PSATYAJIT RAY: A VISION OF CINEMA

Andrew Robinson

“Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the
sun or the moon,” said Akira Kurosawa. On the fiftieth anniversary of Pather
Panchali, acknowledged as one of the greatest films Pever made, Andrew Robinson,
Literary Editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement, pays tribute to its maker
through the book Satayjit Ray: A Vision of Cinema, illustrated with rare
photographs by the filmmaker’s Boswell, Nemai Ghosh. Connecting previews the
tribute.

Satyajit Ray died on 23 April 1992 – on the same day of the year as William
Shakespeare. When the coincidence struck me suddenly a few days later, I remember
thinking: how curious, and then, after a moment’s reflection, how fitting.

It was not that Ray, either in his life or in his films, was strongly drawn to
Shakespeare (or indeed to the theatre, which was the art form that interested him
least), in contrast to many Bengalis of his generation; there are only infrequent
references to Shakespeare in Ray’s many interviews, his copious writings – both
fiction and non-fiction – and his more than thirty feature films. I was thinking,
rather, of two aspects of Ray’s films where a comparison with Shakespeare’s plays
is not far-fetched.

First, there is the subtlety and depth of Ray’s probing of human relationships. As
the writer and Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul, a lover of both Ray and Shakespeare,
once said to me of Ray’s The Chess Players: ‘It’s like a Shakespeare scene. Only
three hundred words are spoken but goodness! – terrific things happen.’ I believe
that there is no director in cinema who can express what is going on inside a
character’s head – his or her psychology – more acutely than Ray.

Second, the exceptional range of milieu, period, genre and mood in Ray’s work, from
the celebrated Apu Trilogy of the 1950s to his swansong film, The Stranger,
completed in 1991, recalls that of Shakespeare. Time magazine’s critic probably had
this uppermost in mind when he wrote in a survey of world cinema in 1963: ‘Will Ray
redeem his prodigious promise and become the Shakespeare of the screen?’

There are Ray films about almost all strata of society and walks of life: the upper
class (for example, Kanchenjungha and The Home and the World), the middle class
(The Big City, Days and Nights in the Forest), and the illiterate working class
(The Postmaster, Deliverance). There are films about the village (for instance,
Pather Panchali and Distant Thunder), about small-town life (The Expedition, An
Enemy of the People) and about the metropolis Calcutta (The Adversary, The Middle
Man). There are films about the distant past (as in The Goddess, Charulata), the
past within living memory (The World of Apu, The Music Room) and the immediate
present (Branches of the Tree, The Stranger). There are also pure comedies (The
Philosopher’s Stone, The Holy Man), fantasies (the musicals, The Adventures of
Goopy and Bagha and The Kingdom of Diamonds), a ghost story (The Lost Jewels) and
detective stories (The Golden Fortress and The Elephant God).

The worlds of art, the intellect, commerce, politics and religion are intertwined
with a gamut of moods, often in one and the same film, ranging from tragedy to
farce. And the standard is consistently high, by general agreement. ‘Who else can
compete?’ concluded a full-page British national newspaper obituary of Ray (by no
means wholly adulatory). ‘Other names come to mind: de Sica, René Clair, Welles,
Bergman, Kurosawa, Ichikawa, Kobayashi. Ray made more good films over a longer
period than any of them.’ Taken together, Ray’s films seem to encompass a whole
culture – that of the Bengalis: an achievement no other film-maker can match.

As if this were not enough, Ray also has a strong claim to be the most versatile
craftsman in cinema behind the camera. The photographs in Satyajit Ray: A Vision of
Cinema by Nemai Ghosh (whom Ray described as ‘a sort of Boswell working with a
camera rather than a pen’) show Ray personally immersed in every stage of film-
making. He is writing the scripts of his films (they were all written solo, and
were often original or near-original screenplays). He is designing the effortlessly
convincing sets and costumes down to the smallest details. He is acting out the
roles for the actors and actresses with consummate nuance. He is operating the
camera throughout the shooting. He is editing each frame of the film. He is even
composing and recording the music after scoring it in a mixture of western and
Indian notation. Short of acting in front of the camera like Chaplin (which he was
invited to do by Hollywood producers), Ray was in direct charge of just about
everything in his films: he was the very model of a film auteur – something which
amused him, given the studious distance kept from his work by the French New Wave
critics and film-makers who first promoted the auteur concept in the 1950s. Ray
liked to work in this way not because it helped to keep his budgets within
manageable limits – though he had always to be keenly conscious of costs, given his
comparatively small home audience – but because then he could truly call his work
his own, in the same way as a painter, a composer or a novelist can.

