pratidwandi
Pratidwandi or Pratidandi is a 1971 Indian Bengali film directed by Satyajit Ray based on the novel by Sunil Gangopadhyay. It is the first part of the Calcutta trilogy...
(1970), Seemabaddha
Seemabaddha
Seemabaddha is a 1971 film by Satyajit Ray. It also known as Company Limited.-Plot:Shyamal is an ambitious Sales manager in a British fan manufacturing firm in Calcutta, where he is expecting a promotion shortly. He is married to Dolan, and lives in a company flat...
(1971), and Jana Aranya
Jana Aranya
Jana Aranya , is a 1976 Bengali film directed by Satyajit Ray, based on the novel of the same name by Mani Shankar Mukherjee, and is last in the series of films by Ray, known as Calcutta trilogy, the previous two being, Pratidwandi and Seemabaddha .-Plot:The film portrays the hopelessness of...
(1975), three films that were conceived separately but had thematic connections. Pratidwandi (The Adversary) is about an idealist young graduate; if disillusioned at the end of film, he is still uncorrupted. Jana Aranya (The Middleman) showed a young man giving in to the culture of corruption to make a living. Seemabaddha (Company Limited) portrayed an already successful man giving up his morality for further gains. In the first film, Pratidwandi, Ray introduces a new, elliptical narrative style, such as scenes in negative, dream sequences, and abrupt flashbacks. In the 1970s, Ray adapted two of his popular stories as detective films. Though mainly addressed to children and young adults, both Sonar Kella
Sonar Kella
Sonar Kella , also Shonar Kella, released in the United States as The Golden Fortress, is a 1971 mystery novel and a 1974 film by Bengali writer and director Satyajit Ray. The film is an adaptation of the novel with minor plot changes and features the actors Soumitra Chatterjee, Santosh Dutta,...
(The Golden Fortress) and Joy Baba Felunath (The Elephant God) found some critical following.
Ray considered making a film on the Bangladesh Liberation War
Bangladesh Liberation War
The Bangladesh Liberation War was an armed conflict pitting East Pakistan and India against West Pakistan. The war resulted in the secession of East Pakistan, which became the independent nation of Bangladesh....
but later abandoned the idea. He said that, as a filmmaker, he was more interested in the travails of the refugees and not the politics. In 1977, Ray completed Shatranj Ke Khiladi
Shatranj Ke Khiladi
The Chess Players is a genre painting of 1876 by American artist Thomas Eakins . It is a small oil on wood panel depicting Eakins' father Benjamin observing a chess match. The two players are Bertrand Gardel , an elderly French teacher, and the somewhat younger George Holmes, a painter...
(The Chess Players), a Hindi
Hindi
Standard Hindi, or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi, also known as Manak Hindi , High Hindi, Nagari Hindi, and Literary Hindi, is a standardized and sanskritized register of the Hindustani language derived from the Khariboli dialect of Delhi...
film based on a story by Munshi Premchand
Munshi Premchand
Munshi Premchand , was a famous writer of modern Hindi-Urdu literature. He is generally recognized in India as the foremost Hindi-Urdu writer of the early twentieth century...
. It was set in Lucknow
Lucknow
Lucknow is the capital city of Uttar Pradesh in India. Lucknow is the administrative headquarters of Lucknow District and Lucknow Division....
in the state of Oudh, a year before the Indian rebellion of 1857
Indian Rebellion of 1857
The Indian Rebellion of 1857 began as a mutiny of sepoys of the British East India Company's army on 10 May 1857, in the town of Meerut, and soon escalated into other mutinies and civilian rebellions largely in the upper Gangetic plain and central India, with the major hostilities confined to...
. A commentary on issues related to the colonization of India by the British, this was Ray's first feature film in a language other than Bengali. It is his most expensive and star-studded film, featuring Sanjeev Kumar
Sanjeev Kumar (actor)
Sanjeev Kumar was one of the most prominent Indian actors in Bollywood.-Personal life and background:Sanjeev Kumar was born as Jariwala in Gujarat to a Gujarati family. His first home was in Surat and family based in Mumbai. A stint in the film school took him to Bollywood, where he eventually...
, Saeed Jaffrey
Saeed Jaffrey
Saeed Jaffrey OBE is an Indian-born British actor, who has done numerous British movies. He was born in Malerkotla, Punjab...
, Amjad Khan
Amjad Khan
Amjad Khan was an acclaimed Indian actor and director. He worked in over 130 films in his film career spanning nearly twenty years. He enjoyed popularity for his villainous roles in Hindi films the most famous being the unforgettable Gabbar Singh in 1975 classic Sholay...
, Shabana Azmi
Shabana Azmi
Shabana Azmi is an Indian actress of film, television and theatre. An alumna of the Film and Television Institute of India of Pune, she made her film debut in 1974 and soon became one of the leading actresses of parallel cinema, an Indian New Wave movement known for its serious content and...
, Victor Bannerjee and Richard Attenborough
Richard Attenborough
Richard Samuel Attenborough, Baron Attenborough , CBE is a British actor, director, producer and entrepreneur. As director and producer he won two Academy Awards for the 1982 film Gandhi...
.
In 1980, Ray made a sequel
Sequel
A sequel is a narrative, documental, or other work of literature, film, theatre, or music that continues the story of or expands upon issues presented in some previous work...
to Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, a somewhat political Hirak Rajar Deshe
Hirak Rajar Deshe
Hirak Rajar Deshe is the second film of the Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne series directed by Satyajit Ray. A unique aspect of the film is that most of the dialogues exchanged by the protagonists of the film are rhyming...
(Kingdom of Diamonds). The kingdom of the evil Diamond King, or Hirok Raj, is an allusion to India during Indira Gandhi
Indira Gandhi
Indira Priyadarshini Gandhara was an Indian politician who served as the third Prime Minister of India for three consecutive terms and a fourth term . She was assassinated by Sikh extremists...
