Shri Satyajit Ray : Universal Eyes

Shri Satyajit Ray: Universal Eyes 

 In 1948 an unknown young Bengali wrote a newspaper article entitled “What is wrong with Indian films?” He accused his nation’s directors of failing to grasp the new medium. “The raw material of cinema is life itself,” he wrote. “It is incredible that a country that has inspired so much painting and music and poetry should fail to move the film-maker. He has only to keep his eyes open, and his ears. Let him do so.”

The author was Satyajit Ray, who within a few years would answer his own challenge by filming masterpieces of lyrical realism set in India. His first work and still his best known is the The Apu Trilogy – Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956) and The World of Apu (1959) – which follows the life of a boy from a village trying to make his way in the world.

Lauded by the likes of Kurosawa and Scorsese, Ray made more than 35 films and received a lifetime achievement Oscar shortly before his death in 1992. Although his name is well known in Bengal, in India his work has not been especially influential (the all-singing and dancing Bollywood behemoth has long since seen him off). In the West, Ray’s films are more talked about than watched – probably because until the internet arrived the only chance to see them was late at night on Channel Four. Fortunately this will change next week with the opening of a Satyajit Ray season at the BFI, showing both the trilogy and a selection of his other films.

Ray had an early interest in fine art and earned a living visualising adverts and designing book covers. He also loved the cinema. He set up the Calcutta Film Society, where he and his friends would watch the latest releases from Capra to Eisenstein. His life changed in 1949 when he helped Jean Renoir scout locations for the French director’s Indian film The River. Renoir encouraged him to ignore Hollywood and fulfil his own vision. Ray would acknowledge later that he had been “subconsciously… paying tribute to Renoir throughout my film-making career”.

Ray had illustrated a Bengali novel from 1928 called Pather Panchali – Song of the Little Road – and wanted to make it into a film. The story follows a Brahmin family living in a poor village: little Apu, his mischievous sister Durga, their struggling parents and an aunt played with exceptional fortitude by 80-year-old Chunibala Devi. (One of Ray’s great fears when the shoot was interrupted was that the actress would die before completing her role.)

Not much happens in the first half – Durga steals a necklace, Aunty Indir tells ghost stories – some modern viewers will need time to adjust to the reflective pace. In one iconic scene the children stumble on the modern world in the form of a train pumping malevolent black smoke; their lives, we sense, are about to change. The laughing children then come across Aunty Indir sitting under a tree in the forest. She has been rejected by the family and has nowhere to go. Durga touches her; she slumps forward and breathes her last. Apu looks on afraid but curious – this will not be his first encounter with death.

The subsequent films, which follow Apu as an adult, were made with greater technical expertise and are better paced. Aparajito, which won the top prize at Venice in 1957, has at its heart a mother-son dynamic common in Indian families. Apu works in Calcutta and only rarely returns to the village where his mother, now a widow, lives alone. They have become different people and find little to talk about. The mother, played superbly by Karuna Bannerjee, is hardly aware of her own emotional manipulation. What if she falls ill, she speculates. “Will you arrange for my treatment? Will you, Apu?” Ray said that he based the conflict on his own difficult relationship with his mother.

As the director’s biographer Andrew Robinson pointed out in his excellent book on the Trilogy, music is the thread that stitches all three films together. Ray was fortunate to have Ravi Shankar perform the score, and during the harrowing death scenes the music channels our emotions. In the last film, The World of Apu, our hero gets married and has a son – but is soon estranged from him. When they are finally reunited, in an acutely tender yet understated scene, the tar shehnai plays the piercing leitmotif that we heard in the first film when Apu’s sister died. What was once lost has been partially redeemed. The journey has come full circle.

Throughout his work, but especially in the Apu Trilogy, Ray focused his eyes on and attuned his ears to the extraordinary drama of everyday life. We would do well to watch and listen.

Santoshkumar B Pandey at 5.21pm.