His versatility is reminiscent of the artist with whom Ray felt a close, perhaps
the closest, affinity: Rabindranath Tagore, Bengal’s greatest creative figure. In
addition to being a unique poet in Bengali, Tagore was a varied, original and
profound short-story writer, song composer and painter, a considerable novelist and
dramatist and a powerful essayist, besides being a stalwart of the Indian freedom
movement. Beyond India, though, Tagore is still largely perceived as only a poet of
mysticism on the basis of one collection of poetry, Gitanjali, which brought him
the Nobel prize in literature. In somewhat similar fashion, Ray has tended to be
typecast outside Bengal as an artist of poverty, on the strength of his first film,
Pather Panchali, and its two sequels in the Apu Trilogy. Pather Panchali was
probably the only Ray film that most of those who gathered in Hollywood to award
him an Oscar just before his death, had ever heard of.

Even among many who respond well to his films, there is a pronounced belief that
Ray is not an ‘innovative’ director; that his work is fine but a bit old-fashioned
and ‘literary’ (in other words, one assumes, static and talky); and, furthermore,
that his best films are those from his first decade, the Apu Trilogy to Charulata
(1964), when his style was evidently more lyrical and poetic. Since Ray himself
sadly is no longer with us, making new films, and since his early films now tend to
be shown more frequently than his later ones, this belief is in danger of becoming
fixed as the critical orthodoxy.

Martin Scorsese, for instance, the most distinguished admirer of Ray among living
American film directors (who played a key role in the awarding of the Oscar to Ray
in 1992), saw the Apu Trilogy, The Music Room, The Goddess and Two Daughters when
they were first released in the United States in the early 1960s, years before he
himself became a director. Scorsese speaks of the Apu Trilogy as ‘one of the great
cinematic experiences of my life’: ‘I was as totally absorbed as one would be
reading a great epic novel’. He was ‘deeply moved’ by the universality and humanity
of these early films, despite their showing people ‘so far from my own experience’
– that of ‘a very parochial society of Italian-Americans’ in New York. And he was
‘very taken by the style’ – ‘at first so much like the Italian neo-realist films,
yet surprising the viewer with bursts of sheer poetry.’ He concludes: ‘Ray’s magic,
the simple poetry of his images and their emotional impact will always stay with
me.’

How true. Yet all of these qualities – along with a greater complexity of cinematic
language and subtlety of understanding of the human condition – are to be found
too, if perhaps less obviously, in Ray’s later films, which Scorsese hardly
mentions. They are what justifies Naipaul’s comparison of The Chess Players with
Shakespeare, and they are the reason why Akira Kurosawa said of Ray: ‘The quiet but
deep observation, understanding and love of the human race which are characteristic
of all his films, have impressed me greatly… Not to have seen the cinema of Ray
means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon.’

Ray’s first film, Pather Panchali, released 50 years ago in Bengal, is a film that
could only have been made by an artist in his youth; his last, The Stranger, is one
that belongs ineluctably to the late evening of a career. Both films, however,
though they are exceptionally different in setting, period and style, radiate life,
charm and wit, visual and verbal; in fact The Stranger has been regarded, for all
its seriousness, as a comedy, both in and beyond Bengal. And both films keep faith
with Ray’s cherished belief in the potential of individuals to transcend the
limitations of their immediate world – a poverty-stricken village in Pather
Panchali, a wealthy Calcutta household in The Stranger – and thereby to grow in
self-awareness. As Lindsay Anderson wrote with his usual bold critical percipience,
in a tribute to Ray on his seventieth birthday in 1991: ‘[He is] a film-maker in
the honourable tradition of humanism, always making men and women, their lives and
spirits and relationships, the inspiration of his art. Humanity has always been the
politics of this artist. His style has always been formed by his vision.’

Andrew Robinson is the author of Satyajit Ray: A Vision of Cinema, Satyajit Ray:
The Inner Eye and, with Krishna Dutta, of several books on Rabindranath Tagore. He
is also the literary editor of The Times Higher Education Supplement in London.