's emergency period
Indian Emergency (1975 - 77)
The Indian Emergency of 25 June 1975 – 21 March 1977 was a 21-month period, when President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, upon advice by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, declared a state of emergency under Article 352 of the Constitution of India, effectively bestowing on her the power to rule by decree,...
. Along with his acclaimed short film Pikoo
Pikoor Diary
Pikoor Diary is a short film primarily made for television by Satyajit Ray.-External links:*...
(Pikoo's Diary) and hour-long Hindi film, Sadgati, this was the culmination of his work in this period.
The last phase (1983–1992)
In 1983, while working on Ghare BaireGhare Baire (film)
Ghare Baire is a 1985 film by Bengali director Satyajit Ray, based upon the novel Ghare Baire by Rabindranath Tagore. It features Soumitra Chatterjee, Victor Banerjee, Jennifer Kendal and Swatilekha Chatterjee, married Sengupta...
(Home and the World), Ray suffered a heart attack
Myocardial infarction
Myocardial infarction or acute myocardial infarction , commonly known as a heart attack, results from the interruption of blood supply to a part of the heart, causing heart cells to die...
; it would severely limit his productivity in the remaining 9 years of his life. Ghare Baire was completed in 1984 with the help of Ray's son (who operated the camera from then on) because of his health condition. He had wanted to film this Tagore novel on the dangers of fervent nationalism
Nationalism
Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...
for a long time, and wrote a first draft of a script for it in the 1940s. In spite of rough patches due to Ray's illness, the film did receive some critical acclaim. It had the first kiss fully portrayed in Ray's films. In 1987, he made a documentary
Sukumar Ray (film)
-Synopsis:The documentary is based on the life and works of Sukumar Ray, father of Satyajit Ray.-External links:*...
on his father, Sukumar Ray
Sukumar Ray
Sukumar Ray , , was a Bengali humorous poet, story writer and playwright who mainly wrote for children. As perhaps the most famous Indian practitioner of literary nonsense, he is often compared to Lewis Carroll...
.
Ray's last three films, made after his recovery and with medical strictures in place, were shot mostly indoors, and have a distinctive style. They have more dialogue than his earlier films and are often regarded as inferior to his earlier body of work. The first, Ganashatru
Ganashatru
Ganashatru is a 1990 Indian film by Satyajit Ray. It is an adaption of Henrik Ibsen's play An Enemy of the People, and was released under that title in the UK. The cast includes Ray's favourite actor Soumitra Chatterjee, and veteran actors such as Dhritiman Chatterjee, Shubhendu Chatterjee, Manoj...
(An Enemy of the People) is an adaptation of the famous Ibsen play
An Enemy of the People
An Enemy of the People is an 1882 play by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Ibsen wrote it in response to the public outcry against his play Ghosts, which at that time was considered scandalous...
, and considered the weakest of the three. Ray recovered some of his form in his 1990 film Shakha Proshakha
Shakha Proshakha
Shakha Proshakha is a 1990 Satyajit Ray film. It deals with four generations of a well-to-do Bengali family, with a focus on the third generation.-Plot:...
(Branches of the Tree). In it, an old man, who has lived a life of honesty, comes to learn of the corruption of three of his sons. The final scene shows the father finding solace only in the companionship of his fourth son, who is uncorrupted but mentally ill. Ray's last film, Agantuk
Agantuk
Agantuk is a 1991 Bengali film directed by Satyajit Ray. It was Ray's last film, and is based on one of his short stories, Atithi .-Plot summary:...
(The Stranger), is lighter in mood but not in theme. When a long-lost uncle arrives to visit his niece in Kolkata, he arouses suspicion as to his motive. This provokes far-ranging questions in the film about civilization.
In 1992, Ray's health deteriorated due to heart complications. He was admitted to a hospital, and would never recover. An honorary Oscar was awarded to him weeks before his death, which he received in a gravely ill condition. He died on 23 April 1992 at the age of seventy-one.
Film craft
Satyajit Ray considered script-writing to be an integral part of direction. Initially he refused to make a film in any language other than BengaliBengali language
Bengali or Bangla is an eastern Indo-Aryan language. It is native to the region of eastern South Asia known as Bengal, which comprises present day Bangladesh, the Indian state of West Bengal, and parts of the Indian states of Tripura and Assam. It is written with the Bengali script...
. In his two non-Bengali feature films, he wrote the script in English; translators interpreted it in Hindi or Urdu under Ray's supervision. Ray's eye for detail was matched by that of his art director Bansi Chandragupta. His influence on the early films was so important that Ray would always write scripts in English before creating a Bengali version, so that the non-Bengali Chandragupta would be able to read it. The craft of Subrata Mitra
Subrata Mitra
Subrata Mitra was an Indian cinematographer. Acclaimed for his work in The Apu Trilogy , Mitra is often considered one of the greatest of Indian cinematographers....
garnered praise for the cinematography of Ray's films. A number of critics thought that his departure from Ray's crew lowered the quality of cinematography
Cinematography
Cinematography is the making of lighting and camera choices when recording photographic images for cinema. It is closely related to the art of still photography...
in the following films. Though Ray openly praised Mitra, his single-mindedness in taking over operation of the camera after Charulata caused Mitra to stop working for him after 1966. Mitra developed "bounce lighting", a technique to reflect light from cloth to create a diffused, realistic light even on a set. Ray acknowledged his debts to Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is often identified with the 1960s French film movement, French Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave"....
and François Truffaut
François Truffaut
François Roland Truffaut was an influential film critic and filmmaker and one of the founders of the French New Wave. In a film career lasting over a quarter of a century, he remains an icon of the French film industry. He was also a screenwriter, producer, and actor working on over twenty-five...
of the French New Wave
French New Wave
The New Wave was a blanket term coined by critics for a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, influenced by Italian Neorealism and classical Hollywood cinema. Although never a formally organized movement, the New Wave filmmakers were linked by their self-conscious rejection of...
for introducing new technical and cinematic innovations.
Ray's regular editor was Dulal Datta
Dulal Datta
Dulal Datta was a film editor in the Bengali film industry located in Kolkata , West Bengal, India. He is especially remembered for his association with the acclaimed film director Satyajit Ray...
, but the director usually dictated the editing while Datta did the actual work. Because of financial reasons and Ray's meticulous planning, his films were mostly cut "on the camera" (apart from Pather Panchali). At the beginning of his career, Ray worked with Indian classical music
Indian classical music
The origins of Indian classical music can be found in the Vedas, which are the oldest scriptures in the Hindu tradition. Indian classical music has also been significantly influenced by, or syncretised with, Indian folk music and Persian music. The Samaveda, one of the four Vedas, describes music...
ians, including Ravi Shankar
Ravi Shankar
Ravi Shankar , often referred to by the title Pandit, is an Indian musician and composer who plays the plucked string instrument sitar. He has been described as the best known contemporary Indian musician by Hans Neuhoff in Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart.Shankar was born in Varanasi and spent...
, Vilayat Khan
Vilayat Khan
Ustad Vilayat Khan was one of India's well known sitar maestros, born in Gauripur in Mymensingh, Bengal...
and Ali Akbar Khan
Ali Akbar Khan
Ali Akbar Khan , often referred to as Khansahib or by the title Ustad , was a Hindustani classical musician of the Maihar gharana, known for his virtuosity in playing the sarod...
. He found that their first loyalty was to musical traditions, and not to his film. He had a greater understanding of western classical forms, which he wanted to use for his films set in an urban milieu. Starting with Teen Kanya, Ray began to compose his own scores.
He used actors of diverse backgrounds, from famous film stars to people who had never seen a film (as in Aparajito). Robin Wood
Robin Wood (critic)
Robert Paul "Robin" Wood was a Canada-based film critic and educator. He wrote books on Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Ingmar Bergman, and Arthur Penn and was a member, until 2007, of the editorial collective that publishes the magazine CineACTION!, a film theory collective founded by Wood and...
and others have lauded him as the best director of children, pointing out memorable performances in the roles of Apu and Durga (Pather Panchali), Ratan (Postmaster) and Mukul (Sonar Kella). Depending on the talent or experience of the actor, Ray varied the intensity of his direction, from virtually nothing with actors such as Utpal Dutt
Utpal Dutt
Utpal Dutt was an Indian actor, director, and writer-playwright. He was primarily an actor in Bengali Theatre, where he became a pioneering figure in Modern Indian theatre, when he founded the 'Little Theater Group' in 1947, which enacted many English, Shakespearean and Brecht plays, in a period...
, to using the actor as "a puppet" (Subir Banerjee as young Apu or Sharmila Tagore as Aparna). Actors who had worked for Ray praised his customary trust but said he could also treat incompetence with "total contempt".
Literary works
Children's literature
Children's literature is for readers and listeners up to about age twelve; it is often defined in four different ways: books written by children, books written for children, books chosen by children, or books chosen for children. It is often illustrated. The term is used in senses which sometimes...
—Feluda
Feluda
Feluda, or Prodosh Chandra Mitra, who uses the anglicised name Pradosh C. Mitter, is a fictional private investigator starring in a series of Bengali novels and short stories written by the famous Indian Bengali film director and writer Satyajit Ray. The detective lives at Rajani Sen Road,...
, a sleuth
Detective
A detective is an investigator, either a member of a police agency or a private person. The latter may be known as private investigators or "private eyes"...
, and Professor Shonku, a scientist
Scientist
A scientist in a broad sense is one engaging in a systematic activity to acquire knowledge. In a more restricted sense, a scientist is an individual who uses the scientific method. The person may be an expert in one or more areas of science. This article focuses on the more restricted use of the word...
. He was a prominent writer of science fiction. Feluda often has to solve a puzzle to get to the bottom of a case. The Feluda stories are narrated by Topshe, his cousin, something of a Watson to Feluda's Holmes
Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes is a fictional detective created by Scottish author and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The fantastic London-based "consulting detective", Holmes is famous for his astute logical reasoning, his ability to take almost any disguise, and his use of forensic science skills to solve...
. The science fictions of Shonku are presented as a diary discovered after the scientist had mysteriously disappeared. Ray also wrote a collection of nonsense verse
Nonsense verse
Nonsense verse is a form of light, often rhythmical verse, usually for children, depicting peculiar characters in amusing and fantastical situations. It is whimsical and humorous in tone and tends to employ fanciful phrases and meaningless made-up words. Nonsense verse is closely related to...
named Today Bandha Ghorar Dim
Today Bandha Ghorar Dim
Today Bandha Ghorar Dim or Toray Bandha Ghorar Dim is a collection of nonsense rhymes by the acclaimed Indian film director Satyajit Ray in Bengali. The collection contains several translated rhymes and limericks besides some original works by him. The book included a translation of Lewis Carroll's...
, which includes a translation of Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson , better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll , was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems "The Hunting of the...
's "Jabberwocky
Jabberwocky
"Jabberwocky" is a nonsense verse poem written by Lewis Carroll in his 1872 novel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, a sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland...
". He wrote a collection of humorous stories of Mullah Nasiruddin
Nasreddin
Nasreddin was a Seljuq satirical Sufi figure, sometimes believed to have lived during the Middle Ages and considered a populist philosopher and wise man, remembered for his funny stories and anecdotes. He appears in thousands of stories, sometimes witty, sometimes wise, but often, too, a fool or...
in Bengali.
His short stories
Short Stories
Short Stories may refer to:*A plural for Short story*Short Stories , an American pulp magazine published from 1890-1959*Short Stories, a 1954 collection by O. E...
for adults were published as collections of 12 stories, in which the overall title played with the word twelve (for example Aker pitthe dui, or literally "Two on top of one"). Ray's interest in puzzles and puns is reflected in his stories. Ray's short stories give full rein to his interest in the macabre, in suspense and other aspects that he avoided in film, making for an interesting psychological study. Most of his writings have been translated into English, and are finding a new group of readers.
Most of his screenplays have been published in Bengali
Bengali language
Bengali or Bangla is an eastern Indo-Aryan language. It is native to the region of eastern South Asia known as Bengal, which comprises present day Bangladesh, the Indian state of West Bengal, and parts of the Indian states of Tripura and Assam. It is written with the Bengali script...
in the literary journal Eksan. Ray wrote an autobiography about his childhood years, Jakhan Choto Chilam
Jakhan Choto Chilam
Jakhan Choto Chilam is an autobiographical book by the famed film director Satyajit Ray. In this book, Ray discusses his childhood days in the city of Kolkata , India. The book was published in 1982....
(1982).
He also wrote essays on film, published as the collections: Our Films, Their Films
Our Films, Their Films
Our Films, Their Films is an anthology of film criticism by noted Bengali filmmaker, composer and writer Satyajit Ray. Collecting articles and personal journal excerpts, it was first published in India in 1976; an English translation was published in The U.S. and UK in 1992...
(1976), along with Bishoy Chalachchitra
Bishoy Chalachchitra
Bishoy Chalachchitra is a collection of writings on films by the acclaimed film director Satyajit Ray. The book is in Bengali and was published by Ananda Publishers....
(1976), Ekei Bole Shooting
Ekei Bole Shooting
Ekei Bole Shooting is a non-fiction Bengali book by the acclaimed film director Satyajit Ray. The book is a collection of Ray's writing on his experiences during the shooting of cinemas. The writings were initially published in the children's periodical Sandesh. Ray illustrates various difficulties...
(1979). During the mid-1990s, Ray's film essays and an anthology of short stories were also published in English in the West. Our Films, Their Films
Our Films, Their Films
Our Films, Their Films is an anthology of film criticism by noted Bengali filmmaker, composer and writer Satyajit Ray. Collecting articles and personal journal excerpts, it was first published in India in 1976; an English translation was published in The U.S. and UK in 1992...
is an anthology of film criticism by Ray. The book contains articles and personal journal excerpts. The book is presented in two sections: Ray first discusses Indian film
Cinema of India
The cinema of India consists of films produced across India, which includes the cinematic culture of Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Gujarat, Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir, Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra, Orissa, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal. Indian films came to be followed throughout South Asia and...
, before turning his attention toward Hollywood, specific filmmakers (Charlie Chaplin
Charlie Chaplin
Sir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin, KBE was an English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work during the silent film era. He became the most famous film star in the world before the end of World War I...
and Akira Kurosawa
Akira Kurosawa
was a Japanese film director, producer, screenwriter and editor. Regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema, Kurosawa directed 30 filmsIn 1946, Kurosawa co-directed, with Hideo Sekigawa and Kajiro Yamamoto, the feature Those Who Make Tomorrow ;...
), and movements such as Italian neorealism
Italian neorealism
Italian neorealism is a style of film characterized by stories set amongst the poor and working class, filmed on location, frequently using nonprofessional actors...
. His book Bishoy Chalachchitra
Bishoy Chalachchitra
Bishoy Chalachchitra is a collection of writings on films by the acclaimed film director Satyajit Ray. The book is in Bengali and was published by Ananda Publishers....
was published in translation in 2006 as Speaking of Films. It contains a compact description of his philosophy of different aspects of the cinema.
Satyajit Ray designed four typeface
Typeface
In typography, a typeface is the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. Each type is designed and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly....
s for roman script named Ray Roman, Ray Bizarre, Daphnis, and Holiday Script, apart from numerous Bengali ones for the Sandesh
Sandesh (magazine)
Sandesh is a Bengali children's magazine. The periodical was first published by Upendrakishore Raychowdhury in 1913 through his publishing company, M/s U. Ray and Sons. After the death of Upendrakishore Roychowdhury in 1915, his eldest son Sukumar Ray succeeded as the editor of the magazine in...
magazine. Ray Roman and Ray Bizarre won an international competition in 1971. In certain circles of Kolkata, Ray continued to be known as an eminent graphic designer, well into his film career. Ray illustrated all his books and designed covers for them, as well as creating all publicity material for his films. He also designed covers of several books by other authors.
Critical and popular response
Ray's work has been described as full of humanismHumanism
Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism....
and universality, and of a deceptive simplicity with deep underlying complexity. The Japanese director Akira Kurosawa
Akira Kurosawa
was a Japanese film director, producer, screenwriter and editor. Regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema, Kurosawa directed 30 filmsIn 1946, Kurosawa co-directed, with Hideo Sekigawa and Kajiro Yamamoto, the feature Those Who Make Tomorrow ;...
said, "Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon." But his detractors find his films glacially slow, moving like a "majestic snail." Some find his humanism simple-minded, and his work anti-modern; they criticize him for lacking the new modes of expression or experimentation found in works of Ray's contemporaries, such as Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is often identified with the 1960s French film movement, French Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave"....
. As Stanley Kauffman wrote, some critics believe that Ray "assumes [viewers] can be interested in a film that simply dwells in its characters, rather than one that imposes dramatic patterns on their lives." Ray said he could do nothing about the slow pace. Kurosawa defended him by saying that Ray's films were not slow, "His work can be described as flowing composedly, like a big river".
Critics have often compared Ray to artists in the cinema and other media, such as Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics...
, Renoir
Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir was a French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author. As a film director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s...
, De Sica
Vittorio de Sica
Vittorio De Sica was an Italian director and actor, a leading figure in the neorealist movement....
, Howard Hawks
Howard Hawks
Howard Winchester Hawks was an American film director, producer and screenwriter of the classic Hollywood era...
or Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , baptismal name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart , was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music...
. The writer V. S. Naipaul
V. S. Naipaul
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad "V. S." Naipaul, TC is a Nobel prize-winning Indo-Trinidadian-British writer who is known for his novels focusing on the legacy of the British Empire's colonialism...
compared a scene in Shatranj Ki Khiladi (The Chess Players) to a Shakespearean
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
play; he wrote, "only three hundred words are spoken but goodness! – terrific things happen." Even critics who did not like the aesthetics
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...
of Ray's films generally acknowledged his ability to encompass a whole culture with all its nuances. Ray's obituary in The Independent
The Independent
The Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...
included the question, "Who else can compete?"
Political ideologues took issue with Ray's work. In a public debate during the 1960s, Ray and the Marxist filmmaker Mrinal Sen
Mrinal Sen
Mrinal Sen is a Bengali Indian filmmaker. He was born on 14 May 1923, in the town of Faridpur, now in Bangladesh in a Hindu family. After finishing his high school there, he left home to come to Calcutta as a student and studied physics at the well-known Scottish Church College and at the...
engaged in an argument. Sen criticized him for casting a matinée idol such as Uttam Kumar
Uttam Kumar
Uttam Kumar is one of the most famous names of Indian Bengali Cinema.Born Arun Kumar Chatterjee in 1926 at Ahiritola, North Calcutta he is widely known as Uttam Kumar and Mahanayak . He remains as much of a cultural icon as he had been in his lifetime...
, whom he considered a compromise. Ray said that Sen only attacked "easy targets", i.e. the Bengali middle-classes. Advocates of socialism
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...
said that Ray was not "committed" to the cause of the nation's downtrodden classes; some critics accused him of glorifying poverty in Pather Panchali and Ashani Sanket
Ashani Sanket
Distant Thunder is a 1973 Bengali film by the renowned Indian director Satyajit Ray, based on the novel by the same name by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay....
(Distant Thunder) through lyricism and aesthetics. They said he provided no solution to conflicts in the stories, and was unable to overcome his bourgeoisie
Bourgeoisie
In sociology and political science, bourgeoisie describes a range of groups across history. In the Western world, between the late 18th century and the present day, the bourgeoisie is a social class "characterized by their ownership of capital and their related culture." A member of the...
background. During the naxalite
Naxalite
The word Naxal, Naxalite or Naksalvadi is a generic term used to refer to various militant Communist groups operating in different parts of India under different organizational envelopes...
movements in the 1970s, agitators once came close to causing physical harm to his son, Sandip. Early in 1980, Ray was criticized by an Indian M.P.
Member of Parliament
A Member of Parliament is a representative of the voters to a :parliament. In many countries with bicameral parliaments, the term applies specifically to members of the lower house, as upper houses often have a different title, such as senate, and thus also have different titles for its members,...
and former actress Nargis Dutt, who accused Ray of "exporting poverty." She wanted him to make films to represent "Modern India."
Legacy
Bengali cinema
Bengali cinema refers to the Bengali language filmmaking industries in the Bengal region of South Asia. There are two major film-making hubs in the region: one in Kolkata, West Bengal, India and the other in Dhaka, Bangladesh .The history of cinema in Bengal dates back to the 1890s, when the first...
; a number of Bengali directors, including Aparna Sen
Aparna Sen
Aparna Sen is a critically acclaimed Bengali Indian filmmaker, script writer, and actress. She is the winner of three National Film Awards and eight international film festival awards.-Biography:...
, Rituparno Ghosh
Rituparno Ghosh
Rituparno Ghosh is a Bengali film director. He has won 8 National Film Awards in India and several awards at international film festivals abroad.- Early life and background :...
and Gautam Ghose
Gautam Ghose
Goutam Ghose is one of the most acclaimed film directors of modern India. Born in Calcutta. Graduated from Calcutta University....
in India, Tareq Masud and Tanvir Mokammel
Tanvir Mokammel
Tanvir Mokammel is a Bangladeshi film director. He earned a Masters degree in English Literature at Dhaka University...
in Bangladesh
Bangladesh
Bangladesh , officially the People's Republic of Bangladesh is a sovereign state located in South Asia. It is bordered by India on all sides except for a small border with Burma to the far southeast and by the Bay of Bengal to the south...
, and Aneel Ahmad
Aneel Ahmad
Aneel Ahmad is a British filmmaker, writer, film director, and producer who specialises in documentaries and shorts.-Personal life:The self-taught filmmaker was brought up on the poor and often violent estate of Longsight in Manchester....
in England, have been influenced by his film craft. Across the spectrum, filmmakers such as Budhdhadeb Dasgupta, Mrinal Sen
Mrinal Sen
Mrinal Sen is a Bengali Indian filmmaker. He was born on 14 May 1923, in the town of Faridpur, now in Bangladesh in a Hindu family. After finishing his high school there, he left home to come to Calcutta as a student and studied physics at the well-known Scottish Church College and at the...
and Adoor Gopalakrishnan
Adoor Gopalakrishnan
Moutatthu "Adoor" Gopalakrishnan Unnithan is an Indian film director, script writer, and producer. Adoor Gopalakrishnan had a major role in revolutionizing Malayalam cinema and is regarded as one of the greatest filmmakers of India.. Adoor's first film Swayamvaram pioneered the new wave cinema...
have acknowledged his seminal contribution to Indian cinema
Cinema of India
The cinema of India consists of films produced across India, which includes the cinematic culture of Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Gujarat, Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir, Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra, Orissa, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal. Indian films came to be followed throughout South Asia and...
. Beyond India, filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese
Martin Scorsese
Martin Charles Scorsese is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation...
, James Ivory
James Ivory (director)
James Francis Ivory is an American film director, best known for the results of his long collaboration with Merchant Ivory Productions, which included both Indian-born film producer Ismail Merchant, and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala...
, Abbas Kiarostami
Abbas Kiarostami
Abbas Kiarostami is an internationally acclaimed Iranian film director, screenwriter, photographer and film producer. An active filmmaker since 1970, Kiarostami has been involved in over forty films, including shorts and documentaries...
, Elia Kazan
Elia Kazan
Elia Kazan was an American director and actor, described by the New York Times as "one of the most honored and influential directors in Broadway and Hollywood history". Born in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, to Greek parents originally from Kayseri in Anatolia, the family emigrated...
, François Truffaut
François Truffaut
François Roland Truffaut was an influential film critic and filmmaker and one of the founders of the French New Wave. In a film career lasting over a quarter of a century, he remains an icon of the French film industry. He was also a screenwriter, producer, and actor working on over twenty-five...
, Carlos Saura
Carlos Saura
Carlos Saura Atarés is a Spanish film director and photographer.-Early life:Born into a family of artists , he developed his artistic sense in childhood as a photography enthusiast.He obtained his directing diploma in Madrid in 1957 at the Institute of Cinema Research and Studies...
, Isao Takahata
Isao Takahata
is a Japanese anime filmmaker that have earned critical international acclaim for his work as a director. Takahata is co-founder of Studio Ghibli with long-time collaborative partner Hayao Miyazaki. He has directed films such as the war-themed Grave of the Fireflies, the romantic-drama Only...
and Danny Boyle
Danny Boyle
Daniel "Danny" Boyle is an English filmmaker and producer. He is best known for his work on films such as Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours, 28 Days Later, Sunshine and Trainspotting. For Slumdog Millionaire, Boyle won numerous awards in 2008, including the Academy Award for Best Director...
have been influenced by his cinematic style, with many others such as Akira Kurosawa
Akira Kurosawa
was a Japanese film director, producer, screenwriter and editor. Regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema, Kurosawa directed 30 filmsIn 1946, Kurosawa co-directed, with Hideo Sekigawa and Kajiro Yamamoto, the feature Those Who Make Tomorrow ;...
praising his work. Gregory Nava
Gregory Nava
Gregory Nava is a film director, producer and screenplay writer, of Mexican and Basque heritage.-Education:...
's 1995 film My Family
My Family (film)
My Family is an American drama film directed by Gregory Nava and written by Nava and Anna Thomas. The motion picture stars Jimmy Smits, Edward James Olmos, Esai Morales, and others. It also features Jennifer Lopez in her second film role....
had a final scene that repeated that of Apur Sansar. Ira Sachs
Ira Sachs
Ira Sachs is an American filmmaker. His first film was the acclaimed short Lady .He directed Sundance Film Festival selection The Delta and directed Sundance Film Festival Grand Prize winning Forty Shades of Blue...
's 2005 work Forty Shades of Blue
Forty Shades of Blue
Forty Shades of Blue is a 2005 independent film directed by Ira Sachs. It tells the story of Alan James , an aging music producer who lives in Memphis, Tennessee with his much younger Russian girlfriend, Laura . Their life together is complicated by the presence of Alan's adult son Michael Forty...
was a loose remake of Charulata. Other references to Ray films are found, for example, in recent works such as Sacred Evil
Sacred Evil
Sacred Evil is an Indian supernatural/surreal film directed by Abhigyan Jha and Abhiyan Rajhans. It was released in 2006.Sacred Evil is about duality. It explores the premise that reality always has two sides...
, the Elements trilogy
Elements trilogy
The Elements trilogy is a trilogy of films by Indian film-maker Deepa Mehta, dealing with controversial issues of social reform on the Indian subcontinent. Fire, the first release in 1996, dealt with issues of arranged marriage and homosexuality in the patriarchal culture of India...
of Deepa Mehta
Deepa Mehta
Deepa Mehta, LLD is a Genie Award-winning Indian-born Canadian film director and screenwriter, most known for her Elements Trilogy, Fire , Earth , and Water , among which Earth was submitted by Indian government for Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film...
and even in films of Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is often identified with the 1960s French film movement, French Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave"....
. According to Michael Sragow of The Atlantic Monthly, the "youthful coming-of-age
Coming of age
Coming of age is a young person's transition from childhood to adulthood. The age at which this transition takes place varies in society, as does the nature of the transition. It can be a simple legal convention or can be part of a ritual, as practiced by many societies...
dramas
Drama film
A drama film is a film genre that depends mostly on in-depth development of realistic characters dealing with emotional themes. Dramatic themes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, infidelity, moral dilemmas, racial prejudice, religious intolerance, poverty, class divisions, violence against women...
that have flooded art houses since the mid-fifties owe a tremendous debt to the Apu trilogy". The trilogy also introduced the bounce lighting technique. Kanchenjungha
Kanchenjungha
Kanchenjungha is a 1962 Bengali film by Bengali film director Satyajit Ray. It was Ray's first original screenplay and his first colour film....
(1962) introduced a narrative structure that resembles later hyperlink cinema
Hyperlink cinema
Hyperlink cinema is a term coined by author Alissa Quart, who used the term in her review of the film Happy Endings for the film journal Film Comment in 2005. Film critic Roger Ebert popularized the term when reviewing the film Syriana in 2005...
. Pratidwandi
Pratidwandi
Pratidwandi or Pratidandi is a 1971 Indian Bengali film directed by Satyajit Ray based on the novel by Sunil Gangopadhyay. It is the first part of the Calcutta trilogy...
(1972) helped pioneer photo-negative
Negative (photography)
In photography, a negative may refer to three different things, although they are all related.-A negative:Film for 35 mm cameras comes in long narrow strips of chemical-coated plastic or cellulose acetate. As each image is captured by the camera onto the film strip, the film strip advances so that...
flashback
Flashback (narrative)
Flashback is an interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point the story has reached. Flashbacks are often used to recount events that happened before the story’s primary sequence of events or to fill in crucial backstory...
and X-ray
X-ray
X-radiation is a form of electromagnetic radiation. X-rays have a wavelength in the range of 0.01 to 10 nanometers, corresponding to frequencies in the range 30 petahertz to 30 exahertz and energies in the range 120 eV to 120 keV. They are shorter in wavelength than UV rays and longer than gamma...
digression techniques.
The character Apu Nahasapeemapetilon
Apu Nahasapeemapetilon
Apu Nahasapeemapetilon is a character in the animated television series The Simpsons. He is voiced by Hank Azaria and first appeared in the episode "The Telltale Head". Apu is the proprietor of the Kwik-E-Mart, a popular convenience store in Springfield, and a friend of Homer Simpson. He is also...
in the American animated television series The Simpsons
The Simpsons
The Simpsons is an American animated sitcom created by Matt Groening for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The series is a satirical parody of a middle class American lifestyle epitomized by its family of the same name, which consists of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie...
was named in homage to Ray's popular character from The Apu Trilogy. Together with Madhabi Mukherjee
Madhabi Mukherjee
Madhabi Mukherjee née Chakraborty is a reputed Bengali actress who has acted in some of the most critically acclaimed films in Bengali cinema.Her major role was the title role of Charu in Satyajit Ray's masterpiece Charulata...
, Ray was the first Indian film figure to be featured on a foreign stamp (Dominica
Dominica
Dominica , officially the Commonwealth of Dominica, is an island nation in the Lesser Antilles region of the Caribbean Sea, south-southeast of Guadeloupe and northwest of Martinique. Its size is and the highest point in the country is Morne Diablotins, which has an elevation of . The Commonwealth...
).
Many literary works include references to Ray or his work, including Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow was a Canadian-born Jewish American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts...
's Herzog
Herzog (novel)
Herzog is a 1964 novel by Saul Bellow. Letters from the protagonist constitute much of the text.Herzog won the 1965 National Book Award for Fiction and the The Prix International...
and J. M. Coetzee's Youth. Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Haroun and the Sea of Stories is a 1992 children's book by Salman Rushdie. It was Rushdie's first novel after The Satanic Verses. It is a phantasmagorical story that begins in a city so old and ruinous that it has forgotten its name....
contains 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
Government of India
The Government of India, officially known as the Union Government, and also known as the Central Government, was established by the Constitution of India, and is the governing authority of the union of 28 states and seven union territories, collectively called the Republic of India...
set up Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute
Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute
Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute is a film institute in Kolkata, West Bengal, India.The institute was established in 1995, and registered as a Society on 18.8.95 under the West Bengal Societies Registration Act, 1961 and is an autonomous society funded by Ministry of Information and...
for studies related to film. In 2007, British Broadcasting Corporation
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
declared that two Feluda stories would be made into radio programs. During the London Film Festival
London Film Festival
The BFI London Film Festival is the UK's largest public film event, screening more than 300 features, documentaries and shorts from almost 50 countries. The festival, , currently in its 54th year, is run every year in the second half of October under the umbrella of the British Film Institute...
, a regular "Satyajit Ray Award" is given to a first-time feature director whose film best captures "the artistry, compassion and humanity of Ray's vision". Wes Anderson
Wes Anderson
Wesley Wales Anderson is an American film director, screenwriter, actor, and producer of features, short films and commercials....
has claimed Ray as an influence on his work; his 2007 film, The Darjeeling Limited
The Darjeeling Limited
The Darjeeling Limited is a 2007 comedy-drama film directed by Wes Anderson, and starring Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman. It was written by Anderson, Schwartzman, and Roman Coppola...
, set in India, is dedicated to Ray.
Awards, honours and recognitions
Numerous awards were bestowed on Ray throughout his lifetime, including 32 National Film AwardsNational Film Awards
The National Film Awards is the most prominent film award ceremony in India. Established in 1954, it is administered, along with the International Film Festival of India and the Indian Panorama, by the Indian government's Directorate of Film Festivals since 1973.Every year, a national panel...
by the Government of India, in addition to awards at international film festival
Film festival
A film festival is an organised, extended presentation of films in one or more movie theaters or screening venues, usually in a single locality. More and more often film festivals show part of their films to the public by adding outdoor movie screenings...
s. At the Berlin Film Festival, he was one of only three filmmakers to win the Silver Bear for Best Director
Silver Bear for Best Director
The Silver Bear for Best Director is the Berlin International Film Festival's award for best achievement in direction.-Awards:-Repeated winners:*Mario Monicelli *Satyajit Ray *Carlos Saura -External links:*...
more than once and holds the record for the most number of Golden Bear
Golden Bear
According to legend, the Golden Bear was a large golden Ursus arctos. Members of the Ursus arctos species can reach masses of . The Grizzly Bear and the Kodiak Bear are North American subspecies of the Brown Bear....
nominations, with seven. At the Venice Film Festival
Venice Film Festival
The Venice International Film Festival is the oldest international film festival in the world. Founded by Count Giuseppe Volpi in 1932 as the "Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica", the festival has since taken place every year in late August or early September on the island of the...
, where he had previously won a Golden Lion
Golden Lion
Il Leone d’Oro is the highest prize given to a film at the Venice Film Festival. The prize was introduced in 1949 by the organizing committee and is now regarded as one of the film industry's most distinguished prizes...
for Aparajito
Aparajito
Aparajito is a 1956 Bengali film directed by Satyajit Ray, and is the second part of The Apu Trilogy. It is adapted from the last one-fifth of Bibhutibhushan Bannerjee's novel Pather Panchali and the first one-third of its sequel Aparajito. It focuses on the life of Apu from childhood to college...
(1956), he was awarded the Golden Lion Honorary Award in 1982. That same year, he received an honorary "Hommage à Satyajit Ray" award at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival
1982 Cannes Film Festival
- Jury :*Giorgio Strehler *Jean-Jacques Annaud *Suso Cecchi d'Amico *Geraldine Chaplin *Gabriel García Márquez *Florian Hopf *Sidney Lumet *Mrinal Sen...
.
Ray is the second film personality after Chaplin to have been awarded honorary doctorates
Doctor of Letters
Doctor of Letters is a university academic degree, often a higher doctorate which is frequently awarded as an honorary degree in recognition of outstanding scholarship or other merits.-Commonwealth:...
by Oxford University. He was awarded the Dadasaheb Phalke Award
Dadasaheb Phalke Award
The Dadasaheb Phalke Award is India's highest award in cinema given annually by the Government of India for lifetime contribution to Indian cinema. It was instituted in 1969, the birth centenary year of Dadasaheb Phalke, considered as the father of Indian cinema.The award for a particular year is...
in 1985 and the Legion of Honor by the President of France in 1987. The Government of India
Government of India
The Government of India, officially known as the Union Government, and also known as the Central Government, was established by the Constitution of India, and is the governing authority of the union of 28 states and seven union territories, collectively called the Republic of India...
awarded him the highest civilian honour, Bharat Ratna
Bharat Ratna
Bharat Ratna is the Republic of India's highest civilian award, awarded for the highest degrees of national service. This service includes artistic, literary, and scientific achievements, as well as "recognition of public service of the highest order." Unlike knights, holders of the Bharat Ratna...
shortly before his death. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is a professional honorary organization dedicated to the advancement of the arts and sciences of motion pictures...
awarded Ray an honorary Oscar in 1992 for Lifetime Achievement
Academy Honorary Award
The Academy Honorary Award, instituted in 1948 for the 21st Academy Awards , is given by the discretion of the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to celebrate motion picture achievements that are not covered by existing Academy Awards, although prior winners of...
. It was one of his favourite actresses, Audrey Hepburn
Audrey Hepburn
Audrey Hepburn was a British actress and humanitarian. Although modest about her acting ability, Hepburn remains one of the world's most famous actresses of all time, remembered as a film and fashion icon of the twentieth century...
, who represented the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is a professional honorary organization dedicated to the advancement of the arts and sciences of motion pictures...
on that day in Calcutta
Kolkata
Kolkata , formerly known as Calcutta, is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal. Located on the east bank of the Hooghly River, it was the commercial capital of East India...
. Ray, unable to attend the ceremony due to his illness, gave his acceptance speech to the Academy via live video feed in his home. In 1992 he was posthumously awarded the Akira Kurosawa Award for Lifetime Achievement in Directing at the San Francisco International Film Festival
San Francisco International Film Festival
San Francisco International Film Festival is the oldest continuously running film festival in the Americas. Organized by the San Francisco Film Society, the International is held each spring for two weeks, presenting an average of 150 films from over 50 countries...
; it was accepted on his behalf by actress Sharmila Tagore
Sharmila Tagore
Sharmila Tagore is an Indian film actress. She has won National Film Awards and Filmfare Awards for her performances.She has led the Indian Film Censor Board from October 2004 till March 2011...
.
In 1992, the Sight & Sound
Sight & Sound
Sight & Sound is a British monthly film magazine published by the British Film Institute .Sight & Sound was first published in 1932 and in 1934 management of the magazine was handed to the nascent BFI, which still publishes the magazine today...
Critics' Top Ten Poll ranked Ray at #7 in its list of "Top 10 Directors" of all time, making him the highest-ranking Asian filmmaker
Asian cinema
Asian cinema refers to the film industries and films produced in the continent of Asia, and is also sometimes known as Eastern cinema. More commonly however, it is used to refer to the cinema of Eastern, Southeastern and Southern Asia. West Asian cinema is sometimes classified as part of Middle...
in the poll. In 2002, the Sight & Sound critics' and directors' poll ranked Ray at #22 in its list of all-time greatest directors, thus making him the fourth highest-ranking Asian filmmaker in the poll.
In 1996, Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly is an American magazine, published by the Time division of Time Warner, that covers film, television, music, broadway theatre, books and popular culture...
magazine ranked Ray at #25 in its "50 Greatest Directors" list. In 2007, Total Film
Total Film
Total Film is a British film magazine published 13 times a year by Future Publishing. The magazine was launched in 1997 and offers film, DVD and Blu-ray news, reviews and features...
magazine included Ray in its "100 Greatest Film Directors Ever" list.
See also
- Bengali cinemaBengali cinemaBengali cinema refers to the Bengali language filmmaking industries in the Bengal region of South Asia. There are two major film-making hubs in the region: one in Kolkata, West Bengal, India and the other in Dhaka, Bangladesh .The history of cinema in Bengal dates back to the 1890s, when the first...
- Cinema of West BengalCinema of West BengalThe cinema of West Bengal refers to the Tollygunge-based Bengali film industry in Kolkata, West Bengal, India. The origins of the nickname Tollywood, a portmanteau of the words Tollygunge and Hollywood, dates back to 1932...
- Cinema of West Bengal
- Cinema of IndiaCinema of IndiaThe cinema of India consists of films produced across India, which includes the cinematic culture of Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Gujarat, Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir, Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra, Orissa, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal. Indian films came to be followed throughout South Asia and...
- Parallel CinemaParallel CinemaThe Indian New Wave, commonly known in India as Art Cinema or Parallel Cinema as an alternative to the mainstream commercial cinema, is a specific movement in Indian cinema, known for its serious content, realism and naturalism, with a keen eye on the sociopolitical climate of the times...
- Parallel Cinema